William Wallace Denslow was best known as the illustrator of the book The Wizard of
Oz.
But he created much more than that and deserves greater recognition as one of the most significant
pioneers of modern picture book illustration.
He was born in Philadelphia in 1856, and other than a few unproductive months of formal art
education, he was self taught.
It's claimed that by the age of 16 he was getting work published in magazines, although
no evidence of this appears to have survived.
He settled in Chicago in 1893, where he worked as a freelance illustrator but again there's
no evidence of his work until 1898 when he met the writer L. Frank Baum and they decided
to collaborate on a book project.
Father Goose was published in 1899 and it quickly became the best selling book of the
year.
Following this success they worked together again and this time the remarkable result
was The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
For the book Denslow created a series of calligraphic line illustrations with tightly controlled
pen and ink.
Some were printed as monochromes and others used unusual combinations of spot colour applied
at printing to Denslow's precise instructions.
The book's success was immediate and unprecedented and gave both the author and the artist celebrity
status.
The next year they published Dot and Tot of Merryland, but the story was nowhere near
as engaging as the Wizard of Oz and it received a rather lukewarm reception.
Away from his partnership with Baum, Denslow did have success with his character Billy
Bounce, which was first published in 1901 as a comic strip and subsequently in book
form.
Which was just as well because his association with Baum ended abruptly and acrimoniously
in 1902.
They had planned to create a stage musical of the Wizard of Oz but the plans disintegrated
into a serious disagreement over money. They couldn't reconcile their differences and Denslow
left for New York.
Unusually for an illustrator, he had a keen business sense and had negotiated generous
royalty payments for his work with Baum and also retained the copyright to visual portrayals
of the characters.
Which meant he was free to create comic strips and spinoff books and didn't have to share
the royalties.
And in the next few years he illustrated more books than seemed humanly possible, including
18 of his own.
All of them sold in large numbers, and with the vast amount of money he had made he bought
a small island in Bermuda, and built a lavish white mansion on it.
But for reasons I can't unearth a few years later his career went into sharp decline.
Sales of his books plummeted and he was finding it increasingly difficult to get published.
There were three failed marriages to pay for and staffing and maintaining a mansion on
a private island wouldn't be cheap.
And some of his failed projects such as an attempted stage musical of the book The Pearl
and The Pumpkin were financially disastrous .
But continuing royalty payments alone should have protected him, and how he came to have
such financial problems is baffling.
Whatever the cause Denslow began drinking heavily, and his increasing unreliability
only made his decline that much faster.
And in 1915, following a three day drinking binge he passed out in an alley, caught pneumonia
and died at the age of 58.
The remarkably distinctive poster artist Achille Mauzan was born in 1883 in the French Riviera
town of Gap, and having studied at the School of Fine Art in Lyon he relocated to Milan
in 1905.
There he set himself up as an illustrator, and was soon creating magazine illustrations
and posters.
After a few years in Milan he moved to Turin and by this point posters were dominating
his output.
Nevertheless he was also creating sentimental watercolour postcards, which were popular
but of little aesthetic merit compared to his poster work.
He went back to Milan in 1912 to work for the highly prestigious publishing house Ricordi
and he stayed for the next 5 years.
At which point he left to join their business rival Maga, and collaborated with them until
1923.
By 1924 he had gained enough experience to be able to set up his own publishing house
with business partner Angelo Morzenti in Milan.
This venture was successful from the outset and by now as much a businessman as an illustrator
he travelled to Argentina and set up another agency in Buenos Aires.
By this point he was totally in control of his style and technique, and clients were
eager to be associated with it.
In the following decade he used his talent to great effect on an astonishingly wide range
of imaginative advertising campaigns.
Mauzan developed a style that set him apart from others. There were elements of art deco
evident in his work but that was balanced with more gesturally applied drawing and paint
too.
He was playful and humorous in his approach, with visual metaphors and symbols which he
used with occasional grotesque surrealism.
He seemed to be quite happy to mix his media even within any given picture, with both flat
and tonal painting and line work created with both brush and crayon.
The end result was always visually energetic, with a finish that was both engaging and memorable
like all successful advertising should be.
In 1933 he moved yet again to Paris and although he found plenty of work he quickly became
aware that the French capital was a highly competitive overcrowded market, and although
he continued to use Paris as his base of operations he nevertheless continued to work in the main
for Italian and Argentinian clients.
And on occasion he ventured into other areas of expression, such as his agreeably absurd
line illustrations for Paul Reboux's humorous book Gerard Chez Les Phoques in 1934
He continued to work in Paris until the second world war began in 1939, and he spent increasing
amounts of time on the French Riviera, well away from the harsh realities of German occupation.
Once the war had ended Mauzan began to scale back his involvement with commercial illustration
And by the mid 1950s he had retired completely with more than 2000 posters to his credit.
He spent the rest of his days on the riviera painting and enjoying life up to his death
in 1952 at the age of 69.
Harry Steele Savage was born in 1898 in Michigan to Irish and French Canadian immigrant parents.
He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Slade School of Art in London.
When he had finished there he headed to Europe for yet more study in both Vienna and Paris.
By 1918 it seems he was working as a commercial artist for a Detroit department store, but
there's no evidence of his work there or anywhere else for that matter until 13 years later
in 1931.
In that year his illustrated edition of Boccaccio's Decameron was published.
And his images for the book immediately set him apart from most of his peers as he was
one of very few commercial illustrators using traditional woodcut techniques.
And it was immediately obvious that he was highly adept with this particularly difficult
method of image making.
In the following year he undertook another commission to illustrate the stories of The
Arabian Nights, and once again he created a series of dramatic and aesthetically pleasing
woodcuts.
only a few months later his edition of The Droll Stories of Honoré de Balzac was also
published
But following this prolific period there follows another gap - this time of 8 years - before
he surfaced again with illustrations for the book No Other Man by Alfred Noyes in 1940.
And in that year he returned to more classical themes again for Stories of the Gods and Heroes
by Sally Benson.
And the creative success of his woodcuts - this time featuring a range of well applied spot
colours- sealed his reputation for historical and mythological subjects.
In 1942 the most successful of these was Mythology by Edith Hamilton. The cover art for this
book also demonstrated what Steele Savage could do with colour
When America entered the war following the bombing of Pearl Harbour he was too old to
fight but he produced some compelling domestic propaganda to aid the American war effort.
In the later 1940s and throughout the 1950s he continued to be in great demand for mythological
book work.
But around this time he also branched out in terms of his subjects, and use of media
with a series of books about religion, and particularly biblical stories.
He didn't abandon the woodcuts but there were also quite a few full colour paintings created
with tightly controlled gouache and watercolour.
These religiously themed books continued into the 70s and from the mid 1960s onward they
were joined by a series of covers he created for science fiction paperbacks.
And despite his advancing years he remained particularly prolific in this genre right
up to his death in 1970 at the age of 71. Jean Bruller adopted the alias Vercors for
both his writing and his illustration work, but outside France neither his real name or
his alias are familiar.
He was born in 1902 in Paris and with his family he spent the years of the Great War
in Switzerland
In 1920 he left school and enrolled onto an electrical engineering course, but even at
this stage he was already supplying cartoon illustrations to Parisian magazines.
In 1923 he graduated with his degree in engineering and immediately attempted to establish his
own magazine but it wasn't a success.
In 1926, following national service in the army, he published his first collection of
drawings 21 recipes for Violent Death. This series of loose line and watercolour cartoons
was a clear indication of Bruller's bleak and sardonic humour.
By this time his work was appearing regularly in the magazines Le Rire and Fantasio, and
his book A Man Chopped Into Pieces was published and met with some success.
In 1930 his agreeably absurd doodles for Andre Maurois' children's book Patapoufs
et Filifers also appeared, and this book became an instant children's classic.
It was translated into quite a few different languages and it's still in print in several
countries.
1932 saw the publication of Le Mariage de Monsieur Lakonik, a farcical and engagingly
loosely drawn comic book, and it proved to be particularly popular.
The success of these books gave him a good income which left him free to try establishing
another magazine, but once again the project failed.
So he carried on with his writing and illustration for adults and children up to the German
occupation of France in world war 2.
Bruller immediately joined the army but following a broken leg he had to return to civilian
life.
He secretly became active in the French Resistance and began publishing under the name
Vercors to avoid detection.
And his most acclaimed book le Silence de la Mer was published under this alias, although
oddly he didn't create the illustrations.
Although he had survived the war it had left its mark on him and his work.
He continued to write and to illustrate his own books, but the humour and child-friendly
aspects of his work were replaced with an altogether more cynical, darker outlook.
In the 1950s he withdrew from the rest of society and kept very much to himself.
But in 1965 he published his illustrated edition of Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This project had taken him 10 years to complete but even if his output had slowed the
distinctive visual qualities remained as strong as they had ever been.
He was still writing up to his death at the age of 89 in 1991.
And I'll be back with another just as soon as it's ready.
See you then.