The name Caran d'Ache is more familiar to most of us as a brand of coloured pencil,
but it was first used as a pseudonym by the enormously influential 19th century French
cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré.
When or why he picked up the alias isn't known but Caran d'Ache is a French phonetic interpretation
of the Russian word for pencil.
Although both his parents were French Emmanuel was born in Moscow in 1858, and that's where
he grew up.
In 1877 when he was 19 he emigrated to France, where he took French citizenship and joined
the army.
And during that time he also contributed caricatures and humorous illustrations to the army journal
La Vie Militaire.
Once he had left the army in 1882 he started selling his work to various Parisian magazines.
And over the next few years he established a growing reputation for his humorous drawings.
In the early 1890s he created Maestro - one of the first graphic novels, but it was never
published in his lifetime and this wasn't rectified until more than a century later
in1999.
But although Poiré never got to see his novel published he was starting to enjoy real success
with his other work.
And by 1895 his editorial cartoons were regularly published in the newspaper Le Figaro, and
a little later in the popular humour weekly Le Rire.
Unlike virtually all his contemporaries, who were using fine hatching techniques to give
solidity to their images, Poiré was more intent on exploring graphic simplicity.
It was his bold economic line and application of usually flat colour which gave his images
their visual authority and impact, and the effect was more akin to woodcut than it was
to lithography.
But he was also capable of - and frequently used - a more sensitive linear approach based
on direct observation, when the mood took him.
His illustrations were regularly re-published in album form and these sold well throughout
France and other European countries.
As the 20th century approached the antisemitic opinions Poiré and many others held at that
time in France became a growing and unpleasant feature of his work.
In the first decade of the 20th century his illustrations also became more extremely styled
to the point of virtual abstraction, and although he had never been known for his good humour
his images became particularly pessimistic.
How far he would have travelled in that direction we don't know because Emmanuel Poiré died
at the age of 50 in Paris in1909, and obviously his death was premature by anyone's standards.
He left behind a body of forward looking influential humorous illustration, and it's a pity the
pencil of the same name is now better known.
For the life of me I can't imagine how American illustrator Walter Harrison Cady has remained
so deeply buried until now.
He was born in Massachusetts in 1877, and in his teens he became an apprentice to a
local artist, where he began learning about drawing and painting.
But a year later his father died and the loss of the family breadwinner forced Cady and
his mother to move to New York , where he managed to find work assisting in the art
studio of the Brooklyn Eagle newspaper.
Unfortunately no evidence of what he did there appears to exist.
But his income took a sudden sharp upturn when Life magazine employed him as a staff
artist.
Around the same time he also began illustrating children's books , and these proved to be
successful and financially rewarding.
In 1912 he collaborated with the writer Thornton Burgess on the first of what would turn into
a long running series of animal stories, and their successful partnership would endure
for 5 decades
He was a particularly evocative pen and ink illustrator, and this technique was the foundation
of all his colour work too, whether created with watercolour washes or applied at printing.
He had a natural ability with anthropomorphic animal characters, and he was also capable
of producing incredibly detailed complex crowd scenes which the viewer could study for quite
some time, and find new amusing narratives within the overall composition.
These were a regular and popular feature of his work for Life magazine, usually printed
in monochrome, but he created many others in full colour and quite a few publications
were keen to use them to draw the potential reader's attention .
In addition to illustrating the stories written by others Cady also successfully authored
and illustrated a few of his own, such as the Butternut Hill series, which began in
1929.
In his lifetime he was best known as the creator of the Peter Rabbit comic strip, and the many
picture books it led to.
The character had first appeared as far back as 1912 in his collaborations with Thornton
Burgess and the strip first ran in the New York Herald Tribune in 1920 and lasted until
1948. These are credited only to Cady but the books
continued to be written by and credited to Burgess.
Despite the fact he was a rabbit called Peter this character had nothing to do with Beatrix
Potter's character of the same name. Why Cady didn't just choose another name I can't imagine.
And it's popularity seems disproportionate, given that it was far from Cady's most convincing
animal creation.
But by the time he reached the end of the line in 1973 at the age of 93 Walter Harrison
Cady had clocked up an astonishing 70 year career.
Robert Stewart Sherriffs is virtually unknown in Britain, and I don't suppose he's any better
known elsewhere. So I'm doing what little I can to put that right.
He was born in Arbroath, Scotland, in 1906, and having shown the customary aptitude for
all things artistic he went to Edinburgh College of Art in 1923.
At that stage he was strongly influenced by the elegant art nouveau stylings of both Aubrey
Beardsley and Alphonse Mucha.
In 1927 Sherriffs wisely moved to London, which was home to every major publisher of
books and magazines in Britain at the time, and in those times you had little choice but
to physically be there to get work.
He showed his portfolio around any number of commercial art and advertising studios,
and the response was not what he had hoped for.
But he also sent caricatures to illustrated magazines, and one of these was accepted by
The Bystander.
This in turn led to a commission to illustrate a series of celebrity profiles for The Sketch,
and these were so successful that from 1930 at the age of only 24 Sherriffs became the
magazine’s film and theatre caricaturist.
From 1927 onwards Sherriffs also drew regularly for the BBC’s Radio Times, and in 1930 he
created a series of remarkable Beardsley influenced illustrations for an edition of Christopher
Marlowe's play Tamburlaine the great.
The highly calligraphic line which defined all his images was created with a brush rather
than the more usual pen. Although trickier to master, the brush in Sherriffs highly skilled
hands hands produced wonderfully descriptive gestural curves and flourishes few others
could hope to emulate.
When war was declared in 1939 Sherriffs joined the Tank Regiment, and later became a war
artist, illustrating aircraft recognition handbooks.
In 1944 he also published his own comical novel Salute If You Must, which sold well
enough, but not well enough for him to try again.
Returning to civilian life in 1945, he headed back to Scotland for a while and scaled down
his illustration activity for a couple of years, producing only occasional illustrations
for longstanding clients
But in 1948 Sherriffs was offered the job of film and theatre caricaturist for Punch,
so he returned to London and continued to feature in the magazine into the later 1950s.
In that same year he illustrated two of Charles Dickens' lesser known works, Mrs. Orange and
Captain Boldheart.
Virtually all Sherriffs work was created and reproduced as monochrome but he did break
out of this in spectacular style with his illustrated edition of the Rubaiyat of Omar
Khayyam in 1954.
This series of images doesn't get anything like the attention it deserves. They are highly
faceted but beautifully visualised line and colour washed images. I wish I could tell
you how he created the highly textured coloured areas in these illustrations but I haven't
got a clue.
And although most of his later work continued to be defiantly monochrome there were also
forays into the use of colour such as his cover art for Men Only magazine.
In the 1950s Robert Sherriffs' aversion to living and working in London got too much
for him and he returned to Scotland, despatching artwork by rail to the capital.
Sadly, he was diagnosed with cancer in 1959, and he died in 1960 at the age of only 54.
Generally I have very little interest in fashion illustration but I'm more than willing to
make an exception for the distinctive and dramatic work of French illustrator René
Gruau.
He was born in Italy in 1909, the son of an Italian count and an aristocratic french mother.
But due to his father's infidelity his parents separated when he was only three and
his mother took him with her to live in Paris.
Gruau was something of a prodigy, and although he was self-taught by the age of 18 he
was already successfully selling drawings to French and Italian fashion magazines.
And in a remarkably short amount of time many of the most renowned fashion houses
including Balmain, Dior and Givenchy were keen to employ Gruau's gestural
illustrative artwork.
He had begun his career when fashion illustration was overwhelmingly under the
geometric influence of Art Deco.
But his influences were altogether different.
He always credited Ettiene Drian's revolutionary fashion drawing, which had been popular
a couple of decades earlier as one of his greatest inspirations.
But there was also Japanese art and calligraphy, along with the post-impressionist graphic
approach of Toulouse Lautrec in there too.
And with his own contribution added to the mix it made for a unique and distinctive
combination.
His observational figure drawing was remarkably expressive and he employed both line and colour
very selectively, and frequently with immense visual vitality.
Consequently all his illustrations made for compelling viewing and more than most could
be considered simply as modern minimalist art.
During the second world war there was predictably little to no interest in fashion or glamour,
which wasn't ideal for Gruau.
But rather than head off to somewhere exotic and neutral for the duration, he stayed in
occupied France, and secretly helped to hide Jewish refugees at great risk to himself.
Gruau's longest collaboration was with the designer Christian Dior.
He was appointed as the company's artistic director in 1947 and the two became good friends
as well as business colleagues.
At this time Gruau was at the height of his popularity, and in addition to his work for
Dior he was in demand from many other major clients including Vogue and Harper's Bazaar.
In 1948 he moved permanently to New York, and when fashion magazines began to turn increasingly
to the use of photograhy in the mid 1950s, he increasingly turned to advertising work.
And with the glamorous posters and press campaigns he created for major clients such as Air France
and Cinzano he had no problem at all remaining a significant force in illustration.
Like Harrison Cady, his career was an astonishing 7 decades long but even he couldn't last forever
and René Gruau died in 2004 at the age of 95.
That' s it for now and I very much hope to see you next time for more of the same.