British illustrator and cartoonist Alfred Leete was born the son of a prosperous farmer in 1882
in Thorpe Achurch, in rural Northamptonshire.
One source asserts that he later studied at The School of Science and Art in Weston-super-Mare,
but another that he was entirely self taught. But both sources agree that he
subsequently relocated to London to work as a commercial artist with a printing firm.
And even at the age of 16 in 1898 he had his first published work in the Graphic magazine.
He steadily built on this early freelance success with more illustrations for other
prominent British magazines including Punch, the Strand and Tatler.
By 1905 he had enough regular work to be able to set up as a freelance illustrator,
and in the decade that followed his generally goodnatured visual humour
made him a popular choice for both magazine and advertising work.
When war was declared in 1914 Leete created this uncharacteristically serious iconic image
of Lord Kitchener and his pointing finger, which originally appeared as the cover of London Opinion
magazine, but was co-opted as a recruitment poster soon after. It was so successful that
James Montgomery Flagg copied the concept for his American recruitment poster of 1917.
While the war raged throughout Europe he also published a trio of highly successful books
which harnessed his more expected comedic skills, and were created
to mock the Germans and their leaders and portray them as both bullies and idiots.
Schmidt the Spy, which had first been published as a series in London Opinion magazine,
was a particularly amusing account of the undercover German failing to
comprehend the British and their daily lives. The Bosch Book, featuring engagingly absurd
portrayals of the enemy, was also published in 1916, and the third in the series was All
the Rumours, a collection of comic verses which despite the horrific reality of the
war made light of the conflict from both a civilian and military point of view.
Despite his creative productivity during the war Leete also served in the army in the artists
rifles along with other illustrators, cartoonists and painters of the period.
Once the war was over his work continued to be popular, and featured frequently in magazines
and advertising throughout the 1920s. And at this time he had considerable
success designing posters for the London Underground,
and he created a series of comedic images which ranged from the remarkably but effectively
simple through to more complex and absorbing humorous compositions.
In 1931 he branched out into children's books with his humorous fairy tale A book of Dragons,
but unfortunately a year or so earlier he had begun to experience serious health problems and
in 1933 Alfred Leete died of a heart attack, at his home in London, at the age of only 51.
Ludwig Kainer was born in Munich in 1885 and initially studied medicine before
turning to a career in art and illustration. The turning point seems to have come when he
visited Paris in 1909 and saw the work of the French impressionists on display there.
And he was so taken with what he saw that he set about teaching himself the basics of artistic
expression. Around the same time he met and married the Austrian painter Lene Schneider
and that too may have been a significant factor in luring him away from medicine.
Kainer settled in Berlin in 1910 and began work as a graphic artist primarily designing posters
for theatrical productions, and others for a range of commercial German clients,
but he also tried his hand at cartoon work with some success in the pages of Simplicissimus.
But despite his obvious facility for humorous work he evidently preferred more serious minded
representational work, and the series of full page selectively coloured illustrations he
created for Simplicissimus and other German magazines of the period bears this out.
All his work, whether for posters or magazines, was characterised by a strong impressionistic
flavour, and a far lighter gestural graphic touch than most of his contemporaries.
In 1914 he designed the cover of Kurt Pinthus' Das Kinobuch with a memorably designed 2 colour print.
and at seems that at this point Kainer gravitated increasingly
towards working for the world of cinema, He began working in film production, where
he designed sets and costumes, along with a series of highly distinctive arresting posters for silent
films, many of which showed his ability to evoke grace and movement with the minimum of marks.
And this ability stood him in particularly good stead with clients in the world of dance,
such as the ballet Russe.
He even took over the artistic direction for a German ballet company around this time.
But he remained diverse in terms of the areas he chose to work in and in the early 1920s also
featured in the short-lived fantasy magazine Der Orchideengarten, and the more enduring Die Dame.
In 1924 he took a year out and travelled to India, and on his return carried
on working in theatre design posters and magazines such as Sport Im Bilde,
with a series of particularly attractive loose watercolour covers.
It's also recorded that he taught fashion in Berlin, and although his later career is poorly
documented and dates are seemingly impossible to find, he appears to have continued to be prolific.
The last verified piece I found was this poster from 1950
and Ludwig Kainer died in 1967 when he was 82 years old.
The almost forgotten French illustrator Jean D'Ylen was born Jean Paul Beguin in Paris in 1886
and although there are quite a lot of decent resolution examples of his poster work to
be found online, yet again biographical detail is exceptionally thin on the ground
There's no record of where, when or even if he studied art but it is recorded that he originally
worked with success as a designer of jewellery before switching to illustration in 1919,
by which time he was already 33 years old
And by 1921 he had managed to secure an exclusive contract with the renowned Vercasson publishing
company in Paris, where he replaced their previous successful and highly regarded
poster artist Leonetto Cappiello , who had left to join the rival publishers Devambez.
In many ways d'Ylen was the ideal replacement for Cappiello because the
two were particularly close in stylistic terms, and in their general approach to composition.
And both favoured the use of single figures which were
frequently were set against plain dark background colours for maximum impact
d'Ylen's drawn style was sketchier than that of Cappiello and his work particularly embraced
the potential and constraints inherent in drawing for traditional stone lithography,
despite the fact that it would have been perfectly feasible to create the images as paintings and
have them reproduced in full colour. But d'Ylen obviously relished producing his gestural
expressive drawings with wax crayon and building up the coloured areas in subsequent print runs,
precisely as Jules Cheret and others had done some 50 years earlier.
in d'Ylen's posters background details were a compete irrelevance and reality, despite
the believability of his subjects' anatomy, was never something he troubled himself with.
He was yet another example of an illustrator exploring the possibilities of what the
surrealist art movement was creating in the same time frame, frequently playing with
relative scale and other absurdities to produce images which were hard to ignore or forget.
In that regard they were ideal for the purposes of poster advertising.
During his career he produced posters for the widest possible range of clients,
both glamorous and mundane, and he was by no means confined to the french market either.
Shell Oil were particularly taken with his style and outlook and he created some of his finest
energetic work for them for the English speaking markets. Using his trademark humour and ability
with surreal visual fantasy he produced a campaign which in its time was immensely successful.
The dates of some of his posters clearly show that he continued to be popular into the 1930s.
How long for is uncertain but what unfortunately is certain is that he died in 1938 when he would
have been only 52. Despite the remarkably latge volume of accomplished and attractive
posters he created his career as an illustrator had lasted a mere 18 years.
Given her talent, and popularity during her career as a cartoonist,
it's particularly baffling that Barbara Shermund should now be so poorly remembered.
She was Born in San Francisco in 1899, the daughter of a sculptor and an architect,
and her visual talents were naturally encouraged by her parents.
She later went on to study at The California School of Fine Arts, and while still a student
in 1921 she illustrated A City of Caprice written by Neill Compton Wilson. For this book she created
a series of suitably serious-minded etchings which were completely unlike her later work.
Once she'd completed her studies she moved to New York at the age of 26
in the hope of starting a career in illustration.
As luck would have it The New Yorker magazine had only recently been launched
and she began she began working for them as both a
writer and cartoonist within its first few months of existence.
Her debut cover and a couple of others from the same time were created to resonate with
the flat art deco look popular in the New Yorker and some other American magazines,
And the same was true of her early monochromes,
but she quickly discarded the style in favour of her own innately more gestural sketchy approach.
In her time with the New Yorker, which would be the best part of two decades
she only created a total of 8 covers, but the later examples were all agreeable situation
comedies which like her gags were created with loosely applied washes and ink line.
And this was the technique which defined her work.
In the following decades Shermund was responsible for over 600 cartoons published in the magazine.
And such was the level of her humorous creativity that alongside her own prolific
output she was happily supplying written jokes for other cartoonists to draw.
She didn't confine herself to work exclusively for the New Yorker, and In
the 1930s she also created covers and illustrations for other magazines,
including appearances in both Life and its humorous rival Judge.
Wherever they were published her drawings were loose but always expressive and almost
invariably about modern American women, and their frequently low opinion of the male of the species.
Nevertheless all aspects of the female personality were explored apparently dispassionately,
and they depicted strong and assertive through to dimwitted and flighty in equal measure.
Her facility and popularity for depicting human relations
was such that advertisers were keen to engage her
and over the decades she created quite a few illustrations for successful press ad campaigns.
She stayed with the New Yorker up to 1944 and subsequently went onto become equally
indispensible to Esquire magazine, by now working almost exclusively in full colour.
In the same year she also began contributing to Pictorial Review,
fos whom she created a highly popular series featuring her girly characters
titled Shermund's Sallies which ran successfully in the magazine for 13 years up to 1957.
How she spent her later years is unrecorded but there is no more
evidence of drawn or painted work, after her series in the Pictorial Revue ended.
It is known that most of her life had been spent as an itinerant, moving from location to location
and only settling at a fixed address in later life, when she moved to New Jersey.
She quickly became forgotten and died at the age of 79 in 1978,
an event recorded in a pathetic 4 line obituary in a New Jersey newspaper.
And on that somewhat depressing note we end this instalment.
More are on their way so I'll see you soon.