In his lifetime Cecil Aldin was a very well known British illustrator and artist but nowadays
you'd be hard pressed to find many - even here in Britain - who are familiar with his
work.
He was Born in Slough in 1870 and in his teens he studied at the National Art Training School
in South Kensington, which was followed by a summer school with the renowned animal painter
William Calderon.
In 1891 at the age of 21 he sold the first of his dog-themed illustrations to the Graphic
magazine and other work soon followed.
A year later he started creating illustrations on a regular basis for the Illustrated London
News and others such as the Sketch, and this gave him the confidence and financial stability
to rent a studio in Chelsea.
In the 1890s among other commissions Aldin created a few posters for advertising but
although they were very successful he didn't create more as his career progressed.
His success soon had him rubbing shoulders with fellow illustrators Phil May, John Hassall,
Dudley Hardy and Tom Browne, and together they founded the London Sketch Club.
By now he was earning a very good living and alongside his commissioned illustration he
was also creating many children's nursery books, which sold well and brought in a regular
stream of royalty payments.
Combined with sales of his equally successful hunting prints they provided him with a sizeable
income throughout his career.
It was Aldin's dog stories and pictures, created most often with bold calligraphic lines and
flat colour which were at the heart of his popularity, and he created many titles over
the years.
He was a natural choice to illustrate the 1910 edition of Charles Dickens' Pickwick
Papers and the evocative pen and watercolour pages he produced rapidly became everyones
enduring visualisation of the story.
In the same year Aldin and his family moved to Henley on Thames, where he increasingly
immersed himself in the rural lifestyle captured in his prints and drawings.
But he continued to publish his children's books including Field Babies in 1910 and its
companion piece Zoo Babies in 1913.
And in 1916 his watercolour edition of Anna Sewell's novel Black Beauty was published.
Although by the end of the great war he was financially independent Aldin continued to
paint and illustrate prolifically throughout the 1920s.
In 1930 he retired to the Spanish island of Majorca but couldn't resist the occasional
commission.
In 1932 he illustrated James Douglas's The Bunch Book, which unfortunately turned out
to be his last commission as Cecil Aldin suffered a fatal heart attack while sailing back to
England in 1935 at the age of 65.
I've read conflicting accounts about the location and year of Arthur Johnson's birth
but Cincinnati in 1878 seems to be the likeliest option.
He was born into a wealthy family and In 1889, when his father was appointed US Consul to
Hamburg, the family moved to Germany.
In his teens Arthur studied at the Berlin Academy and had some critical success as a
landscape artist - although I can find no examples of his paintings anywhere.
But soon after he also began contributing cartoons to the satirical magazine Kladderadatsch
in 1906.
Johnson's earliest cartoons for the magazine were quite heavy in their execution, but he
began creating his drawings with wax crayon directly onto the lithographic stone.
This labour intensive method wasn't uncommon in Europe at the time and it allowed Johnson
to create the widest possible range of line and textured effects.
And by using this method his work became far more expressive, energetic and spontaneous.
With very few exceptions his drawings were reproduced either as duotones or monochromes.
And even where there was a more fully coloured image reproduced this would have been added
at printing just as it would with the duotones. In the final analysis, it was Johnson's incisive
line work which defined his style.
Although I can't find definitive information there's nothing to be found by Johnson published
elsewhere so it's pretty much certain his entire working life was with Kladderadatsch.
Like quite a few other satirists Johnson's worldview was exceptionally bleak and he took
obvious delight in exploring the darker side of humanity.
The great war of 1914 provided him with plenty of material and his wartime drawings were
heavily propagandist, attacking Britain and her allies while portraying his adopted homeland
as the innocent victim of their brutality.
In the years after the war Kladderadatsch's editorial tone - and Johnson's cartoons increasingly
took aim at communism and religion. and his antisemitic tendencies intensified in the
coming years.
And by the time Hitler's National Socialist party had come to power in 1933 Johnson had
become a particularly enthusiastic convert to the Fuhrer and his Aryan quest.
As disturbing and repellant as this ideology was the illustrations he produced in support
of the third reich constitute a remarkable collection of dramatic and biting satirical
drawings.
And by the time the second world war had begun Johnson's illustrations were almost exclusively
savage attacks on the allies and their supposed Jewish puppet-masters.
And he kept this up until the bitter end when Kladderadatch closed in 1944.
The following year Hitler was defeated and it was no longer such a good thing to be a
fascist in Germany.
As far as I can tell Arthur Johnson never worked again, and he lived the rest of his
days in obscurity up to his death in Berlin in 1954 at the age of 80.
Like others who supported the wrong side his memory has been brushed under the carpet by
a Germany that would rather we forgot its recent past.
Frances Tipton Hunter was one of a very small number of female illustrators who worked in
what is now commonly called the 'Rockwell' style.
And because of the dominant position held by Rockwell, Tipton Hunter - like so many
others - tends to be overlooked or accused of mimicry.
She was born in Pennsylvania in 1896 but when her mother died six years later she and her
older brother moved in with an aunt and uncle who lived nearby.
When old enough she studied illustration at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art
and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Although she had successfully completed a few commissions while still a student, after
graduation she returned to her home town for six years before she moved to New York and
finally started work as an illustrator.
In the early 1920s she created a series of paper dolls for the Ladies’ Home Journal,
which proved immensely popular with the readers and their offspring.
And from that point onward Tipton Hunter's lasting relationship with popular magazines
became her primary source of income.
Her first Saturday Evening Post cover appeared in 1936 and she went on to contribute seventeen
more into the early 40s.
This high-profile work was instrumental in elevating her status and she became one of
the most successful and popular illustrators of her time.
But in the minds of many Norman Rockwell's goodnatured paintings and the covers of the
Saturday Evening Post are inseparable, and have taken on iconic status.
But the magazine also used several other illustrators and Tipton Hunter was one of the more prevalent.
Like Rockwell her themes were about everyday America with an obvious affection for kids
and their pets.
And she too had a remarkable facility for creating humorous and endearing narratives
through posing and facial expression.
But unlike Rockwell and the others working with heightened realism Tipton Hunter's medium
of choice was watercolour - and her technical dexterity with it was nothing short of astonishing.
In the period after the war she was at the pinnacle of her success, and her sentimental
images were in constant demand from magazines and advertisers, and her images were also
sold as prints to adorn the walls of many American households.
In 1946 she began a series of paintings depicting the everyday problems of a little boy and
his dog. The series was titled Sandy in Trouble and ran for more than a decade.
Oddly, she illustrated very few books.
There was 1935's The Frances Tipton Hunter Picture Book, which featured illustrations
for verses and stories by Marjorie Barrows.
And in 1948 she illustrated Munro Leaf's story Boo, Who Used to be Scared of the Dark.
Unfortunarely In 1956 she became seriously ill and Frances Tipton Hunter died in 1957
in Philadelphia at the age of 61, and since then her memory has faded to almost nothing.
Harry Beckhoff is yet another undervalued and poorly remembered illustrator but I'm
glad to say I've managed to collect enough decent quality images and scraps of biography
to be able to feature him.
He was born in 1901 in Perth Amboy, New Jersey and at the age of 18 he studied at the Art
Students League in New York.
Unlike most of his contemporaries at the league who were chasing ideals of painterly realism,
Beckhoff was more influenced by the work of French illustrators such as Charles Martin
and Pierre Brissaud.
Unfortunately there's nothing at all written about what he did after graduation in 1922
and his first published illustration didn't appear until 1929.
What he'd been doing up to that point is anybody's guess.
But although he was a late starter he made up for lost time, creating illustrations for
books and magazines, most notably Collier’s magazine with whom he developed a particularly
enduring relationship.
The images he created for Collier's not only provided him with a steady income but also
a very public gallery and his illustrations were seen across all America.
Stylistically, Beckhoff was ahead of his time as one of a small number who realised early
on that illustration didn't have to be realistic to be understood.
So although his illustrations were painted - usually with watercolour or diluted gouache
- it was generally applied as flat washes and his remarkably precise inked line did
all the hard work.
His goodnatured humour and economical graphic style made him a natural choice for press
advertising and he worked on quite a few campaigns in the 1940s, including a very successful
if rather dull series of ads for Birds Eye frozen foods.
Despite the appalling lack of biographical information available there is one fascinating
and unorthodox aspect of his working methods recorded.
Beckhoff would invariably create very small but incredibly detailed thumbnail sketches
no bigger than three inches square, which he would then scale up to about five times
their original size using a pantograph.
If your'e not aware of this ridiculously old-fashioned device it looks like this.
Then he would ink over the drawn outline and if it was a colour piece he would then add
washes over the image.
However perverse this method may seem to the rest of us the evidence suggests that it enabled
him to capture the energy and gestural qualities of the original sketch.
And that's something that many illustrators feel gets lost when creating finished artwork.
For over half a century Harry Beckhoff illustrated hundreds of articles and fiction in magazines,
and his advertising client base remained undiminished even in the later 50s when Rockwell and the
other realists were starting to be seen as rather old fashioned.
And Beckhoff's own work evolved in his later career into a looser, gestural inking style
more in tune with the prevalent styling of the 1960s.
And the only other piece of information I could find about Harry Beckhoff is that he
died in 1979 at the age of 78.
And that's it for this one and the next will be uploaded as soon as its done.
Thanks for watching.