British illustrator and artist John Byam Shaw was born in 1872 in Madras, India
where his father was the registrar of the high court.
But the family returned to England in 1878 and settled in London.
It was obvious that Shaw had a real talent for drawing and
at the age of 15 he enrolled at St John's Wood Art School.
And from 1890, he continued his studies at the highly selective Royal Academy School.
He launched his career in art in 1896, painting mostly in oils,
and for the first few years at least that was his primary source of income.
Nevertheless in 1897 he illustrated a book of poems by Robert Browning.
The book was successful and he followed this up
with illustrations for the Tales of Boccaccio in 1899.
So from this point on he continued with two parallel careers,
both of which flourished and earned him equal reputations.
In 1900 the first of his illustrated editions of the works of Shakespeare was published,
and in total he created 500 compelling narrative illustrations for this commission alone.
The following year he illustrated the Garden of Karma, and these
orientally infused mesmerising images demonstrated his prowess with watercolour.
All the illustrations and the decorative borders had been rigorously researched,
and that would become an ever-present aspect of all his work.
His illustrated Old King Cole's Book of Nursery Rhymes was also published in 1901.
But although the watercolour and ink images he created for this book
were typically arresting and well executed it seems he was
unable to pitch his technique and subject matter more towards a younger readership.
Unsurprisingly this was just about the only time he tried to illustrate for children and he
quickly returned to his more expected romantic, historical and mythological subject matter.
Throughout the first decade of the 20th century he continued to work with success as a painter,
but by now it was illustration which dominated his output.
Trading on his popularity and enviable reputation he founded the Byam Shaw School of Art in 1910,
and from the very beginning it attracted many aspiring artists
keen to emulate the success of its founder.
By the time the First World War began his commitment to the art school had
distanced him a little from his own formerly prolific output,
but he did continue to create illustration where time allowed for the next few years.
When the war ended in 1918 Byam Shaw was still only 46 years old,
and he should have had quite a few more years of creative endeavour to look forward to.
But he had the bad luck to fall victim to the influenza pandemic
which spread across the world at that time, killing around 50 million people.
And Byam Shaw's life and career came to an abrupt and premature end in 1919.
Henry Patrick Raleigh was an immensely popular American illustrator in the early 20th century
but his reputation seems to have inexplicably faded to almost nothing.
He was born in 1880 in Portland Oregon into a broken and seriously impoverished family.
At the age of only 12 he dropped out of school and
went to work on the docks of San Francisco for a coffee importer.
But when he wasn't working he would make sketches of the dockland and its inhabitants.
And when the owner of the company became aware of Raleigh's obvious talent
he offered to pay his tuition at the renowned Hopkins Academy in San Francisco.
He eagerly took up this very generous offer and 3 years later in 1897 at the age of 17 he
found work as a trainee reporter and news artist with the San Francisco Bulletin.
Two years later he moved on to a more senior position at the rival San Francisco Examiner,
but I've been unable to unearth any evidence from this time.
It isn't until he moved to New York and started being published in magazines
that his career and work is better recorded.
Raleigh's unmistakable illustrations began to appear in virtually all the major
popular magazines, including Vanity Fair, Harper's Bazaar, Colliers and the Saturday Evening Post.
And almost exclusively it was his illustrations of what can generally be termed high society
that consolidated his reputation and led to his ubiquitous presence in their pages.
Given his impoverished origins and early life it was perhaps ironic that this world of glamour,
romance and ostentatious wealth should be the source of his own remarkable success.
Whether in monochrome or colour the defining feature of his work was the expressive energy
of his combination of ink and charcoal line.
Colour was used frequently and he generally applied loose transparent washes of watercolour
which were actually very effective at creating visual focus and atmosphere.
I'm not sure why but on occasion he also used thinly applied oil paint
but you'd be hard pressed to know it.
Although his figures were elongated similar to fashion illustrations they were always
highly plausible and it is asserted that he worked almost entirely without models or photo reference.
If that's true then his talent was all the more astonishing.
In the mid 1920s his association with glamour led to advertising work,
including a commission for a series of press ads for Maxwell House coffee.
At his peak, Raleigh was able to make enough money
in just 3 or 4 months to enable him to spend the rest of the year travelling.
At the height of his popularity his income was reportedly around $100,000,
which at today's value is over 2 million.
And he spent it like it was going out of fashion.
In addition to paying for large groups of friends and family to accompany him on his travels,
he maintained a yacht, owned a staffed mansion and kept a large studio in downtown Manhattan.
But during the 1920s the painted work of illustrators such as
Norman Rockwell and Mead Schaeffer began to dominate magazine illustration.
Raleigh was notoriously hostile to this development, and his stubborn
refusal - or perhaps inability - to adapt led to commissions drying up during the 1930s.
Despite the colossal amount of money he'd made he was eventually declared bankrupt
and he committed suicide in 1944 by jumping from the window of a New York hotel at the age of 64.
German children's illustrator Fritz Baumgarten was born in 1883, in a small town close to Leipzig.
He trained as a lithographer there and from 1903 to 1905 he studied at both
the Royal Academy of Art in Dresden and at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Munich .
While still a student, he was called up for military service and in 1908
he returned to Leipzig, trying to get started as an illustrator
by designing postcards and whatever other work he could find.
During the First World War he rejoined the army and was awarded the Iron Cross for bravery.
Consequently it was the 1920s before he began working in earnest
as an illustrator of books for children.
His images were created with tight expressive pen line and tonal washes of luminous watercolour.
Oddly He doesn't appear to have created a lot of monochrome work, and among what examples I could
find only a couple were created as line only. All his work was resolutely cheerful and
unthreatening, and even when taking on stories such as those of the brothers Grimm the menace
and gothic mood of the originals was glossed over to make them safe reading for little readers.
During his career he published well over 500 works for children and in addition to
illustrating his own authored stories he also had successful collaborations with other writers too.
In the 1920s Baumgarten created numerous illustrated board games
using the same themes and imagery as his books, and these too became very popular in Germany.
And as his popularity grew and endured merchandising such as
advent calendars and greeting cards were created from his endearing images.
Throughout the entirety of his career he not only stuck with his gnome and animal themed stories,
but also never ventured into other areas of illustration,
so there is no advertising or magazine work in evidence.
Unfortunately in 1944 his home in Leipzig was bombed and many of his original drawings and
paintings were lost in the fire, but at least the printed versions have endured.
When the war was over Germany was split by the allies into East and West,
and unfortunately for Baumgarten Leipzig fell under Russian communist control.
This made publication in the West problematic and under the harsh regime in the East
his charming woodland fantasies were increasingly considered an unwelcome relic from the past.
Even so he carried on working until 1960 when he was in his late 70s
and he then retired from illustration.
Sadly his wife died not long after, and devastated by the loss of his life partner
he committed suicide at the age of 83 in 1966.
Spanish illustrator Francisco López Rubio was a critically
important figure in the development and modernisation of popular illustration,
but even in Spain he is nothing like as widely remembered or appreciated as he deserves to be.
Even now there are many illustrators working in
what could rightly be called the Rubio style who have never even heard of him.
He was born in 1895 in Motril near Granada, and 20 years later in 1915 he left for Madrid
to begin a career as an illustrator apparently without benefit of any formal art education.
He managed to get a job in the editorial offices of the magazine Blanco y Negro.
Before long he was assigned to the magazine's children's comic supplement Gente Menuda,
and it was in the pages and covers of that publication that he developed his
revolutionary and at the time unique modernist visual style.
His cover art for Gente Menuda was created with flat opaque application of gouache
and precise geometric ink outlines.
Whether they were painted as black white and grey or they used a muted
but distinctive colour palette I'm unable to tell.
It may well be that the images I've used are from scans of the original artwork,
in which case they could well have discoloured with age.
And there are signs of touching up with white paint which hasn't
discoloured as much as the paper.
But then some covers seem to have been printed in blue so it's really anybody's guess.
Stylistically there was nobody quite like Rubio.
He had taken the basic cartoon templates of American characters such as Felix the Cat,
Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop and created a world of geometric construction and isometric projection
virtually unknown in Europe at that time.
Sometimes there were freehand elements in his images but most
commonly his was a world of circles and tubes.
It seems he had little time for reality and there
was a profoundly surreal comical quality to the scenarios he created.
He didn't confine himself to only working for his employers,
and his highly distinctive ultra- modernist images began appearing across
a wide range of popular Spanish magazines including Muchas Gracias and Nuevo Mundo.
Here his work appeared in full colour and it isn't clear whether he was using
the same flat painted technique or whether it was separate print runs of spot colour.
In the early 1920s he became a staff artist for the magazine Buen Humor,
and although this too was a magazine for adults he continued to create mad
environments populated with unlikely garishly coloured characters.
His colour illustrations were featured on the magazine's covers for more than a decade,
and they demonstrated the high level of visual communication
he was able to create from a style which should on paper have looked merely diagrammatic.
And in 1927 he co-founded and collaborated with similarly inclined illustrators
on the magazine Guitierrez which was set up as an alternative to Buen Humor.
It didn't manage a particularly long run but nevertheless during its relatively brief existence
he managed to create a long line of equally compelling and surreal covers.
The sources state that in the early 1930s he worked as cartoonists for the Spanish
production company SETA but frustratingly I haven't managed to find any evidence of this.
In 1936 The Spanish civil war erupted and during this bloody conflict it's
highly likely that frivolous activities such as humorous illustration would be put on hold.
But even when the war was over there seems to be no more work from Rubio,
or at least none I can find.
He would have only been in his later 40s at the time and he didn't die until 1965
in Madrid when he was 70 years old, so I find it hard to imagine he stopped working altogether.
But that's all for now so its goodbye from me until the next time.