Fidus was the professional alias of German illustrator and painter Hugo Höppener, whose
style and subjects would be influential on the work of several of the psychedelic illustrators
of the later 1960s.
He was born in 1868, in the town of Lübeck, and his artistic talent and inclinations were
obvious at an early age.
He moved to Munich in 1887, intending to enrol at the Art Academy there, but after only a
few months he encountered the older painter, socialist and self-styled apostle of nature
Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach.
With his large extended family and a group of likeminded disciples, Diefenbach had set
up a commune in an abandoned quarry miles from anywhere.
The group practised nudism, vegetarianism and abstinence from alcohol and tobacco. They
also rejected the concept of private property and worshipped the sun.
Bizarre and extreme as this may seem to many of us this ideology and lifestyle made a serious
impression on Höppener.
He quickly became Diefenbach's most devoted acolyte, and was awarded the name Fidus for
his loyalty.
In this phase of his career Fidus' work revolved around suitably mystical and natural themes
with usually naked figures both young and old in idyllic rural settings
In his mid 20s he left the commune and moved to Berlin in 1892, where he first worked as
an illustrator for the magazine Sphinx.
And given his general creative and spiritual motivation it was inevitable that he would
also find his way into Jugend magazine.
And very quickly his drawings and lithographs became a regular feature in their pages.
Although there were some examples of his use of colour, Fidus was essentially a linear
illustrator.
And although there's no reason to suppose they were created as such quite a bit of his
line work emulated the graphic punch of woodcuts.
But there were also plenty of examples of finer, more detailed use of what look like
pen and ink drawing, etchings and lithographs. Sadly, I cant find definitive information.
But all of it was possessed of considerable grace and precision.
And I can't be any more helpful when it comes to his colour application. I suspect there
are examples of both ink with watercolour washes and some colour lithography work, if
only because so many of Jugend's other artists were using that method.
Over the coming years he continued to have magazine illustration published , some of
which was commissioned but a lot of which had also been created as art and then published
purely as decoration.
After the first world war ended in 1918, interest in Fidus's work began to fade quite rapidly,
and although there's no stated reason I can find it's quite likely that in the harsh reality
of postwar Germany his fanciful heroic imagery was no longer welcome.
Whatever the reason from this point on he retreated into art for its own sake.
In later life he became an ardent supporter of the Nazi party in the early 1930s, but
ironically they wanted nothing to do with him, as they considered him unsuitably decadent.
So much so his work was impounded in 1937
and a sales of his art was banned completely.
And although he went on to live to 80 years old by the time he died in 1948 both he and
his creative output had been completely forgotten.
Sarah Stilwell Weber was born in Pennsylvania in 1878 and at the age of 19 in 1897 she began
studying art with Howard Pyle at the Drexel Institute.
Having completed her art education, and armed with practical advice from Pyle she went to
New York to look for clients.
Before long she was being commissioned by several magazines and by the early years of
the 20th century she had become fairly well established in the pages of Century and Harper's
Bazaar.
In 1904 she created her first duotone cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post
and she quickly became one of their most popular and enduring choices, with a total of 60 covers
to her name between 1904 and 1925 .
Apparently she hated working to deadlines and she came to an agreement with her publishing
clients that she would submit her cover art only when she thought it was completed.
That they gave in to her demand is a clear indication of how highly she was regarded.
The readers of the magazines she created illustration for were overwhelmingly female and she catered
to her audience with many images of female beauty, family life and the innocence of childhood.
Her style was essentially realist, although usually painted quite impressionistically.
Her favoured medium was oil paint but there were also quite a few departures into watercolour,
which she used with equal dexterity.
She did occasionally create some book illustration in black line with spot printed colour but
the clear majority of her output continued to be for magazines.
Among others she created a particularly attractive series of romantically themed full colour
covers for Collier's magazine between 1907 and 1914.
Around the same time she also produced some suitably elegant cover art for Vogue.
Her later work for the Saturday Evening Post also began to appear in full colour as the
1920s approached.
Her popularity also led to some advertising commissions too, for which I can only assume
she got over her aversion to deadlines.
In 1920 she created a series of commercial illustrations which were used to promote the
children's tricycle with the brand name Kiddie Kars. Both the product and the images she
created were extremely popular and her involvement made a significant contribution to her already
large income.
She had by now become one of the highest earning illustrators of the early 20th century, but
in the mid 1920s and still only in her 40s for reasons I can't find out she appears to
have stopped working altogether. Maybe she just figured she had made enough money and
wanted to enjoy it.
And she died at her home in Philadelphia in 1939 at the age of 61.
British illustrator and designer Charles Paine was born in Salford in 1895, and although
that's just a couple of miles from where I'm sitting I was previously completely unaware
if his existence.
He studied at Manchester School of Art, and then the Royal College, although this was
disrupted when he joined the army in the Great War.
After the war he began a career designing stained glass for a firm in Glasgow, but it
didn't last and he quickly transitioned into graphics and illustration.
In 1919, he took a job teaching design at Edinburgh College of Art, and a year later,
despite being hundreds of miles distant from the client, he received his first significant
commission from London Transport.
This was the poster Kingston by Tram and its radically abstracted approach and use of non-naturalistic
colour set the tone for much of what was to follow from Paine.
His primary influence had been the work of Julius Klinger and the other poster artists
of the Vienna secession.
Paine had clearly picked up on their ideology which favoured minimalism and extreme posterisation.
And the series of posters Paine went on to create for the various strands of the London
Transport system made this point with great clarity, and - once the public got used to
the idea - popular success.
His Boat Race poster in 1921 was an example of this, with the abstract forms and composition
being the dominant aspect of the image
All his commercial work was created using gouache paint, which he applied both flat
and with stippled dry brush techniques to add tonality and texture. His colour palettes
were never less than striking and applied purely for their aesthetic contribution to
the design.
A couple of times during the 1920s Paine left Edinburgh to teach briefly at Santa Barbara
Art School in California, but for most of the decade he continued to create graphics,
mostly for posters but there were also some equally abstracted book cover designs.
And in 1928 he produced an astonishingly attractive series of wildlife-themed colour calendar
images for the Sundour textiles company. This commission alone clearly showed what aesthetic
beauty could be achieved through simplicity and abstraction.
In the 1930s he and his wife moved to live in Welwyn Garden City, a town which had been
first established a decade earlier as an alternative to living in the already congested heart of
London.
And Paine created yet more memorable and visually daring illustrations for a series of posters
and other publicity material designed to attract new residents to the virtues of living there.
His success continued throughout the decade
and he also attracted the attention of major clients such as Shell Oil, who commissioned
him for a series of playful posters.
In the the 1940s Paine appears to have created fewer posters than in his heyday, but the
quality of his work remained as high as it had always been.
Among other projects he created dynamic monochromes for school text books, and although they can't
have been particularly lucrative there is no feeling that he treated them with any less
care and consideration than his more profitable commissions.
And in 1948 he moved again, to live on the island of jersey in the English Channel.
Not long after Paine retired from commercial work, but painted watercolour landscapes up
to his death in 1967 when he was 72 years old.
Lynd Ward was born in 1905, in Chicago, Illinois and although possessed of obvious artistic
talent he chose to study at Columbia Teachers College in New York, rather than attend art
school.
Once he had graduated he married and the couple immediately left the USA for an extended trip
travelling around Eastern Europe.
After a few months they settled in Leipzig in Germany, where Ward took a year long course
in graphic art and gained experience of etching, lithography, and wood engraving.
And significantly for his subsequent career he also discovered and was impressed by Frans
Masereel's wordless novel The Sun.
He returned to the United States in 1927, and within a year he had completed his first
commission to illustrate Dorothy Rowe's The Begging Deer, a collection of Japanese stories.
He then collaborated with his wife May McNeer on another Japanese book, Prince Bantam, which
was published in 1929.
But more significantly his own first wordless novel was published in the same year.
This was the book God's Man and it was the first of its kind to be published in America.
This fantasy about an artist who exchanges his soul for an enchanted paint brush
was never going to be a best seller, but even so it sold more than 20,000 copies.
Like the European works that had inspired him it was created entirely as black and white
woodcut illustrations and it was highly praised by critics, which gave him the impetus to
produce five more between 1930 and 1937.
Although more than capable of working successfully in any number of other mediums all of these
were also created as woodcuts, and the last of them was Vertigo, published in 1937.
Also worthy of note was his highly distinctive interpretation, also woodcut, of Mary Shelley's
Frankenstein in 1936.
Ward also explored some tonal illustrations in line and wash for a series of children's
books, including more with his wife May McNeer, such as the story of the boy and moose My
Friend Mac.
In the later 1930s he also used what looks very much like stone lithography - although
that's not verified - to illustrate the Haunted Omnibus, a collection of ghost stories.
And in 1938 Ward started to illustrate books published by the Heritage Limited Editions
Club, including a two colour edition of the Count of Monte Cristo.
Details of his later life are virtually non-existent, but he retired in 1979 to Reston, Virginia,
where he died in 1985, at 80 years old.
That's the end of this video and I hope you'll tune in when the next one makes its appearance.