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The illustrations of Belgian artist Jean de Bosschère (1878–1953) aren’t as easy to find as those of his British and American contemporaries so it’s a shame there isn’t more of his idiosyncratic work at the Internet Archive. Folk Tales of Flanders is there, however, an edition from 1918 featuring a number of colour plates and many black-and-white illustrations. For once I prefer the paintings over the line drawings, de Bosschère’s colour work perhaps owes something to Edmund Dulac’s style but it’s a lot more eccentric, especially here where he’s required to depict the activities of a host of anthropomorphic animals. The eccentricities extended to the artist’s life and the books he wrote, one of which is an autobiography entitled Satan l’Obscure (1933). A lighter work, Weird Islands (1921), was featured at BibliOdyssey a couple of years ago.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive