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Percy Billinghurst’s fables

These are actually La Fontaine’s fables illustrated by a British artist, Percy J. Billinghurst, but I try to avoid unwieldly post titles that mix artist and writer. There isn’t much of a biographical record for Percy Billinghurst, and what records there are don’t agree about his birth and death dates which are generally given as 1871—1933. One thing that is certain is Billinghurst’s fondness for drawing animals. In addition to this volume he illustrated a book of his own, A Hundred Anecdotes of Animals in 1901, and an edition of Aesop’s fables in 1910.

The La Fontaine book dates from 1900, and has the French text translated into clumsy English verse. Whoever did this isn’t credited but the translations by Walter Thornbury for one of the Doré editions are far better. Billinghurst’s illustrations are typical of a graphic style much favoured at the time by The Studio magazine: clear lines with heavy outlines and little shading, and with the captions hand-lettered and incorporated into the drawing itself. Those dots separating the words are another Studio hallmark. A bookplate by Billinghurst was featured in an ex libris collection published by The Studio in 1898 which suggests there may be more of his early drawings to be found inside the magazine.

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Weekend links 849

Mushroom Lady poster (1967) by East Totem West.

• “I want to be able to hear the process happening throughout the sounding music.” Composer Steve Reich talks to Flora Willson about his long career. More Reich: live performances from 1976 by Steve Reich and Musicians of Six Pianos and Music For Mallet Instruments, Voices And Organ.

• At Aeon: Eric Leas on toadstools and toxins. “When I found the mushroom Amanita muscaria being sold in candy wrappers, I uncovered legal loopholes, dangerous dosages and more.”

• At Little White Lies: Nicolas Winding Refn on his return to cinema—and from the dead—with a neon-hued fable about a father-daughter relationship from hell.

• At Bandcamp Daily: Faust reunite without reuniting. The surviving members of the group return with four solo albums.

• New music: Noon by Richard Skelton and Lawrence English.

• Mix of the week: a mix for The Wire by Kaja Draksler.

• Winners of Bird Photographer of the Year 2026.

• At Dennis Cooper’s it’s Luchino Visconti‘s Day.

• Wyrd Daze relaunches with a new issue.

• Rainy Day Mushroom Pillow (1967) by The Strawberry Alarm Clock | Amanita Kingdom (2014) by Moon Coven | Amanita (2025) by Huong Federkeil

Cthulhu’s new labyrinth

Here in The North the weather is slowly turning against the wearing of T-shirts outdoors but this week I’ve made a new shirt available based on an old design. The first Cthulhu Labyrinth came about when I was putting together pages for a Cthulhu calendar in 2012. In the end it didn’t get used for the calendar but the design stuck around even though I was never entirely satisfied with it. My recent work on the new edition of The Haunter of the Dark has had me going back through all my Lovecraft-related art which prompted me to finally rework the old design into a more satisfying appearance. I’ve come to think of this as a distillation of The Call of Cthulhu into a single graphic: the globe-spanning investigation leads inexorably to the monster sitting spider-like at the centre of its convoluted path. As before, other shirt designs are available, and I can prepare new shirts from old artwork on request.

And since I’ve mentioned the work-in-progress, I thought another progress report was in order. After spending spare moments over the past 18 months reworking pages for The Great Old Ones while also designing new page layouts I’m now fully immersed in the completion of The Dunwich Horror, and very pleased with the way the story is proceeding. I’m still having to work on this as a side project but I feel properly engaged with the story now that I’m working on new pages rather than redrawing parts of old ones. I’ve just finished drawing page 27 which brings the narrative up to the place where the story reveals its apocalyptic scope, when Dr Henry Armitage reads for the first time a portion of Wilbur Whateley’s decrypted diary. I’ve roughed out the next few pages which will bring the story to the beginning of part 9 where I’m hoping the drawing will go more quickly once I’m back in the wilds of Dunwich. The pace is kept to a crawl by my having to match all the fine shading I was doing in the 1980s but shading rural scenes is generally less time-consuming than shading detailed interiors like the one above. The long march to Sentinel Hill continues.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Lovecraft archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Father of Serpents
• The Black Goat
• Tsathoggua rising
• H.P.L.
• The return of the Crawling Chaos
• Lettering Lovecraft
• Weird ekphrasis and the Dunwich Horrors
• Kadath and Yog-Sothoth
• Another view over Yuggoth
• Nyarlathotep: the Crawling Chaos

Two short films by István Orosz

Hungarian artist István Orosz has directed fifteen short animated films to date, and co-directed three more, yet he’s known more for his drawings than his films, especially those works which follow MC Escher by combining a careful graphic technique with an exploration of optical illusion. Orosz’s artistic interests naturally extend to his animations which have never been easy to see online despite so many of them being relatively recent productions.

A Kert (The Garden, 1993) is a recent arrival at Rarefilmm where it’s possible to watch it on the web page but it should really be seen at a large size in order to appreciate the texture of the engraved visuals. In previous posts I’ve highlighted some of the many examples of films which animate engraved illustrations. Orosz does the same here but with a unique difference in the way he makes his original drawing match the appearance of the collaged artwork. The whole thing is beautifully done, as is the story itself, in which a small boy explores a mysterious garden in the home of an equally mysterious woman.

A rajzoló (The Drawer, 2016) has been on YouTube for a while but I’d missed it in the past which suggests I ought to make a more determined search for Orosz’s other films. Pencil drawing is the subject but The Sketcher might be a more suitable English translation of the title, “drawer” giving the impression that we’ll be watching a film about furniture. This one is a simpler in style than The Garden although vaguely related, with both films concerning characters whose true nature is only revealed at the very end. There’s also a nod to Orosz’s optical illusions in the tesselated pavement, and in the mazes which are a recurrent feature of his own drawings.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Mazes, a film by István Orosz
• False perspective

Boris Artzybasheff’s Myths of the World

Boris Artzybasheff’s art was rediscovered in the 1980s by a new generation of American cartoonists who were delighted by his illustrations of anthropomorphic machinery and other technological artefacts. These were the illustrations which made Artzybasheff popular with advertisers and the commissioners of magazine covers in the 1940s and 50s, and their continued popularity today has tended to overshadow his earlier book illustrations, in the same way that W. Heath Robinson’s drawings of improbable inventions overshadow his own illustrated books.

Anthropomorphic machines were still in Artzybasheff’s future when he produced twenty wood engravings for Orpheus: Myths of the World in 1930, one of several books by Padraic Colum which retell mythological stories. In the introduction Colum explains why he named a book about world mythology after a Greek icon:

I have called the collection “Orpheus,” naming it after the minstrel who, according to the poet of the Argonautica, sang “how the earth, the heaven, and the sea once mingled together in one form, after deadly strife were separated each from the other; and how the stars and the moon and the paths of the sun ever keep their fixed place in the sky; and how the mountains rose, and how the resounding rivers with their nymphs came into being, and all creeping things.”

The art from Artzybasheff’s first decade of published illustration is so different to his later humourous drawings that it might be the work of another artist altogether. The Colum engravings are all very Deco-styled: bold, stylised, and generally flat, reminding me of some of the illustrations the Radio Times used to run. They’re also almost entirely serious until you spot the expression on Eve’s face when the Serpent offers her the forbidden apple. As with Heath Robinson, the humour crept in slowly until it became the dominant mode.

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