American fantasy and science fiction illustrator Virgil Finlay was born in Rochester New York
in 1914. Already struggling financially, the family
was hit hard by the great depression of the early 1930s and when his father died in his
40s they found the going even harder. Finlay had an obvious precocious talent for
drawing and in his youth had been deeply impressed by the illustrations he had seen in the pulp
magazines of the 20s and early 30s. But he had also taken a keen interest in earlier
masters from the American Golden Age including Franklin Booth, Charles Dana Gibson, and Joseph
Clement Coll, all of whom were spectacularly adept with pen and ink.
But it was the subject of science fiction and horror which most interested him. So in
1935, when he was 21 years old and without any formal art training, he sent 6 of his
drawings to Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales, arguably the most popular
pulp specialising in that genre at the time. Wright was suitably impressed with Finlay's
ability, but was unsure whether the subtlety of his technique would reproduce all that
well on the rough textured paper of the pages that had given pulps their derogatory name.
Although artwork was created as black on white board or paper, pulp paper was a dingy heavily
textured off-white, and the printed image was at best an approximation of patchy dark
grey. But Wright made a test print run which proved
him wrong and from the December issue of that year onward Finlay was suddenly a regular
contributor to one of the leading pulp magazines of the day, creating many dynamic images for
the work of his favourite writers. Initially he was commissioned to illustrate
only interior page monochromes, but this was no problem for Finlay, who had devised a distinctive
technique involving all manner of mark making from highly controlled hatching to stippling,
and was fond of creating his images using scratch board, enabling him to create marks
in both black and white with great precision. This wasn't his only method and he used conventional
pen and ink too. But even in this he had some far from usual techniques.
Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright was so enamoured of his skills and imagination that
he engaged Finlay’s services for a project distinct from the regular pulp work.
Wright wanted to bring out an eight volume set of William Shakespeare’s plays in a
series of inexpensive illustrated editions, and he commissioned the 21-year old Finlay
to draw a total of 25 illustrations for the first volume, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Finlay
tackled this comedic woodland fantasy with accomplishment and completed the work in the
last two months of 1935. The book was published at the end of that year, but it proved to
be unpopular with the public, and although Finlay had already started work on an un-named
follow up the project was abandoned. But what this, and for that matter all his
work revealed, was that with Finlay's images it wasn't just about his admittedly breathtaking
technique. From the beginning it was clear that more than virtually all his contemporaries
in this market he could take either a specific moment within any given narrative, or just
develop a more imaginative evocation of the text and make it a compelling and illuminating
visualisation, which defied the reader to turn the page.
It wasn't until 1937 that Finlay produced his first colour cover for Weird Tales, and
when it came to colour he painted in both gouache and oil paint, and did so with such
accomplishment it was frequently hard to tell one from the other. He was sparing in his
use of background elements and concentrated on the quite formally posed figures, in tableaus
representing dramatic moments from a particular story contained within.
But accomplished and engrossing as his excursions into colour for Weird tales were it was with
the interior page monochrome illustrations that his reputation and most of his livelihood
was made.
Finlay continued working for Weird Tales in the following years but quickly branched out
to other publications, and significantly In 1938 he went to work for Abraham Merritt,
who was the editor of The American Weekly magazine. Merritt had been a writer of science
fiction and fantasy and was extremely taken with Finlay's stylistic approach and visual
imagination. The job necessitated moving from Rochester
to New York City and in that year he married and at some point not much later, he apparently
converted to Judaism. Surprisingly, given the level of his success
and accomplishment, it is recorded that he also took some night classes in technical
drawing at this time, while simultaneously created yet more illustrations for other magazines
and a few book covers, such as H. P. Lovecraft’s The Outsider and Others in 1939.
As 1940 came around he was still producing monochromes and occasional covers for Weird
Tales, but had also begun illustrating colour covers for pulp rivals Famous fantastic Mysteries.
And throughout the decade his wildly imaginative and frequently grotesque paintings graced
their covers, and whether it was his idea or the suggestion of the art director all
these illustrations were considerably more dynamically composed than his earlier Weird
tales covers. The printing of colour images on pulp covers
was significantly better than the page monochromes, if only because the covers were glossy untextured
art paper. But although the sensationalist livid titling
and typography may have excited the interest of potential readers it tended to obscure
rather than enhance the images. When the USA joined the allies in World War
2 Finlay served in the US Army and saw extensive combat in the Southwest Pacific, including
Okinawa. But his illustrations continued to be published
in various pulps including Argosy throughout the conflict, and it seems most likely they
had been created beforehand.
When the war was won he returned to civilian life and picked up where he had left off with
work for pulps and even diversified into comic strip work, with contributions to Real Fact
Comics, which he created as line only and were coloured at printing. But this was not
a facet of his talent that he seemed to have any interest in continuing.
In 1949 Finlay created a collection of breathtakingly detailed monochromes for a commemorative edition
of Abraham Merritt's book The Ship of Ishtar, originally published in 1924.
These swirling black and white images were a perfect match for Merritt's hallucinatory
historical fantasy and they were constructed from a wide range of mark-making techniques
incorporating stippling, hatching and some I'm not sure there are names for.
But in every case the tonal control produced gave them particular solidity, and it could
be argued with some plausibility that this collection represented the pinnacle of Finlay's
creative ambition and career. When the pulp magazine market began to fall
away during the 1950s, work wasn't as easily come by for Finlay, but nevertheless some
of the pulps, including Weird Tales, managed to survive for a few more years. And in the
later years of the decade he filled in the increasing gaps in his workload with work
for others including a significant body of images for Astrology magazine. The monochromes
he produced in this context were created with the same attention to detail and and precise
mark making as his pulp images, and with no need to follow a written narrative they were
in the main purely decorative, and very successfully so.
And even if pulps had largely disappeared by 1960 there were a growing number of newer
publications which focussed on science fiction, including Galaxy, Fantastic Universe, and
Famous Science Fiction. All of these featured both colour and monochrome work by Finlay,
and so did horror magazines, which began to appear around the same time.
And in 1963 he worked regularly for the magazine Worlds of If, creating covers, and some interior
monochromes with an added poorly registered colour overprint.
The last dated piece of illustration I found is this wonderful test piece for a proposed
edition of The Hobbit, which unfortunately never actually happened.
In the later 1960s Vigil Finlay was diagnosed with Cancer and in 1969 he underwent major
surgery. Although he recovered briefly he died in 1971 at the age of only 56.
Despite the relatively brief span of his career he had produced around 2500 illustrations
before he died. Since his death Finlay has rightly taken on
an iconic status for the many fans of pulp and science fiction fantasy illustration who
revere his work, and his original paintings and drawings are highly prized among collectors.
And so they should be but I cant help wondering how much wider appreciation of his work would
be if he had illustrated more classic and better known fiction.