{illustrators} – Page 150

Jugend Magazine revisited

It was just over a year ago that I was wishing there was some way to see whole issues of Jugend magazine, the German periodical launched in 1896 whose Art Nouveau style gave its name to the movement in Germany, Jugendstil. Yesterday’s search for Heinrich Vogeler artwork turned up that very thing, scanned editions of Jugend at the University of Heidelberg’s digital archive. Whole numbers from 1896 to 1925! I am aghast. As well as the scanned pages being very high quality you can download the bound collections as PDFs, each one totalling over 400 pages. Leafing through pages of old magazines in a foreign language doesn’t sound very stimulating if you can’t read German but Jugend was a very visual publication. Each issue is crammed with a variety of drawings in styles which range from black-and-white Art Nouveau motifs and quasi-Symbolist illustration to humorous drawings and cartoons. Each issue also featured a large drawing or painting on a fold-out spread.

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Heinrich Vogeler’s illustrated Wilde

The Fisherman and his Soul.

It’s always satisfying when a search intended to satisfy curiosity turns up more than you expect. The subject in this case was German artist Heinrich Vogeler (1872–1942) and the surprise was finding these illustrations for a German collection of Oscar Wilde stories lurking in the archives of the Visual Telling of Stories site. The stock of imagery there is substantial and wide-ranging but the search facility stopped working a while ago and has now been removed so you either have to hit things at random or hope for happy accidents such as this. Vogeler’s volume dates from 1911 and while his draughtsmanship isn’t as assured as some of his contemporaries there’s enough going on to make me want to see more of his illustration work.

The Young King.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
• The Oscar Wilde archive

The Dark Ledger

The boundless depths of Chris Mullen’s VTS site continue to yield treasures. The documentation for these pictures is somewhat vague but they seem to be illustrations for Fantômas stories which Mullen has grouped under the title The Dark Ledger, part of a larger selection of pages devoted to the Lord of Evil. The depiction of the Eiffel Tower is of interest here for its showing a view over one of the Paris expositions, possibly the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The opium den, on the other hand, seems remarkably overlit and well-appointed compared to the more customary renderings of such places.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Exposition Universelle publications
• Exposition cornucopia
• Return to the Exposition Universelle
• The Palais Lumineux
• Louis Bonnier’s exposition dreams
• Exposition Universelle, 1900
• The Palais du Trocadéro
• The Evanescent City
• Judex, from Feuillade to Franju
• Fantômas

Bradley does Beardsley

Browsing various bookbinding sites this week turned up a gorgeous cover design I hadn’t seen before by the great Will Bradley (1868–1962). The Beardsley influence is unmistakable, of course, and more pronounced than one usually sees in Bradley’s work. Richard Le Gallienne is a familiar name to scholars of the London fin de siècle scene although I can’t testify to the quality of this novel which was published in 1898, the year of Beardsley’s death. If you want to give it a go, the Internet Archive has the entire thing in its Bradley livery.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks

Peter Edwards times two

Sometimes it pays to have an unusual name… Ritual is a 1967 novel by David Pinner which has been claimed on many occasions to be the original source for the story which Anthony Shaffer wrote as The Wicker Man. An illustrator named Peter Edwards was responsible for the cover graphic and possibly the hand-drawn type as well. Searching for more of his work turned up this elegant cover for an Everyman title (at this rather tasty illustration blog) but little else.

Metatron’s Cube.

There is, however, a younger Peter Edwards who also happens to be an illustrator with a website here and an example of his work above. Are the two related, perhaps? In addition to this pair there’s a third Peter Edwards who paints portraits. Pity the poor artist trying to carve a niche for his or herself among a host of similarly-named contemporaries.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The book covers archive
• The illustrators archive

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The music of The Wicker Man