{"id":30040,"date":"2026-06-01T16:30:52","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:30:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=30040"},"modified":"2026-06-01T16:08:12","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T15:08:12","slug":"huszti-horvaths-three-dragons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2026\/06\/01\/huszti-horvaths-three-dragons\/","title":{"rendered":"Huszti Horvath’s Three Dragons"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Book of the Three Dragons<\/em><\/a> is an unusual illustrated volume, being an American edition of a retelling of Welsh myths by a Welsh writer, Kenneth Morris, with illustrations by a Hungarian artist, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath (1891\u20131973). Morris was, among other things, a Theosophist who was living in California when he wrote Book of the Three Dragons<\/em> which no doubt explains the American publication. There doesn’t appear to be any Theosophy in this book at least. Dragons are an important symbol for the Welsh, with a red dragon being a prominent emblem on the flag of Wales. Morris’s book opens with a guide to the pronunciation of the Welsh names and words that appear in the text.<\/p>\n

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Ferdinand Horvath, meanwhile, moved to the USA in the 1920s where he eventually found employment as an illustrator before working (without credit) for Disney. It’s at Disney-related websites that you’ll find most of the information about his life and work, where the discussion inevitably concerns his designs for animated films. A list of his other book productions would be welcome. There’s a very nice edition of The Raven<\/em> that was published in the same year as Book of the Three Dragons<\/em> but with art in much more of an Expressionist style.<\/p>\n

I often wonder what Disney’s animations might have been like if the studio had given artists like Horvath and Kay Nielsen a freer rein. Disney only began to change its style in the late 1950s as a result of competition from other animation studios, and even then the results were compromised. Sleeping Beauty<\/em> used the designs of Eyvind Earle<\/a> to distinguish the film from the studio’s previous fairy tales but Earle was dissatisfied with the treatment his work received and he left the project before it was finished; the art direction for One Hundred and One Dalmatians<\/em> was based on the cartoons of Ronald Searle but Walt Disney hated the results and refused to try anything similar again.<\/p>\n

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Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 The illustrators archive<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Book of the Three Dragons is an unusual illustrated volume, being an American edition of a retelling of Welsh myths by a Welsh writer, Kenneth Morris, with illustrations by a Hungarian artist, Ferdinand Huszti Horvath (1891\u20131973). Morris was, among other things, a Theosophist who was living in California when he wrote Book of the Three … Continue reading “Huszti Horvath’s Three Dragons”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Huszti Horvath's Three Dragons","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[52,2,42,7,48],"tags":[6520,14606,2139,14607,1077,898],"class_list":["post-30040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-animation","category-art","category-books","category-film","category-illustrators","tag-eyvind-earle","tag-ferdinand-huszti-horvath","tag-kay-nielsen","tag-kenneth-morris","tag-ronald-searle","tag-walt-disney"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-7Ow","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30040"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30040\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30041,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30040\/revisions\/30041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}