British cartoonist and comic artist Tom Browne was born in Nottingham in 1870, and in his
teens he was apprenticed to a lithographic printer.
He subsequently enrolled at Nottingham School of Art and while still studying he sold some
humorous drawings to a couple of London newspapers and comics.
With the money he'd been paid to date he set off for London in the hope of developing the
publishing contacts he'd already made, and finding more.
He didn't find the going easy in the capital but gradually he got more regular work.
Then in 1896 what would soon become his most famous and enduring creation appeared for
the first time in the Illustrated Chips comic.
He had created two down and outs who were originally named Weary Waddles and Tired Timmy
and they made a strong impression on the editor, who immediately made them regulars in the
comic's pages.
Soon their names were resolved as Weary Willie and Tired Tim and they became immensely popular,
and quickly became a virtual national institution. .
By 1897 he had made enough money to establish his own lithographic colour printing firm
in Nottingham, which proved to be successful and generated yet more income.
By the turn of the century he was not only turning out six full-page strips a week, but
he also managed to produce more illustrations for magazines including Punch and The Tatler.
In 1904 Tom Browne's Comic Annual was published and among other strips it featured a comic
update on the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, who had served as the original inspiration
for Tim and Willy.
In 1908 he was commissioned to create a mascot for Johnnie Walker Whiskey and although others
would re-invent the character in later years the striding man mascot was his original creation.
The pen and ink technique he used in all his comic work would come to be be influential
on others who followed.
His own experience in printing gave him a clear understanding of the inherent problems
of printing on poor quality newsprint.
So he kept his line work simple with bold calligraphic pen strokes and solid spot blacks
to punctuate the white areas.
Browne did create other strips such as the remarkably similar 'Airy Alf and Bouncing
Billy which first appeared in The Big Budget around 1900, and there was even a spinoff
series featuring junior versions of Tim and Willy.
Other than his comics he was immensely successful as a creator of comic postcards.
And in this arena Browne's work was reproduced in colour.
I may well be wrong but it looks like these were coloured at printing. They look far too
solid and flat to be watercolour, but the crude dot screening used in the print process
really makes it impossible to tell.
But however poorly printed the public loved them and they were enthusiastically sent back
and forth between family members and friends.
But Browne was unfortunately yet another from this period who would burn brightly but only
briefly, and he died following surgery to treat his cancer at the age of 39 in 1910.
Even though their creator was gone, Willy and Tim continued to be drawn by other artists
and they kept on going until 1953.
Karl Alexander Wilke is another example of an undeniably significant illustrator about
whom very little is recorded.
The pitiful amount I could find had to be auto-translated from the German by Google
and of course the result was risible. But I've done
my best with what there was.
He was born in Leipzig in eastern Germany in 1879 and he studied at the art academy
there from 1898 to 1902
And when he had finished his studies there he took some additional tuition in the town
of Karlsruhe.
In 1903 he relocated to Vienna and began work as an illustrator, mostly for magazines, including
appearances in the highly influential Jugend.
In 1905 he started getting commissions from the newly launched satirical magazine Die
Muskete.
And this would go on to be by far his strongest and most enduring professional relationship.
So much so that virtually all the images I've used here are from Die Muskete's pages and
covers.
I have no proof but the volume of work he created for the magazine suggests that he
worked as a staff artist rather than a freelancer. His images were invariably dark and compelling,
and although the meaning of many he created is lost to history they nevertheless exert
an enduring hold on the viewer.
Austria was allied with Germany in the first world war and during the war years Wilke produced
many illustrations on that theme. But rather than attacking the enemy these images concentrated
on the misery endured by the troops and the the grim presence of death himself overseeing
events.
Wilke was also a moderately successful painter and I did find a handful of other graphic
work he created including a series of patriotic historical postcards for the Austrian Federal
Publishing organisation.
But none of it was the equal of his Die Muskete illustraton.
It's more speculation on my part but it seems likely that the bulk of his magazine illustration
was created as monochrome directly onto lithographic stone with brush and crayon and the colour
added in subsequent print runs.
It's certain that many of his contemporaries favoured this method and on many of his images
there is tell-tale texturing which would be actually harder to achieve on paper.
But however they were created his illustrations were never less than compelling, and his creative
use of limited colour was easily among the best of its kind.
Die Muskete continued to be published up to 1940, and Wilke's work was published until
its final collapse, but from the early 30s onward the magazine had begun re-using previously
published material including many of Wilke's illustrations to keep costs down.
It's around this time that the trail runs out and the only other solid information I
have is that at the age of 75 Karl Alexander Wilke died in Vienna in 1954
Its true to say Rolf Armstrong was one of americas earliest and greatest pinup artists
but that wasn't the full extent of his output, even if attractive females were almost his
exclusive subjects.
He was born John Scott Armstrong in Michigan in 1889, into a prosperous family.
When, how and why he took the name Rolf isn't recorded.
Within a few years of his birth the family business failed and in 1899 they moved to
Detroit
His father died in 1903, and a year later he and his mother moved to Seattle
By now his artistic interests were emerging as more than a hobby, and he moved to Chicago
in 1908, where he studied at the Art Institute.
By 1913 he was doing well enough to be commissioned for a series of covers for Puck magazine,
and the portraits of female faces he created established his reputation.
After a trip to Paris in 1919 for some intensive study at the Académie Julian, he returned
to New York and picked up where he had left off, but with suitably enhanced artistic skills.
It was magazines, and particularly movie fan magazines such as Photoplay, which would become
and remain his most frequent source of commissions.
The atmospheric dramatically lit pastel renders of leading female stars of the period such
as Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo fed a massive public appetite for all things Hollywood.
The equation was simple - publish an Armstrong illustration of a movie siren and watch your
circulation rise.
But his obvious facility with attractive females led to cover art for many other publications.
In the 1920s sheet music of the popular songs of the day sold in large numbers and Armstrong
also created many bright romantic covers featuring yet more women's faces.
And as the 30s became the 40s it was pinups which now dominated his output, many of which
were for the leading calendar publishers Brown and Bigelow.
And Armstrongs mildly suggestive images of carefree girls were extremely popular.
He only infrequently created nudes or at least almost nude images, and most of his pin up
work was actually quite demure and only mildly erotic.
In 1940, a young woman by the name of Jewel Flowers started modelling for Armstrong. Their
professional collaboration and friendship lasted for two decades.
The first painting he created of her, titled How am I doing? was first published in Brown
& Bigelow's best selling calendar for 1942 and it became one of Armstrong's most reproduced
pictures.
In total, he created around fifty to sixty images with her as the model, and these cheerful
pastel illustrations of female beauty became the most admired of his career.
Armstrong died in 1960 in Hawaii at 71 years old, and I don't know about you but I find
it quite heartwarming that he left a large part of his wealth to Ms Flowers for her contribution
to his great success.
Like a handful of others I've featured in the series George Giusti was as much a graphic
designer as he was an illustrator. and apparently he was a successful architect and sculptor
too.
And such is the level of abstraction and absence of conventional drawing in his images that
I suspect there'll be some of the more realistically inclined viewers who don’t think he was
an illustrator at all.
He was born in Milan in Italy in 1908, to a Swiss father and an Italian mother, and
he later went on to study at the Accademia de Belle Arti in Milan.
After graduation he worked as a designer in Lugano, Italy and then moved to Zurich,
Switzerland where he opened his own design studio in 1930.
Although he was successful in Zurich by 1938 he was ready for a new challenge and he decided
to emigrate to America.
And in New York he established a new studio and quickly built up an impressive corporate
client base.
He had been working for only a couple of years when America entered World War 2, and although
he didn't produce any actual propaganda he did produce a lot of advertising work for
clients who were industrially linked to the war effort.
And these images revealed the influence of French poster artist A. M. Cassandre, who
was coincidentally also working in America at the time.
In 1941 Giusti created the first in a series of radical semi-abstracted dynamic compositions
for the covers of the business magazine Fortune.
These images were like nothing else seen in commercial illustration at that time, and
the graphic power of his industrially themed subjects revealed an unerring aesthetic sensibility
that few could match.
In terms of his use of materials and their application in what was the more illustrative
side of his output Giusti worked almost exclusively in tempera paint.
Usually he applied the base colour with a brush as you would expect, before selectively
applying ink sprayed with an airbrush for smooth or almost as often roughly textured
tonal gradation.
But that was by no means his only approach and there are also quite a few examples of
his work using more expressionistic colour application.
He also incorporated collage techniques and even included selective photography into his
compositions.
From the 1940s onward he was also a popular choice for book cover design for both factual
and fictional content.
Some of these covers employed the techniques I've described, and others used seemingly
endless combinations of techniques incorporating photography and collage. What they all had
in common was Giusti's creative imagination and modernist aesthetic .
He brought the same compelling qualities to the work he created for his corporate clients
and even in the relatively conservative and usually representational context of press
advertising came up with unconventional but memorable results, which balanced formal composition
with more visually playful elements.
Throughout the 1950s to the end of his career he continued to create highly imaginative
illustrations illustrative design, and in addition to his book, magazine and corporate
work he also produced some sharp modernist record covers.
In the late 50s and 1960s he produced another long series of striking covers for Holiday
magazine. These imaginative pictures used collage and photographic elements combined
with paint and ink in a series of compositions evoking aspects of traditional national culture.
In the early 1970s he retired from from commercial work to pursue his career as a 3D artist,
but for me and others who are aware of him it's the graphic image-making which is his
greatest legacy.
Giusti died in Connecticut in 1990 at the age of 82. And you might be interested in
checking out the equally distinctive work of his son Robert Giusti.
That's all for now and I hope I'll see you next time.
Thanks for watching