Elizabeth MacKinstry was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1879. She and her family
moved to Paris when she was about 7, where she trained to be a concert violinist.
Tragically, she developed spinal tuberculosis in her teens, and as a result she was no longer
able to continue performing professionally. But during her time in Paris she had also
been also inspired to draw and paint and on her return to the USA she took a job
teaching art between 1911 and 1913 at the Albright Art School in Buffalo, New York.
Other than a brief period spent studying with August Rodin What she actually did
in the intervening years I haven't managed to discover. but in 1925 at the age of 46, she
wrote and illustrated a book of poems titled Puck in Pasture. and it was this publication which
launched her career as an illustrator. in the following year Tall Tales of the
Kentucky Mountains, written by Percy McKaye, was published, featuring a number of simple
but visually engaging black and white spot illustrations created by MacKinstry.
In 1928 she illustrated The White cat and Other Old French Fairy Tales by Madame D'Aulnoy. And
for this project her work appeared in colour. She still used an inked line, but it was considerably
finer than her earlier work, and her well chosen flat colours greatly enhanced their appeal.
In the same year she also illustrated Clement C. Moore's The Night Before
Christmas but all Ive found that's usable is the cover and frontispiece.
Her edition of Ibsen's Peer Gynt followed in 1929, once more using
her flat colour approach to great effect . And In 1930 she illustrated both Rachel
Field's story Eliza and the Elves and 40 Singing Seamen written originally by Afred Noyes in 1907,
which made particularly good use of her colour technique.
MacKinstry created her second self-authored work The Fairy Alphabet as Used by Merlin
in 1933, which saw a return to her blockier, woodcut styled monochromes.
And In the same year her illustrated edition of the Tales of Hans Andersen
was published. It featured a couple of colour pages but the bulk of the
book was illustrated with yet more of her expressive monochrome work.
And the images created for this publication demonstrated how engaging her deceptively simple
and far from representational technique could be. And she followed this in 1934 with a series of
delicately executed line illustration for a collection titled The Fairy Ring,
which featured stories from a variety of sources including the brothers Grimm.
In 1935 she created a significantly attractive and engrossing full colour edition of the story
of Aladdin, and for this project her line drawings were augmented with paint and what
looks like added use of crayon or pastel to produce far from typical shaded effects. This
made for a striking and highly distinctive visualisation of the story and was certainly
among her greatest creative achievements. Also in that year her illustrated edition of
the legend of Saint Columbia by Padraic Colum was published and once more she
used pen and ink to create suitably inspiring facsimiles of woodcut images
The only evidence of dated work I found published later was the
book Tales of Laughter in 1938 but I can't say for sure if it was her last.
All I do know is that she died in 1956 at the age of 77.
Charles Verschuuren was born in Tilburg in the Netherlands in 1891 and in 1907 He
enrolled at the Rijksacademie in Amsterdam. He also studied for an unspecified period
somewhere in Paris following his graduation. He returned to Amsterdam and in 1915 he began
working for the Kotting printing company. The earliest verified date I have is from 1917 but
I suspect some of the images I'm showing here may well be earlier, and he created
a vast amount of posters over a 7 year period for all manner of clients both big and small.
And the success of his creative solutions made him intensely useful to his employers.
Quite a lot of his work but by no means all was created to advertise theatrical and
cabaret prformances in Amsterdam, but whatever he produced his stylistic approach at this time was
wildly eclectic and it ranged from energetic tonal painting sometimes with and sometimes
without linear assistance through to highly abstracted formally designed images. And he worked
with humorous and more serious intent, which was reflected graphically in his approaches to anatomy
Nevertheless his output frequently evinced a generally grotesque and
surreal quality not often found outside the more expressionistic fringes of European graphic art.
And although his work was invariably commercial and populist it was also frequently riddled
with unsettling elements and characters with more than a hint of the demonic about them.
Despite the ongoing commercial success and respect he enjoyed in his home country Verschuuren left
for America in 1922 and settled initially in Cleveland Ohio but left not long after
for New York where he joined the staff of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle newspaper.
And he produced a series of angular comic illustrations for their Sunday
supplement magazine between 1924 and 1933.
But from the mid 30s onward he seems to have moved back to creating poster work, and quite a lot of
it was produced for the The Works Progress Administration, known popularly as the WPA.
This was an initiative set up by President Roosevelt in 1935 to
create jobs and drag the American economy out of its ongoing economic depression.
By this point Verschuuren's work had lost its earlier manic energy and was
now possessed of a more sedate but tasteful design aesthetic.
But as the Second World War began all evidence of his work seems to
have disappeared . It's recorded that he created some propaganda posters and I've
seen assertions that he worked briefly at Disney studios after the war. But the
best I can do is tell you that he died in 1955 in New York at the age of 64
Herry Perry was born as Anne Perry in Bolton in the North West of England in 1897.
Her father was a highly successful cotton merchant and had amassed quite a fortune with his business.
And In 1900 the family moved south to the desirable borough of Kensington in
London where Anne and her sister were schooled by a private tutor at home.
In her later teens she went to study at Central School of Art in London,
where she acquired a firm understanding of how to produce images for various methods of printing.
In 1917 she began a freelance career and her first significant commission
was an illustrated map promoting tube travel to London's Imperial Institute.
This poster was heavily influenced by the earlier decorative maps created by
Leslie MacDonald Gill, but her whimsical approach proved popular and other poster
commissions such as her memorable zoo alphabet followed in rapid succession.
Decorative maps continued to be a dominant feature of her work,
and in 1929 she was commissioned by London Transport to create five more. These engrossing
works were designed to promote leisure travel using the underground rail network by showing
local places of interest and relatively rural beauty not far from the grey congested capital.
They were so popular that she eventually produced a total of 50 similar pieces up to 1938,
and might well have created more had it not been for the outbreak of war a year later.
All the work she created in the 1930s was graphically simple and made great
creative use of the potential of lithographically printed images,
combining large flat areas with more textured application and a variety of line styles.
On occasion she even incorporated elements of collage. But however they were created all her
work was defined by an infectious mood of playfulness for both children and adults.
But she didn't confine herself to posters and maps and in1933 she illustrated the book
entertaining with Elizabeth Craig, a popular writer of cookery books.
The images she produced for the book using a bright limited palette of
colour were agreeably whimsical and like her other work nodded - if not
much more than that - in the direction of Art Deco styling.
Nevertheless with one or two occasional exceptions, including some other book
work and the design of decorative telegrams for the Post Office it continued to be the creation
of posters for London Transport which consumed most of her time, and she produced a large and
diverse volume of distinctive images for them up to the outbreak of war in 1939.
In that year she co-wrote and illustrated a light humorous but technically accurate book about
administering first aid. And she subsequently worked as a nurse for the duration of the war.
But I can find no more evidence of her creative output after 1939
and once more all I have to offer is that Herry Perry died in 1962 at the age of 64.
Hugh Joseph Ward was born in Philadelphia in 1909,
the youngest of six children. I can find no trace of early work but
it's recorded that following high school he worked as a cartoonist for for the Philadelphia Inquirer,
and also studied at night classes at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Art.
But In 1931 he travelled to New York City to show his portfolio of paintings and succeeded in
getting commissions from the pulp magazines Wild West Weekly and Complete Detective Novel Magazine.
As a freelancer he wasn't tied to any particular publisher and other commissions followed from
several of the most successful, including Munsey, Dell, and Popular. And with every commission his
skilful blended application of oils paint and keen eye for dynamic composition improved considerably.
He worked across a wide range of the genres favoured by different pulp magazines and he
was equally at home with western to detective or science fiction, although for all of them
he stuck to a well established and invariably successful combination of sex and violence.
On occasion he even managed to plagiarise himself by repeating earlier images for
another magazine with just a few details changed. He also created more overtly pinup illustrations
for Bedtime Stories magazine during the mid 1930s, although his females were more usually
integrated into his sensational scenarios on most of his covers.
A lot of the magazines he worked for used the adjective spicy in their titles,
and Ward took this very much to heart in all the work he created,
with images designed to lure the reader with the promise of titillation within the magazines pages.
And alongside his ongoing successes for others in the later 1930s he added the publishers Trojan to
his client base, and he quickly became by far their most popular and prolific cover artist.
In my searches I found no evidence of monochrome page illustration created by Ward, which of course
doesn't mean he didn't produce any. But it's safe to say he was kept more than busy with the far
better paid cover work, and would not be the only pulp artist to shun page illustration at the time.
Similarly the only example of him working for a
more mainstream publisher I found was this 1939 cover from Liberty magazine.
And It's recorded that around 1940 Ward was keen to diversify into other magazines and
to find a place in the far better paid arena of advertising, apparently without success.
How much this disappointed him or otherwise isn't recorded but the volume of exciting cover
art he continued to produce into the 40s suggests he was probably too busy to be bothered by it.
But tragedy came his way when he was signing up for the army in 1944. He had always been
a heavy smoker and a medical examination revealed that he had terminal lung cancer.
That unfortunately was that and Hugh Joseph Ward died at the age of only 35 in 1945. I can't help
wonder what he could have gone on to achieve, and I'm sorry to have ended yet another video
on such a depressing note. Maybe next time I'll find 4 who lived long and happy lives.