Despite a lifetime's fascination with comic illustration I'm embarrassed to admit I've
only recently discovered the work of American cartoonist Walt McDougall.
He was born in 1858 in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a successful painter.
He left school at 16 and at the age of 18 in 1876 he took a job as a staff artist
at the New York Daily Graphic, America's first ever illustrated daily newspaper.
And in addition to his employment there he was also freelancing for several magazines.
He began working for the New York World in 1884, producing mostly political cartoons, some of which
would later be credited as being influential in the outcome of the 1884 presidential election.
In 1888 he produced a series of humorous line drawings for The Railway Book,
and 3 years later in 1891 he published his own authored adventure story The Hidden City.
The monochromes for this book were an unusual and not completely successful excursion
into representational figure work, which it seems he never repeated.
As early as 1893 McDougall's work appeared in colour, making him one of the first and some
maintain the very first, to have his cartoons printed in colour in an American newspaper.
And subsequently many of his strips and complex comical crowd scenes
created for newspaper supplements were also printed in full colour.
These cover pages were particularly absorbing and inventive,
although among them there are examples which suggest he was inspired and influenced by the
revolutionary page layouts created by Winsor McCay for his Little Nemo strip.
Nevertheless McDougall's work had its own individualistic appeal.
1903's The Rambillicus Book, which was both written and illustrated by him,
was his highly successful foray into the world of strange monsters and beasts, and it quickly
became one of his most popular ventures. Sadly it was a monochrome line only publication
but nevertheless this surreal fantasy and the inventive imagination with which he created
his characters and scenes made the book ideal narrative entertainment for children.
The repulsive but amiable monsters he created and their interaction with the human characters
ably demonstrated the quality and persistence of his creative imagination.
The absence of visual evidence suggests he never created a follow up to this remarkable book.
In 1904 he illustrated the the first instalment of the colour comic strip
Queer Visitors from the Marvellous Land of Oz written by L. Frank Baum. It ran for only
a year but others McDougall created around the same time fared better with longer runs.
One of his most enduring successes was Peck's Bad Boy
which was popular enough to also be published as books in 1907 and 1908.
Throughout the first 2 decades of the 20th century McDougall remained popular with the public
and in this period he produced a large number of comic strips
which were widely syndicated in various American newspapers.
But following the end of the Great War evidence of his work disappears rapidly,
although in 1925 he published an autobiography titled This Is The Life, which wasn't illustrated.
And it's also recorded that for reasons unknown McDougall committed suicide by
shooting himself at the age of 80 in 1938.
Marie Cramer, who became better known as Rie, was born in the Dutch East Indies in 1887,
but moved with her family to Arnhem in Holland in 1896.
She was inspired and encouraged by her aunt, who was a professional artist, and when the family
later moved to the Hague at the age of 18 she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Art in 1905.
Even as a student she was getting children's books published
but the earliest usable pictorial evidence I've been able to find
is a single pen and watercolour page from her story The Diamond Princess published in 1910.
Her 3 separate editions of the Fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen were published in 1915
and this series of enchanting cleanly executed monochromes and lyrical pen and wash watercolours
firmly established Cramer as one of Holland's most respected and successful children's illustrators.
More books followed at an astonishingly prolific rate for several decades to come
and the best I can do is just pick out some highlights.
In 1920 she published an edition of the 12th century romantic tale of Tristan and Isolde,
and as with much of her other work it featured stylised graphic monochromes
alongside the painted colour work.
And 2 years later she followed the same pattern for the Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Her images steered well clear of the darker gothic elements of the stories
which had generally been highlighted in earlier versions of the book.
Although to date the majority of her colour work had been created in the
tradition of pen and watercolour masters such as Rackham and Dulac,
as her career progressed her style became increasingly graphic as her monochromes
had always been, and frequently they were printed with flat spot colours.
This was particularly evident in the large volume she produced for
the children's magazine Zonneschijn, from the middle 1920s up to its demise in 1943.
Cramer continued to have great success throughout the 1930s, and produced many
more books, including an edition of Alice in Wonderland in both black and white and colour.
During the Second World War she joined the Dutch resistance, and as well as writing for
an underground newspaper she helped fugitives to escape, and luckily was never caught.
After the war she increasingly produced work for school text books, alongside her other creations,
and by this point all the evidence confirms
that she had left her traditional watercolour render style behind.
The last dated work I've found is a pair of amusing animal-themed books from 1955,
at which point she retired to the Spanish island of Mallorca.
In 1971 she returned to the Netherlands, and she subsequently died there in 1977 at the age of 81.
The now unjustly neglected French illustrator Jacques Touchet was born in Paris in 1887.
It's recorded that he studied at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris, some time around 1905,
and he later fought in the Great War and was captured by the Germans.
Following his release when the war ended he published two limited edition books, the first
being Small trades of Salonica, and Sketches of a Prisoner of War, for which I can find no evidence.
Following their somewhat limited success he became increasingly prolific and his work
started to be published in the wider commercial market by many of Paris's major publishing houses.
The comical Arabic tale Les Merveilleuses Histoires de Nas'rEddine,
written by Pierre Mille was published in 1924 and Touchet's humorous vignetted colour images
contributed immensely to this books success, leading to numerous reprints in following years.
Like virtually all Touchet's early illustrations
his images were reproduced by the laborious Pochoir stencil process.
2 years later he created a contemporary comic visualisation
of Eloge de la Folie, originally written by the monk Erasmus in 1509
Among other books he illustrated a French edition of Gulliver's Travels in 1930 and in 1932 the
charming tale Les Malheurs de Sophie originally written by The Comtesse de Segur in 1858.
And as if he wasn't occupied enough with book work in the early 1930s
he also started creating covers for the magazine Redondo,
using a somewhat atypical graphic modernist style, and he continued to do so up to 1939.
By the mid 1930s it seems he was increasingly working in watercolour
as Many of his images featured tonal rendering, a technical impossibility in pochoir.
This certainly seems to be the case with his 1934 edition of Rabelais' story Gargantua et Pantagruel
and again for a particualely charming series for Charles Dickens Pickwick Papers in 1937
Despite Germany's occupation of France in 1940
Touchet was apparently left alone and allowed to continue illustrating books.
And judging by the volume he published during the war years his productivity was undiminished.
Among several others was a particularly visually absorbing scenic watercolours
for an edition of les Contes de La Fontaine 1941,
and in the same year he also published his version of Aristophenes' erotic play Lysistrata.
Only a year later he followed these successes with his edition
of Louis Pergaud's La Guerre des Boutons.
And in 1943 he produced what was arguably one of the most popular and narratively engaging
visualisations of Gabriel Chevallier's satirical novel about the fictional town of Clochemerle,
originally published a decade earlier.
Following the end of the war in 1945 he created one of his greatest narrative works, with a series
of imaginative and evocative pen and watercolour illustrations for the story of Don Quixote.
Touchet really does seem to have been an unstoppable creative force and he continued
to create his exuberant and entertaining illustrations right up to the end of his life.
And he died in Paris of unknown causes in 1949 at the relatively young age of 62.
Cecil Calvert Beall was born on 1892, in Saratoga, Wyoming,
but moved with his family to new York city in 1899.
His talent was such that he sold his first painting in 1907 when he was 15 years old,
and at the age of 18 he enrolled at the Art Students League in New York City.
He also attended Pratt Institute, and it was there that he learned the art of watercolour painting,
which would become the dominant defining feature of his future career.
In 1917 he served in the American army and on his return resumed his career as an artist.
In 1922 Beall took a job with the Picard Advertising Agency,
and produced work for their clients, including a major campaign for Maxwell House coffee.
But he was also working freelance and in the years that followed he was increasingly creating
illustration almost exclusively for quite a few prominent mainstream American magazines
such as Collier's, Woman's Home Companion, and The Saturday Evening Post.
And the success he achieved soon enabled him to follow
his career exclusively on a freelance basis.
Undoubtedly Beall's greatest asset was his remarkable facility with watercolour.
Virtually all his realist contemporaries were using oils and his skilful gestural application of
watercolour gave his images great distinctiveness and spontaneity compared to his rivals.
And he was particularly adept with the creative potential of the medium's transparency
Along with his ongoing magazine commissions during the later 1930s and into the 40s
he also painted covers for several pulp magazines, but signed his work as C. Calvert.
During the Second World War Beall was employed by the U. S. War Department,
and simultaneously worked as a correspondent and artist for several magazines, including Collier's.
He created a large amount of propaganda work, mostly in the form of dramatic and
effective posters which were designed to boost morale among civilians and promote sfficiency
in the industrial war effort. Among them he produced a now well known painted rendition
of Joe Rosenthal's original photograph of the flag raising at Iwo Jima.
As this commission indicates he was happy to work from photography
and he used posed models and photographic reference extensively in all his work.
Following the war, Beall became a popular choice for the new boom in paperback books, which had
taken over at the expense of the rapidly declining pulp fiction market, and he created a large number
of covers designed to convince the reader of the racy credentials of the book in question.
But by the 1960s he had virtually abandoned commercial illustration in favour of portraiture,
with which he continued to enjoy success.
And following a long and highly successful career
Cecil Calvert Beall died at the age of 77 in Tampa Bay, Florida, in 1970.
And It's goodbye for now and I'll see you next time around.