British illustrator burner Partridge was so highly regarded in his lifetime that
he was awarded a knighthood for service to his country in 1925 he was born in
1861 in London the son of an eminent medical professor and surgeon and once
he'd left school he went to work as a trainee with a firm of architects at the
age of 19 he left the architects office to work as a stained-glass designer and
although throughout this time he had continues drawn paint it was 1885 when
he was 25 years old that he first tried his hand as an illustrator and
watercolour artist he created illustrations for magazines and books
and he did reasonably well as a painter - on several occasions he submitted work
to punch magazine but it took him a few attempts before they finally published a
couple of his drawings in 1892 a year later they invited him to join them as a
staff artist and after some characteristic indecision he eventually
accepted the offer and stayed with them for the rest of his life Partridge
wasn't a joke writer but the editorial staff supplied him with the material
from which he would create the image and it was his exceptional ability to
translate situations and dialogue into quickly understandable visual humor
which rendered him invaluable to the magazine's writers throughout the first
decade of the 20th century partridges pen and ink images reflected on the
changes in society at every level and took a liberal but firmly middle class
for you have events in Britain and around the world Partridge had become a
humorous illustrator at a time when the word cartoon didn't
imply a hastily drawn doodle and his attention to her nuts be imposing was
nothing short of exceptional similarly his ability to create the illusion of
substance with carefully controlled pen and ink couching was without equal I can
find no definitive evidence to support the idea but he must have worked from
pose models probably his associates a punch it's
impossible to imagine that such convincing occasions of humanity weren't
observational in the years before the Great War partridges illustrations
mercilessly targeted Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm and his expansionist policies
and when the war inevitable began in 1914 he stepped up the level of
vilification with more grim humor in addition to his work for punch he also
used his painting skills to create some color propaganda posters today told his
worth a punch had necessarily been monochrome but as with his propaganda
work he occasionally had other opportunities to use color his 1915
collection of detailed and precise watercolors for a collection of poems by
Robert Browning showed just how adept he was with the medium around the same time
a couple of his illustrations for punch appeared with the addition of limited
spot colors although by far the bulk of his illustration for the magazine would
continue to be line only once the war had ended and Britain began to get back
to normal he returned to domestic humor and he
satirized the politicians and social issues of the day throughout the 1920s
his illustration style remained as precise and detailed as it always had
been and he made no concessions to the rise of more modernist minimal
approaches although Partridge turned 70 in 1931 he was still working a punch and
around this time the threat to global stability presented by Adolf Hitler and
his National Socialist Party began to ring alarm bells and the feeling of deja
vu Partridge and his colleagues created many visually eloquent satirical attacks
on the Fuhrer as his ongoing occupation of neighboring countries made another
war inevitable Partridge lived just long enough to see Hitler's Third Reich
destroyed and he died in 1945 at the age of 84
Joseph Francis Kernan was born in Massachusetts in 1878 making him 16
years older than Norman Rockwell's I mentioned this because the similarities
of style technique and subject matter of the two can't be ignored and much as I
admire Rockwell it does get on my nerves as others such as Kernan are either
hidden by his shadow or relegated to the status of Rockwell clones he studied at
the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston and he paid for his art education by
playing professional baseball he would have graduated around 1900 and it's
known that he taught for a few years following graduation but the first dated
illustrations I could find are these on promising course for baseball magazine
from 1916 in 1920 by which time he was already 42 years old sudden flood of his
paintings featured on the covers of quite a few magazines and these images
show clearly that his skill levels that improved considerably
the Country Gentlemen magazine was particularly keen to have him illustrate
their covers with his good-natured homespun images and in addition to
featuring on their covers for more than a decade he created similar
illustrations for others such as outdoor life the Elks and the more obscure
cappers farmer before the decade was out he had also appeared on covers for the
Saturday Evening Post which was of course where Rockwell had made his name
and continued to be their most used artist even so by 1936 Kernan had racked
up a total of 26 covers advertising work had never been part of his ambitions but
every once in a while he did check occasional commissions for posters and
press arts he was one of several illustrators
including Rockwell who created croissants and posters for Fiske tyres
Kernan's abilities as a draftsman and his dexterity with oil paint Marti
mounts a truly great realist painter the visual evidence available strongly
suggests he was one of a relatively small number of illustrators who never
worked in monochrome either tonally or in line but the incredible authority of
his pencil sketches gives a clear indication of his level of skill
Kernan's are perfectly captured middle-class American life throughout
the 1930s and into the forties in magazines calendars and they are
advertising campaign although he slowed down in later life he retained his
position as one of America's best and most popular realistic illustrators up
to his eventual retirement and after a long and rewarding career
Joseph Kernan died in 1958 at the age of 80
Fred G Cooper was primarily but not exclusively a cartoon illustrator and he
was adept in a wide range of styles and techniques he was born in Oregon in 1883
and he studied art very briefly at the Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco
having quit his studies he headed for New York in 1904 at the age of 21 almost
immediately he began contributing illustrations and cartoons to Life
magazine and this professional relationship would prove to be both
lasting young mutually beneficial at the same time he was also having some
success as a typographer and graphic designer within a year of his arrival
his reputation was strong enough for him to be invited to produce virtually all
Illustrated publicity work for the New York Edison Company
and although Edison alone were keeping him busy and financially stable he
continued to work for several magazines and also found time to illustrate the
occasional book or theater poster life continued to rely on him not just for
content but to also create a series of arts to attract more subscribers and he
was responsible for creating a large number of monochrome spots illustrations
which we used repeatedly in every issue of the magazine in essence these
drawings were an early form of clipart he even found time to produce occasional
iterations for other magazines such as Colliers during America's brief
appearance in the Great War Cooper also created editorial cartoons and I for one
would not have known these cartoons were by the same person in the 1920s he
maintained his position as one of the most in-demand illustrators of his day
and he continued to demonstrate remarkable levels of graphic diversity
and authority in all his Commission's the series of covers he created for life
between 1925 and 1927 show just how eclectic Cooper was in his approach to
making pictures some are highly sophisticated linear works with Anatomy
that's only slightly caricatured and others are far more basic with Anatomy
very much in line with characters such as Felix the count and these covers also
revealed that he was sufficiently accomplished in creating Art Deco images
to be able to parody them for comic effects Cooper invariably created his
line work with either pen nor brush and ink and when working in color it was
usually flat spot printing over his line drawing
in the years between the wars Cooper was remarkably successful and creatively
energetic across all areas of the media and he prospered accordingly during the
Second World War he was too old to fight but he created several domestic
propaganda posters including this totally out of character
representational painting again I would never have known it was him in 1947 he
was appointed editor of the subway Sun newspaper and it's at this time that's
examples of his illustration become very scarce this pair of coffee posters from
the early fifties are all I've been able to find his appointment that the Sun may
have kept him too busy to carry on as an illustrator or maybe a 65 years old he
considered it a good enough time to retire from freelance work but whatever
the reason all we know of his later life is that he died in 1962 at the age of 79
Eric Schilling is yet another in a long line of German illustrators whose work
was highly regarded in his lifetime but whose political affiliations led to him
being somewhat of an embarrassment he was born in 1885 in the town of Sol in
central Germany but in 1903 he left to study at the Berlin School of Art and he
continued to live and work in Berlin in the years that followed in 1905 at the
age of only 20 he had some of his work published in davar Jakob
a satirical magazine with affiliations to the outlawed
left-wing Social Democrat Party but two years later he also began contributing
to the rival simply kisi mas magazine and it was in their pages that the
overwhelming majority of his illustrations would appear for the rest
of his career in the years leading up to the first
world war his frequently angry misanthropic images
covered the wide range of expected targets any satirical illustrator would
naturally take aim at Authority in general government corruption and the
less savory aspects of the church could always be relied on to provide
ammunition but once war had been declared he joined the rest of the team
of simply kissing offs in turning his attention to Germany's enemies and the
supposedly evil war mongering ways by the time the war ended in 1918 his
commitment to simply kissing Moss led him to relocate to a small town just
outside Munich where the magazine was published shelling was unusual among his
contemporaries as he never relied on one particular style some of his work was
created lithographically and was possessed of sinewy grace while other
images resembled the more brutal look of medieval wood coals and it was a similar
story with his approach to color which was applied terminally using washes in
charcoal shading and frequently as flats Bach Khoa when adult Hitler and his
National Socialists came to power in 1933 the artists and writers of simple
kisum us were given the choice of either getting out while they could or getting
on board with Nazi ideology Schilling chose the latter option and from that
point on created anti-semitic and xenophobic images which must have made
the Fuehrer proud whether this was a genuine change of heart or simply a
question of self preservation isn't recorded simply kisima fell apart in
1944 and when he became glaringly obvious to even the most die-hard Nazi
that Germany had lost the war Eric Schilling committed suicide as American
troops approached Munich in 1945 so it seems his love for the Fuhrer was
genuine after all and that's the somewhat depressing end of this
installment see you next time I hope and bye for now
you