French Illustrator and artist Louis-Maurice Boutet de Monvel was born in 1850 in Orléans,
but he grew up in Paris and he studied at the National School of Fine Art there in 1870.
He spent a year in the army during the Franco-Prussian war and then completed his art education at
the Académie Julian.
He quickly found success as an artist, and following visits to Algeria in the later 1870s
he produced a collection of very popular paintings.
It wasn't until 1881 that he first began working as an illustrator of books for children.
And his obvious talent for this kind of work led to many more commissions for books and
children's magazines.
In 1883 his illustrated volume of Old Songs for Little Children was published and its
popularity convinced him to maintain parallel careers in both art and illustration.
Such was the success of this book that a second album of songs was published the following
year.
His delicate, precise line work and use of restrained watercolour washes produced particularly
decorative results.
full colour offset lithography had yet to make an appearance and these images were reproduced
using a less successful and soon to become redundant photo-engraving process known as
zincotype.
More books came thick and fast throughout the decade, and although it was rather minimally
illustrated as sequential vignettes his most popular work to date was his interpretation
of the Fables of Fontaine, published in 1888.
In 1895 he published the illustrated children's history of Joan of Arc which is now regarded
as his greatest achievement in illustration.
This was a more flamboyant publication altogether And the compositions he created, particularly
in the epic battle scenes, leaned heavily on the formally structured approach of Italian
masters such as Paolo Uccello.
The illustrations were tightly controlled, dramatic and highly absorbing in their attention
to detail.
They were created in Boutet de Monvel's usual line and wash style, and again printed using
the zincotype method. Apparently he was far from happy with the results, and considered
them unworthy reproductions of his originals.
But whatever his opinion of the outcome the book was a huge creative and commercial success
He continued to illustrate Into the early 20th century but progressively drifted back
to his career as an artist, particularly with portrait work.
And he died at the age of 63 in the town of Nemours in 1913.
Throughout his career British illustrator Louis Wain was popularly known as The Man
Who Drew Cats, and it's easy to see why.
He was born in 1860 in London and after studying at the West London School of Art he began
a career as an art teacher.
But not long after his father died and Wain suddenly became the sole financial support
for his mother and his sisters.
He took a huge gamble and quit his teaching position to become a freelance illustrator,
Luckily for him and his dependents he quickly became successful and his work featured regularly
in magazines such as The Illustrated London News and The Sketch.
From the beginning of his career amusing animals of various kinds featured frequently, and
although cats appeared in his illustrations they had yet to become his only subject.
In 1883 at the age of 23, he married but within three years tragedy struck when his wife died
of cancer in 1886. And throughout her illness he had stayed by her bedside and kept her
distracted by drawing amusing pictures of cats.
And when he resumed his career following a period of mourning he increasingly started
to draw them in the magazines he worked for.
At this time he also illustrated several animal-themed children's books written by Clifton Bingham,
but for some reason - probably contractual - he used the alias G. H. Thompson.
But it didn't take long before cats and kittens became his exclusive subject.
As the demand for Wain's cat pictures grew they evolved rapidly into more anthropomorphic
characters capable of human actions and facial expression.
And although He was far from being the only illustrator creating this kind of work in
Victorian England, and for that matter continental Europe, he was easily the most popular.
Not only were his creations appearing in magazines but he illustrated many children's books,
all of which featured his endearing felines and all of which were very successful. including
the Louis Wain Annual, which ran successfully from 1901 to 1915.
Typically he would create a drawing with pen and ink and then embellish it with tonal washes
of watercolour to create textures, and particularly cat fur.
Some of the work created this way was also printing as monochrome halftone but the colour
naturally had far greater clarity.
Some of his drawings were created as pen and ink line art, usually with a heavier graphic
line and frequently spot colours were added at printing.
But despite his success Wain continued to experience financial problems.
He was still supporting his mother and sisters, and it didn't help that he was hopeless in
business and would frequently give away his original works and his rights in the characters.
If ever an illustrator needed an agent it was Wain.
In 1907 he sailed to New York where he drew a series of comic scenarios for the Catville
series, published by the Hearst group of newspapers, but they had only a brief run.
Wain managed to return to England with even less money, having invested unwisely in a
new type of oil lamp, which turned out to be a complete failure.
But he continued to be popular in Britain and as well as magazines and books there were
cat-themed spinoffs such as postcards and calendars and even a collection of futuristic
ornamental ceramic cats.
Presumably he managed to not make significant money from these either.
Throughout his life Wain had suffered from increasing bouts of mental illness, some of
which had been violent, and by 1924 his schizophrenia had become so extreme he was committed to
a prison-like insane asylum.
But following intervention by - and donations from - prominent figures such as fellow illustrator
George Studdy, writer H. G. Wells and even Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin he was transferred
to a far more pleasant and comfortable hospital in rural Hertfordshire, which at least had
tranquil gardens to walk and a colony of cats to play with.
His delusional state didn't improve but the violent outbursts subsided and he took obvious
pleasure in painting his favourite feline subjects as therapy.
Some have attributed this collection of increasingly psychedelic drawings to his mental illness
but others claim it was merely the persistent immersion of the artist into the visual possibilities
of his subject.
Whatever the cause he was never released and he spent his remaining years there up to his
death in 1939 when he was 79 years old.
Modest Stein was born Modest Aronstam in Kovno, in what was then part of the Russian Empire
in 1871.
When he was 17 in 1888 he emigrated to America with his cousin Alexander Berkman.
And not long after their arrival in America he and his cousin showed their gratitude to
the land of liberty by joining a commune of anarchists.
And with another extremist Emma Goldman they plotted to assassinate a politician named
Henry Clay Frick in 1892.
It was Berkman who actually tried to kill Fricke in his office but the attempt failed
and he was tried and jailed for 14 years.
He didn't give up his co-conspirators so Stein got away with his part in the crime and promptly
abandoned anarchism to become an illustrator.
Early on in his new career he created pen and ink monochromes for various newspapers
but by 1910 he had made significant inroads into the hugely popular pulp fiction magazine
market.
His illustrations for these titles revealed a natural talent for figure work, and his
use of colour and ability to create lighting effects was suitably melodramatic.
Throughout the decade he continued to paint pup covers and was one f a relatively small
number of illustrators who dominated in the genre.
More than most of his contemporaries he was eclectic in his approach to media.
as well as the expected use of oil paint he also created images using water colour and
as his career progressed made increasing use of pastels for smooth illuminated skin tones.
By the 1920s the American public had become obsessed with all things Hollywood and in
particular the movie stars of the day, and more often than not the glamorous female actors.
Stein found himself in the right place at the tright time and moved away from the pulps
towards the better paying movie magazines such as Picture Play.
I can find no definitive evidence whether these women sat for him or whether he worked
from photographs, but these portraits were all created with varying blends of paint and
pastel and used intense saturated colour.
But even while making a very good living from his association with the movie industry he
also continued to create covers for pulp magazines such as Love Story.
By now Berkman had served his sentence and emigrated to the South of France, and Stein
visited him regularly and gave him money in an attempt to compensate him for his silence
about Steins involvement in the assassination attempt.
Despite his advanced age he was still working in the 1940s for various pulp magazines, and
in addirtion to several covers for the Doc Savage series he also had a brief stint working
on the Shadow.
The only work I've been able to find by Stein from the 1950s is this comic book cover, and
soon after he died in 1958 at the age of 87.
Luckily for him it was only after his death that the truth of his terrorist past became
public knowledge.
Children's illustrator Else Wenz-Viëtor acquired her double barrelled name through her marriage
to architect Paul Wenz in 1913.
She was born as Else Viëtor in 1882 in Sorau, close to the border between Germany and Poland,
but she grew up with her grandparents in Southwest Germany.
In her teens she attended the School of Applied Arts in Munich and in 1903 at the age of 20
she illustrated the first of what would eventually be a total of more than 150 children's books.
But even so she went on to pursue a successful career as a designer, mostly of ceramics.
And although she did create a handful of other books in the coming decades she was far from
prolific as an illustrator.
But in 1920 she began an enduring professional relationship with the Oldenburg Stalling publishing
house and from this point on she became considerably more productive.
Frequently there were as many as 3 different picture books by her published in any given
year and throughout the decade and the rest of her career she enjoyed an unprecedented
level of popular success.
Wenz-Viëtor was of a generation of illustrators who had absorbed the influence of earlier
British children's illustrators such as Arthur Rackham.
But where Rackham and others had delighted in visualising the menace of woodland fantasy
her world was a far more welcoming child-friendly place, where everyone got along and there
was no place for sinister elements or characters.
She used fine ink line and washes of bright saturated watercolour in all her illustration,
which gave her images an agreeably light but detailed and plausible appeal.
Typical of her visual approach was the book The School in the Forest which had verses
written by Adolf Holst, and which was published in 1931. This proved to be a particularly
successful collaboration which led to around a dozen more books along similar lines in
the years that followed.
Despite the changes experienced by the publishing industry in the 20th century, and the stylistic
move to modernism Else Wenz-Vietor continued to create illustrated books which remained
resolutely traditional for the rest of her career and her last published work was St.
Nicholas in Need in 1954
By now she was 70 years old and following a successful career in children's illustration
she retired, and she died 2 decades later in 1973 at the age of 91.
That's the end of this one so thanks for watching and I'll see you next time around.