In his time Hermann Stockmann was a highly respected German illustrator and painter
but I for one had never heard of him until I started making this video series.
He was born in the town of Passau in 1867
and in his teens he moved to Munich to study at the city's prestigious Art Academy.
Like many others of this time it was art
rather than illustration which was his original chosen path.
In Stockmann's case he was actually a very talented painter
and he quickly established a particularly strong reputation for his landscapes.
Nevertheless his success as an artist was soon matched by his ability and popularity
as an illustrator, and by 1896 he was having work published in the arts magazine Jugend.
In 1898 he moved to Dachau in Bavaria, even though it was in Munich that most of his
humorous illustrations were published, and he was by now appearing regularly
in the pages of the popular humour magazine Fliegende Blätter. His goodnatured scenes,
usually of rural German life became a popular feature in the magazine for the next 30 years.
Consequently most of the images shown here are taken
from his many published images in this magazine.
For quite a few years the illustrations he created for Fliegende were monochrome,
and although I have found absolutely nothing to support this assertion,
it looks very much like he was using pen, crayon and washes of watercolour in varying combinations
to produce strikingly solid and plausibly 3 dimensional images.
And whether he was producing close up character work or more complex crowd scenes
he approached every element with a keen eye for detail and use of his expressive line technique.
In 1910 Stockmann was appointed professor of the Munich Academy and he continued to
work in that capacity, and maintain his art and illustration careers for years to come.
During the years of the Great War Stockmann continued to supply Fliegende Blätter
with plenty of humorous work, but he made no concession to the conflict that was taking place,
and carried on with his usual lighthearted material.
And the same was true of the work he produced in the years following the end of the war,
despite the abject misery of life in Germany from 1918 onwards,
when the citizens were paying the price for the Kaiser's aggression.
By the 1920s his resolutely cheerful work in Fliegende Blätter and elsewhere was increasingly
featuring in full colour. His methods remained the same but where once his washes had been monochrome
he was now able to use tonal colour to fully flesh out his characters and scenes. In particular the
series of bright single figure covers he created for the magazine in the middle of the decade were
a highly attractive and goodnatured antidote to the less than idyllic conditions of the time.
He also had great success during the 1920s with several children's picture books.
including a particularly popular series which re-told numerous Grimm's Tales such as Tom Thumb,
and these books were translated and published with success in other European countries.
But evidence of his illustration grew scarce in the 1930s and it
seems he was increasingly returning to painting.
Nevertheless his illustrations for the children's story Fritz Immerfroh
was published in 1938, which was also the year Stockmann died at the age of 71.
Although the name Georges de Feure sounds French his actual name was Georges Joseph van Sluijters.
He was born in Paris in 1868 but his architect father was Dutch and his mother was Belgian.
In 1886, at the age of 18, de Feure was
admitted to the highly selective Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam,
but formal study didn't suit him and he returned to Paris not long after he had begun the course.
Despite abandoning his studies he found early success as a painter, and also created limited
editions of etchings, but from 1890 onwards he also started producing lithographic posters.
And as the decade progressed he painted less and increasingly found favour with his poster designs,
many of which were for the Parisian theatre and cabaret.
And in the later years of the decade his illustrations
also appeared regularly in the pages of magazines such as Cocorico and L'Image,
alongside those of his art nouveau contemporaries, including Alphonse Mucha.
He also illustrated books, among which was the publication of The Gate of Dreams written
by Marcel Schwob in 1899. This book featured a couple of exceptionally attractive colour pages
and a series of elegant line only narrative monochromes. When published it became a
significant critical and popular success and brought de Feure's work to an even wider audience
There was apparently no end to his talents and not only did he continue
to work as an illustrator and painter, he had equal success as a designer.
He created many stylish interiors, and such was his reputation in this field
he was invited to create the lavish entrance to the art nouveau hall at the 1900 Paris exposition.
He also designed many pieces of furniture, ceramics and other household objects.
With the reputation he had made with the quality of his graphic and 3 dimensional output,
de Feure was awarded a professorship at the École des Beaux Arts in Paris.
But despite his academic position he was still able to continue to produce a large amount of
illustration, mostly in the form of posters throughout the first decade of the century.
Briefly he was a partner in an aeroplane design company but he
suffered an unspecified injury in 1910 and the company went out of business soon after.
Despite this setback his other ventures continued to thrive up to the 1920s,
by which time art nouveau had lost much of its appeal,
and the geometric lines of modernism had taken over. and although nothing like as prolific as
he had been his furniture and interior designs stayed popular with the fashionable and wealthy.
Strangely, two sources state that when de Feure died at the age of 75 in 1943
he had fallen into poverty, but no further explanation is given.
I don't know if it's true but if so, it's hard to imagine how it might have co me about.
Honor Charlotte Appleton was one of the earlier British illustrators of children's books,
and she was born in Brighton in 1879 - not much more than a decade behind
Arthur Rackham and Beatrix Potter, both of whom influenced her work. But she currently
languishes in the their shadow, and I haven't managed to unearth much information about her.
She studied art at the Kensington School, Frank Calderon's School of Animal Painting
and the Royal Academy of Arts.
After this thorough and dedicated early study,
Appleton went on to develop a distinctive and delicate watercolour style.
But her first published book The Bad Mrs Ginger in 1902 didn't reveal this talent.
And neither did the following year's Dumpy Proverbs,
which humorously visualised well known sayings as a children's picture book
Others followed during the decade, but the first real indication of her abilities with the use of
pen and tonal watercolour washes came in 1910 when she illustrated a volume of William
Blake’s Songs of Innocence.
This publication made a significant impact in the world of British publishing and it
subsequently led to many more commissions, such as 1912's Our Nursery Rhyme Book,
which contained many similarly delicate and engrossing colour illustrations.
In 1915 she had another major success with her illustrations for H. C. Cradock's
book Josephine and her Dolls, and this charming series of
watercolours made a significant contribution to the book's success.
Its popularity led to several more stories about the same characters, and the collaboration
between author an illustrator continued in coming years.
But Appleton didn't rest on her laurels and in 1916 she illustrated More About the Squirrels,
written by Eleanor Tyrell, which featured some particularly evocative naturalistic wildlife
watercolours.
Her delicate style made her a natural choice for the illustration of fairy tales,
and In 1919 she had popular success
with the Tales written by Charles Perrault, and she followed that in 1922 with similar
results for an edition of the stories of Hans Christian Andersen.
There follows a decade with little evidence of her work
but In 1933 she illustrated a re-told edition of
Brer Rabbit stories, which did feature a handful of her trademark watercolours,
but was dominated by line only spot illustration
And in 1936 she illustrated a version of Alice in Wonderland for the same publisher,
which again used mainly monochromes and only the occasional colour page.
Following her 1939 edition of Charles Kingsley's The Water Babies the trail
of her work runs out, and it's possible that at that point she simply retired.
And Honor Appleton subsequently died in 1951 when she was 72 years old.
Italian Poster artist Luigi Martinati was born in Florence in 1893
and the only information I can find about his early life is that he studied at the Academy
of Fine Arts there before relocating to Rome in 1911 when he was still only 18 years old. There
he started work as an apprentice in the studio of the painter and poster artist Federico Ballester.
This poster from 1914 is an early example of Martinati's work, but strangely theres
no other visual evidence until the mid 1920s, at which point he became increasingly ubiquitous.
And among the posters he created there are many examples of film productions and
Italian releases of American movies among others for tourism and other purposes,
including several supporting the fascist government of Benito Mussolini.
His success and reputation grew quickly and in the early 1930s he moved to a new
studio in the centre of Rome, which he shared with his colleague Tito Corbella.
And during the decade he also became the director of one of the biggest
advertising agencies in Rome, and it was in this capacity that he increasingly became involved
with the design and production of posters for the Italian releases of American films,
the great majority of which were Warner Brothers' productions.
Nothing appears to be recorded about his choice of media or working methods, but all his images
were brush painted and dramatically lit, and he frequently used the same compositional devices
as many other film poster designers of the period, with close ups of characters and scenic elements
artfully placed as composites designed to maximise the drama of the film narrative.
It is known that tempera paint was frequently the preferred medium for
many if his contemporaries in Europe so its quite possible he used it too.
But Whatever he was using, the result was always impossible to ignore.
During the Second World War worked at a much reduced rate,
and after 1941 Italy's hostile relationship with the USA rather hampered his previous association,
but he found time for some additional propaganda work during the conflict.
Once the war had ended he formed the company BCM with two other film poster artists,
Alfredo Capitani and Anselmo Ballester,
the son of Federico Ballester, with whom Martinati had begun his career. And this
trio of likeminded talents completely dominated film poster production in Italy for over a decade.
By the later 1950s he was no longer working on the big budget Warner Brothers films
and although he continued for a few years more for other studios photograohy had all but supplanted
what had been the illustrator's domain. In 1967 Martinati abandoned commercial work completely,
but carried on as a painter up to his death in Rome in 1983 at the age of 90.
Thanks for watching as always, and I'll be back as
soon as I can with more of one sort or another. See you then.