|
Many of the major china companies have drawn inspiration for designs from the artistic works of various illustrators. Some of the male artists are referred to here.
Cecil Aldin
Cecil Charles Windsor Aldin was born in London in 1870. He was educated at Eastbourne College and Solihull Grammar School. He went on to study animal painting and commenced a career as a humorous illustrator of animals, especial dogs and horses. His first illustrations were published for The Graphic in 1891. He illustrated many books including the works of authors such as Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling, developed travel posters, and made advertisements for Bovril, Colman’s Mustard and Cadbury’s. His personal interests included fox-hunting, horse-racing, golfing and the countryside and his illustrations included these subjects as well as pastoral scenes, cathedrals and the London gentry. However, it was his affection for dogs that particularly influenced his illustrations. Royal Doulton used his drawings as designs for some sixty items between 1910 and 1939 particularly featuring his mongrel dog or hunting scenes. A series was also produced by the china company Burgess and Leigh in 1925. Due to failing health, Aldin moved to a warmer climate in Majorca in 1930 with his dogs Mickey and Cracker. He was forced to return to London for medical treatment in 1935 and he died soon after at the age of 65. His obituary in The Times stated that ‘There never yet has been a painter of dogs fit to hold a candle to him. …. Cecil Aldin can justly be described as one of the leading spirits in the renaissance of British sporting art’"
Cecil Aldin
Henry Mayo Bateman
Henry Mayo Bateman was born to an English family in New South Wales, Australia in 1887. The family returned to England two years later and he studied at the Westminster School of Art and Goldsmith's Institute. His first cartoons appeared in Scraps, The Royal Magazine and Tatler at age 16. His cartoons were usually about social embarrassment with a new style where he drew people as they feel rather than as they look which he referred to as "going mad on paper". He also took up amateur boxing, tap-dancing, golf and fishing and used them as sources for his cartoons. Prior to the First World War, he illustrated theatrical reviews in the Bystander and produced posters for two plays by George Bernard Shaw. He joined the London Regiment at the outbreak of the First World War but was discharged on medical grounds. He went on to publish cartoons for Punch, The London Magazine, Bystander, Strand Magazine and The Humorist. He worked on film and poster advertisements for companies including Lucky Strike, Guinness, Shell and Moss Bros. and he published several books. A famous series of cartoons concerned the social gaffe, ‘The Man Who...’ and these were taken to illustrate china series ware produced by Royal Doulton. . During the Second World War he designed posters for the government, including his most famous poster 'Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases'. After the war he retired to share his time between Devon and Malta and concentrated on fine art painting. He died in Malta in 1970 at the age of 83.
A Henry Bateman Illustration
Aubrey Beardsley
Aubrey Beardsley was born in Brighton, England in 1872. His father had lost an inherited fortune and worked intermittently in a brewery while his mother helped by teaching piano. They were able to send him to Bristol Grammar School as a boarder for four years after which he started work as a clerk at age 17. His first published work was a poem and then drawings for his school magazine in 1885, and then more prose in the magazine Tit Bits. An eminent painter of the day was impressed by his work and arranged for night classes at the Westminister School of Art, the only formal training he ever received. Commissions came in 1893 for books and periodicals including 300 illustrations for the work Morte D’Arthur. In the same year, Beardsley became associated with the then infamous Oscar Wilde whose play Salome was scandalizing London. Wilde commissioned Beardsley to illustrate the play resulting in dubious celebrity but their friendship ended when Wilde was convicted of indecent acts in 1895. Beardsley's fame was established with the appearance of the first volume of the quarterly The Yellow Book of art and literature in 1894. He was appointed art editor and his startling drawings combined with writings of the so-called "decadents" made the journal a sensation. However, his work was criticized by guardians of Victorian decency and even his own colleagues, and his association with Wilde resulted in Beardsley being dismissed in 1895. Undaunted, he joined a rival periodical The Savoy and became part of an avant-garde movement of artists and writers who began to criticize and satirize Victorian society. He produced hundreds of drawings in his short but brilliant career. Many of his drawings were used to illustrate china produced by Royal Doulton. He developed tuberculosis as a child and moved to the south of France hoping to improve his health, but he died there at the age of 25 in 1898. By this time he had helped to break through 19th century restraints to launch Victorian society into the 20th century.
An Aubrey Beardsley Illustration
Palmer Cox
Palmer Cox was born in Québec, Canada in 1840. He began work as a carpenter and was a contractor on the cross-Panama railway. He moved to San Francisco in 1863 and began to formally study drawing in 1874 when he contributed illustrated stories to Californian magazines. He moved to Long Island, New York in 1875 and worked from his studio at 656 Broadway, Manhattan. He is best known for his humorous cartoons about the mischievous elves he called Brownies. They first appeared in 1883 in a popular children's magazine St. Nicholas. The Century Company made them into a book in 1887 and this was followed over the years by 11 more, the last published in 1918 when he was 78. He regularly contributed to the Ladies Home Journal and to a Sunday newspaper. The publishers described Brownies as "a very strange little band of night-sprites; tiny neckless creatures with big ears, pop-eyes, wide smiling mouths, fat round paunches, spindling legs and long tapering feet." The Brownies always managed to outwit the adults and avoid capture. There were distinct personalities such as the Irish Brownie, Policeman, Dude, Cadet, Chinaman, Indian and the Cowboy specifically requested by President Theodore Roosevelt. Palmer Cox estimated that he drew over one million Brownies through his career. His Brownies featured in two stage plays, one of which opened in New York in 1894 and continued for 5 years. They starred in popular sheet music such as Frolic of the Brownies produced in 1896. His illustrations were used for Nursery Ware china manufactured by Grimwades Potteries. His latter years were spent living in Long Island and in a palatial house in Quebec near where he was born that he called Brownie Castle. He preferred children to adults and responded to every child's request for a personal Brownie drawing. George Eastman named his popular Eastman Kodak Box Brownie cameras in his honour and the Girl Guides similarly called their junior sisters Brownies. Palmer Cox died at Long Island in 1924 at the age of 84.
Palmer Cox
John Hassall
John Hassall was born in Kent, England in 1868. He was educated at Newton Abbot College in Worthing, Kent and at Neuenheim College in Heidelberg, Germany. He failed to gain entry to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst so that he emigrated to Canada in 1888 to begin farming with his brother. However, he returned to London two years later after his drawings were accepted by the Graphic magazine. Together with his life-long friend Cecil Aldin, he then studied art in Antwerp and Paris. He commenced work as an advertising artist for David Allen & Sons in 1895 and this association lasted for fifty years and included well-known projects such as the poster "Skegness is so Bracing" in 1908. His poster style was well suited to children's books and he produced many volumes of nursery rhymes and fairy stories. He was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colour and the Royal Society of Miniature Painters. He also belonged to several clubs, including the Langham, the Savage and the London Sketch Club of which he was President in 1903-4. Hassall opened his own New Art School and School of Poster Design in Kensington in 1900 which continued until the start of the First World War and after the War he managed the very successful John Hassall Correspondence School. His illustrations were used to decorate ceramics manufactured by the Atlas, Paragon and Royal Doulton china works. John Hassall died in 1948 at the age of 80.
Dana Gibson
Charles Dana Gibson was one of five children born into an affluent Boston family in 1867. He was apprenticed to a sculptor at age 14 but soon changed to illustrating and enrolled in the Art Students League in Manhattan. A reverse in the family fortunes necessitated his starting a career as an illustrator in 1885. His first sale of a dog baying at the moon was to the magazine Life in 1886. He quickly developed a style with pen and ink portraying the idiosyncrasies of members of high society. He was employed by Life but also sold drawings to Tid-Bits later re-named Time magazine, and to Scribner’s Magazine, Century, and Harper’s Magazine. He was able to afford to travel to Europe in 1889 where he visited George Du Maurier who illustrated for Punch in London, and he studied at the Académie Julian in Paris. The first of 14 books of his drawings was published in 1894. Life magazine promoted his drawings of women as The Gibson Girl and they became a sensation. The Gibson Girl was the ideal image of the young independent American woman, focused on marriage proposals, often surrounded by handsome athletic clean-shaven young men but frequently shown fending off the attentions of unworthy suitors. He married Virginia society belle Irene Langhorne in 1895.and she was undoubtedly the model for The Gibson Girl. Collier’s Weekly and Condé Nast arranged a sharing relationship with Life with a contract for $100,000 for 100 illustrations over four years in 1904. Royal Doulton produced a large series of the Gibson Girl for their ceramics. Dana Gibson’s period of greatest popularity was from 1900 to 1910. At the beginning of World War I he directed his attentions to the war effort. He continued to illustrate after the war but the public was now interested in the new jazz age and The Gibson Girl became passé. In 1920, he headed a syndicate to buy Life magazine with Gibson having the controlling shares but the magazine went into decline and he sold it and retired in 1932. He turned to oil painting and the American Academy of Arts and Letters exhibited his paintings with some success. Charles Dana Gibson died in Maine in 1944 aged 81.
Dana Gibson and the Gibson Girl
|
