French illustrator Henri Lanos was born in 1859 in Paris, and in his teens he studied at
the city's prestigious École des Beaux Arts. From the middle 1880s, his engraved images
appeared regularly in several French magazines, and many tended to focus
on scenic and technological themes, including the construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1888.
His first published book illustrations appeared in 1892 in Armand Silvestre's Russia,
which must have been created from observation of the people and places illustrated.
In the following year his illustrations for Hector Malot's novel En Famille were published
and this collection of fictional narrative images uniformly favoured scenic approaches
with the characters placed quite small within the composition, just like his editorial work.
In the next few years he continued to create journalistic illustrations,
and quite a few of these were published in in the popular British magazine The Graphic
But in 1899 his illustrated edition of When the Sleeper Wakes by H. G. Wells was serialised in the
magazine, with each instalment illustrated with conspicuous imagination and plausibility by Lanos.
Although monochrome they were remarkably detailed and dramatically composed. This was an important
milestone in the development of the illustration of the kind of speculative literature which
Wells and others were by now producing. In 1904 he illustrated the book Ratatin,
a fantasy about a giant, with a series of imaginative pen and watercolour illustrations, his
first to be printed in full colour. The story was highly derivative of Swift's Gulliver's Travels
but Lanos produced a series of visually engaging vignettes which added greatly to the book's appeal
A year later his science fiction images began to feature on a regular basis in the magazine
Je Sais Tout, and his exciting visuals accompanied fiction by authors including Arthur Conan Doyle,
and yet more for H. G. Wells, including some for a serialisation of War of the Worlds.
And in addition to these works of fantasy he also illustrated a large amount of speculative
non fiction for articles predicting what scientific advance might lead to in the future.
In1910 he not only illustrated but co-authored the science fiction story A World Above the
World with Jules Perrin, which was first published in instalment in the magazine Nos
Loisirs and subsequently as a book. Unlikely as it may seem a couple of
years later Lanos also started writing and illustrating books for children.
The inventor and adventurer Monsieur Trouve-Tout and the teenage character P'tit Bob were both
very popular, and when war broke out in 1914 he harnessed both of them for books which
were removed from any sort of grim reality but nevertheless contained not very well concealed
propagandist and patriotic messages which however comic in nature lionised the bravery of the French
and their allies, and successfully made the Germans a risible bunch of belligerent buffoons.
And he also created an wartime alphabet book which used this ageless format to
further reinforce the same message in the minds and hearts of French children.
Following the end of the war all trace of his work seems to have
disappeared and all I can tell you for sure is Henri Lanos died in1929 at the age of 70.
Clive Gardiner was born in Blackburn, Lancashire in 1891, the son of a newspaper editor. He studied
at the Slade School of Fine Art, and followed that with a year at the Royal Academy Schools.
During World War 1 he was lucky enough to serve as a non-combatant at the ministry of munitions, and
when peace returned in 1918 he taught at various colleges on a part time basis,
while simultaneously attempting to get his career as an artist and illustrator off the ground.
His work was published in the book Pillars of Empire: Studies and Impressions in 1918
but these sketch portraits gave little to no indication of what he would go on to create.
And neither did his illustrations for books written by his brother Alfred, who used the
peculiar alias Alpha of the Plough. But the monochrome pen and ink drawings he produced
in this context were possessed of considerably more visual character than his portraiture.
In 1924 he illustrated another volume of his brother's stories and observations
titled Many Furrows, which also found modest success.
But it was in 1926 with a commission from the Empire Marketing Board to create a series of
posters that he attracted significant attention. Their collective theme was British industry,
and he rose to the challenge with some particularly dynamic images which revealed
a strong stylistic influence of both the cubist and futurist art movements.
They were succesful enough to convince London Transport to commission him to create a large
volume of similarly modernist images. Some were daringly abstracted angular compositions
but equally quite a few of the scenic works were more organic and evoked the painting
technique of the French artist Paul Cézanne, an influence Gardiner freely admitted to.
In 1928 took the position of principal of Goldsmith's college, although it didn't get in
the way of either his art or his illustration work to any noticeable degree. With very few exceptions
such as this press ad for the Gas Board in 1928 it was London Transport who continued to be his
almost exclusive client, and he created yet more compelling posters well into the 1930s.
But this run of commercial creativity came to an end in the later years of the decade
and he increasingly concentrated on his roles as an academic and artist.
He did design this wartime poster in 1942 but otherwise his flirtation with
illustration seems to have burned brightly but relatively briefly.
And Clive Gardiner died in 1960 when he was 69 years old
Hal Foster was born in Halifax Nova Scotia in 1892 and in 1910, with no formal art training he became
a staff artist with the Hudson Bay Company, but I could find no visual evidence of this early work.
Unlikely as it seems, between 1917 and 1920 he and his wife worked a gold mine following which he
worked for a commercial art studio while taking evening classes at the Chicago Art Institute.
The earliest evidence of his work I found was in the form of a couple of
colour magazine illustrations and this impressive Arabic fantasy oil painting,
all of which come from 1928 when he would have already been 36 years old.
But in that year he was offered a contract to
create a comic strip version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan of the Apes.
Foster was actually the second choice as artist but got the work because the
original choice J. Allen St. John didn't want to work to the gruelling deadlines involved.
Foster was uncredited for his work and so was the writer R. W. Palmer but the pair produced
a significantly large and popular series of adventures which although pedestrian in terms
of layout contained many dynamically composed individual frames by Foster. These were created
as black and white but for some publications poorly registered colours were also added.
Its popular success gave Foster a decent and regular income for
several more years into the 1930s, but being a cog in somebody else's
machine started to irk him and and he began planning his own creation.
He pitched his idea to the publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst who was
impressed enough to agree to a 50/50 split of the strip's gross income.
And in 1937 the weekly medieval fantasy strip Prince Valiant was launched.
It featured Foster's always immaculate and expressive line work, and had narration built
into the frames, rather than speech balloons. And as it had done with Tarzan this device
greatly added to the overall feel of worthiness and authenticity which attracted the readers.
Prince Valiant proved to be an immense popular success and ultimately it was syndicated not
only throughout the USA but across the world. Like Tarzan It was printed in both monochrome
and colour but always used Foster's original pen and ink drawing.
The visual evidence indicates that while most of the colour was added flat at printing with more
than likely no involvement from Foster himself, some is certainly hand painted with washes of
transparent colour, which I imagine was applied by its creator. All of wich is guesswork on my part.
In 1944, Foster and his wife moved from Topeka to Redding Ridge,
Connecticut and he created a new remarkably similar strip titled Hal Foster's Medieval
Castle which usually ran at the foot of the Valiant page, but only lasted a year.
But Prince Valiant was by this point a huge phenomenon and Foster continued to write and ink
the strip over the coming decades. Spin off books and re-formatted editions were also published
around the world. There was even a Hollywood movie made in 1954 with Robert Wagner in the lead role.
And so its success continued but by 1970 Foster was suffering from arthritis and
from the next year onwards he employed John Cullen Murphy to produced the inked artwork,
while he wrote the scripts and provided pencil sketches.
Eventually and inevitably he stopped completely and by the time he died
at the age of 90 in 1982 he no longer even remembered the name Prince Valiant.
Helen Haywood was born in England in 1907 but in her childhood she travelled with her
parents to live in Chile where her father worked as an engineer, supervising the
creation of the trans-Andean railway. And she lived there until she was 15 in 1922.
It seems unlikely she had a formal art education because her first authored and
illustrated book was published in 1926 when she was still only 19 years old.
This was The Mouse That Ran but other than its animal theme it
bore little resemblance to the books she would publish later in her career.
At this rime she was also hand painting the bindings for expensively bound books
for her grandfather's publishing firm but other than this I have found no
more illustration until the 1938 book Hedgehog's Holiday written by Geoffrey Ford
And from this point on she went on to illustrate quite a few more, such as 1940's Figgles Frog
Sees Life by Isobel St. Vincent for which I can only find the cover unfortunately.
She continued to work with Isobel St. Vincent throughout the decade and in 1943 they
collaborated again for Sandy's Seven Tails. And from 1947 onward they enjoyed their
greatest success with a series of books of considerable visual engagement and amusement.
They were The story of Clarrie Coot, and the conspicuously similar follow ups Penny
Pullet and Hermione Hen. But whatever their predictability in narrative and thematic terms,
these books were among Haywood's finest and most engaging work.
Haywood was a particularly convincing and endearing anthropomorphic illustrator,
and for her colour work she used watercolour paint with great dexterity and an ability to
produce finely controlled shading which gave her images great three dimensional plausibility.
The monochromes were invariably pen and ink and these too were
tightly controlled and carefully hatched.
The overall effect was very attractive, solid and well suited to spot monochrome illustration.
Haywood was also a keen amateur naturalist and in 1950 she published the book British
Wild Flowers which contained a large number of botanical drawings,
some in exquisitely painted watercolour and others in black and white.
Numerous other children's books were published throughout the 1950s, all of which played to
her considerable anthropomorphic strengths and in 1955 she published the first of her
Peter Tiggywig books, about the adventures of a small pig and his animal friends,
and its commercial success quickly led to several more in the series, which ran up to 1960.
She continued to produce more non-fiction with books about both domestic and wild
animals, and she regularly created attractively composed educational
pages in children's comics. usually on the subject of the natural world.
Following this she seems to have retired, and Helen Haywood died in 1995 at the age of 88.
That's it for now and the next 4 will be with you hopefully quite soon.