Dutch illustrator Louis Raemaekers is now largely forgotten but during his life he was
widely known in Europe and America.
He was born in 1869 and although it isn't recorded where he studied his first job was
as an art teacher, while also working as a reasonably successful landscape artist and
occasional illustrator.
He was already 37 years old when in 1906 he started to draw political cartoons for Dutch
newspapers.
In 1909 he took the staff cartoonist's job at De Telegraaf, and he earned a reputation
as an astute visual commentator on the insanity of politics.
When war broke out across Europe in 1914 Holland was among the countries who declared themselves
neutral.
Raemaekers was far from happy about this and he used his obvious talent for making visual
statements to try to persuade Holland to join the allies against Germany.
Although some of his work addressed the general human tragedy and loss of life he also created
many images which were merciless in their depiction of the Kaiser and his forces as
vicious barbarians.
The Dutch government, fearful of the German's reaction to these attacks, frequently confiscated
and destroyed his work.
He travelled to London in 1915, to put in an appearance at an exhibition of his work
at a Bond Street gallery.
He immediately decided that life in London was preferable to Holland and he sent for
his family to join him there.
Soon after his arrival he was offered a contract by theDaily Mail newspaper and his potent
drawings were published in their pages up to the eventual end of the war.
Britain's Propaganda Bureau were keen to utilise Raemaeker's work and 40 of his most venomous
cartoons were published as a book and distributed throughout the allied countries to keep everyone
focussed on why they were fighting.
And other albums, pamphlets, posters, postcards and even cigarette cards bearing
reproductions of his work were also widely distributed.
A lot of his work was created directly onto lithographic stone with wax crayon.
And there are some pencil and watercolour images and quite a few etchings.
What they all had in common was his distinctive energetic linear style.
His lecture tour of America in 1917 was financed by the British Government in the hope he would
help convince America to join the war.
Over 2000 American newspapers published examples of his work, and it's generally acknowledged
that he did help to get the U.S.A. on board.
After the war had ended Raemaekers and his family returned to mainland Europe and settled
in Brussels in Belgium.
With no war to illustrate he was nothing like as in demand but he carried on working for
the newspapers with lighter more comical material, and he created a comic book of sorts in 1927
titled Health is the Greatest Treasure.
By the time the Second World War was about to erupt in 1939 Raemaekers was 70 years old
and he returned to the U.S.A. and stayed until the war ended when he headed back to Brussels.
In 1953 he finally went back to the Netherlands and he died three years later at the age of
87 in 1953.
French humorous illustrator Joseph Hémard was one of the first to demonstrate that simplicity
could be every bit as communicative as more complex illustration styles.
He was born in Les Mureaux, a small town northwest of Paris, in 1880.
There's no record of his family circumstances, childhood or art education, and I've been
unable to find any work created by him before 1907.
In that year his images started to appear in several popular humour magazines such as
Le Rire and L'Assiette au Beurre.
At this point he hadn't yet fully mastered his chosen style.
The close ups and facial expressions in particular were far from descriptive, but he quickly
refined his deceptively loose linear scrawl to communicate more clearly.
When the war came he joined the army, but was captured early on and imprisoned until
it was over in 1918.
After the war he set about rebuilding his career, and he moved away from magazines towards
the illustration of books. His illustrated edition of Molière's Le Malade
Imaginaire was published in 1920, and it was a great popular success.
The images were created by Hémard as line drawings which were then coloured using the
laborious pochoir stencil method.
This was followed by his exuberant line only images for Rabelais' tale of Gargantua et
Pantagruel in 1922.
Most significantly he was commissioned in 1925 to illustrate the family law provisions
of Le Code Civil. For most illustrators this would have been the commission from hell.
But miraculously Hémard created a series of amusing pen and pochoir spot cartoons which
managed to both inform and entertain the reader.
In 1927 he returned to more literary material with his copiously illustrated edition of
the story of Cyrano de Bergerac.
Fables de La Fontaine followed in 1930 and for this book he created his images for each
fable as a decorative page header, again using pochoir print.
But as time went on his work was increasingly reproduced by colour lithography and
throughout the 1930s commissions for all kinds of work, and not only books continued to roll
in.
When war broke out again in 1939 he continued to live and work in Paris and was considered
harmless and left alone by the occupying German forces.
His comic book 'Le Célèbre Coucouraille et le Capitaine La Pistole' was published
at this time, and the book would prove to be enduringly popular with French comic fans.
In 1944, he took on the challenge of the French Tax Code and once again he turned remarkably
tedious text into entertaining, easily understood images.
By the later 40s his prodigious work rate began to slow down, but In 1947 at the age
of 67 he illustrated a memorable edition of Brillat-Savarin's classic work on the subject
of food, Physiologie du Goût.
His last published work was for Voltaire's philosophical book Zadig in 1954, and Joseph
Hémard died in Paris at the age of 81 in 1961.
The unconventional personal life and ultimately tragic story of Danish artist and illustrator
Gerda Wegener have been used as the basis for the novel and subsequent film The Danish
Girl.
But here I'm only concerning myself with her career as an illustrator, which frequently
gets ignored.
She was born Gerda Gottleib in 1886 in a village near the city of Grenaa and at 18 she enrolled
at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts.
There she met and not long after married fellow student Einar Wegener and they graduated from
the Academy in 1907.
They traveled together through Italy and France, and eventually settled in Paris in 1912.
They considered themselves to be artists but in a bid for more regular income Gerda began
making contacts in the worlds of publishing and advertising, and quickly found success.
Einar remained an artist and struggled accordingly but it was Gerda's new source of income which
kept them solvent.
By 1915 she had become a fairly frequent contributor to both La Vie Parisienne and La Baionnette
and her delicate, playfully erotic images continued to feature on their covers and in
their pages into the following decade.
She also had some pochoir fashion work printed in La Gazette du Bon Ton and not much later
she was also appearing in the pages of the French edition of Vogue.
In 1918 she was commissioned to illustrate the story L'Abdication de Ris-Orangis by Léo
Larguier.
For this book she created a series of immaculate pen and ink monochromes which clearly
demonstrated the stylistic influence of British decadent illustrator Aubrey Beardsley.
Given that she also had a flourishing career as an artist she was a remarkably prolific
illustrator and she was also eclectic in her acceptance of commissions from all manner
of sources.
Whether she was creating sexually explicit material for limited edition pornography - which
she did on quite a few occasions - or producing press advertising she tackled all
assignments with the same flair and aesthetic consideration.
Her delicate application of line and washes of watercolour and gouache gave even her
most graphically sexual images a lighthearted and visually absorbing appeal.
This was particularly true of her series of illustrations for Casanova's erotic adventures,
which was published in 1927.
It was an ideal marriage of writer and artist and it sold in large quantities, as much for
Wegener's images as for Casanova's accounts of his debauchery.
Sadly her husband died in 1931 after undergoing surgery, and although devastated by the loss
Wegener rather hastily married a young Italian diplomat and moved with him to Morocco.
From there she continued to work and her images for the erotic book Fortunio by Théophile
Gautier in 1934 were a clear reminder of her facility for stylised adult material.
Not long after she discovered that her husband had been embezzling her accumulated wealth
throughout their marriage and they divorced in 1936.
Two years later she returned to Denmark but she was unable to generate any interest in
her work, and she had to live in obscurity on the small amount her second husband hadn't
yet stolen.
What money she had she spent on alcohol and she died of a heart attack in 1940 at the
age of only 54.
Wallace Smith was an American book illustrator, comic artist, reporter, author, and screenwriter,
and he enjoyed equal success with his writing and his illustration.
He was born in 1888 in an unknown location, and his given name was Schmidt so its likely
his parents were German immigrants.
At some point before he had begun working he had anglicised it to Smith, as many Europeans
did.
At the age of only 20 in 1908 he became the Washington correspondent for the Chicago American
and in his first year working there he originated the Joe Blow single panel comic spot.
This series demonstrated his prowess in pen and ink with distinctive brittle line work
which featured some equally distinctive hatching.
Early on in his career at the newspaper he was sent to Mexico to cover the revolution
currently being led by Pancho Villa and he drew many affectionate, mildly comic pictures
of the revolutionaries and wrote accounts of their bid to oust the Carranza regime.
He stayed with the newspaper for more than 10 years, but was also active as an illustrator
and he created the cover for the Shadow Eater in 1915 after which he turned freelance as
both a writer and illustrator.
In 1922 he created a series of mesmerising black and white illustrations for Ben Hecht's
novel Fantazius Mallare: a Mysterious Oath.
This book proved to be extremely controversial because of its sexual content and although
there was nothing remotely pornographic in the illustrations both Hecht and Smith were
tried and each fined for obscenity to the tune of what would now be about 15000 dollars
each.
Following the widely publicised trial the publisher quickly printed another 2000 copies
and sold them `under the counter' at greatly inflated prices.
Both the style and content of Smith's images were unusual in an American illustrator of
this period. The pen and ink technique he used for all his monochrome work showed an
obvious influence of both Aubrey Beardsley and Harry Clarke.
But he was no mere copyist and he had his own distinctive precise line style, which
he used expressively in both his serious and humorous work.
In 1923 and 1924 he contributed illustrations to Ben Hecht's magazine the Literary Times.
For some reason he signed his work using the alias Vulgus.
He also illustrated Hecht's book The Florentine Dagger, published in 1923.
A little later he moved to Hollywood and began a successful, decade-long, career writing
screenplays for various movies, including adaptations of two of his own novels.
In his 1925 book Oregon Sketches Smith created a series of drawings of the American west
both past and present, and his drawing of a bronco rider was subsequently bought, copyright
and all by the Pendleton Round Up Association.
He spent the rest of his life in Hollywood, where he died of a heart attack in 1937 at
the premature age of 49.
That's it for now and more is on its way. Thanks for watching and see you next time
I hope.