Really Old Old-school Artist: Austin Molloy (aka Austin Ó Maolaoid, AóM)

Many of you may notice that the art of today's featured artist Austin Molloy (1886–1961) bears a striking resemblance to illustration legend Harry Clarke. So it may come as no surprise that Molloy was friends with Clarke; they met at the Dublin Metropolitan School of Art (now named the National College of Art and Design) as students, then Molloy went on to teach there. Tell me the last image below doesn't reek of Harry Clarke.

Molloy (aka Austin Ó Maolaoid, AóM) had a pretty prolific career, serving An Gúm (The Scheme), a government initiative in Ireland started in 1925 to publish books in Irish, as his main client for many years. All the images below pre-date 1925, but many of them could have been done in the last 40 years by someone like Russ Nicholson (specifically the boy fighting the hound, or the Grummsh-looking mother-effer below it).

I can't remember exactly how I stumbled across his work, but I do know it was during a recent "Archive.org expedition" (what I call those times I sit front of the TV with my feet up, my laptop in my lap, and I just keep poking around Archive.org until I find something relevant-but-previously-undiscovered-by-me).

SO DIG THIS STUFF!!!

Really Old Old-School Artist: Dora Curtis

It's been a while since I've done one of these "Really Old Old-School Artist" posts, but it's also been a while since I stumbled across someone with whom I was unfamiliar. Like a few of the other artists I've featured here before, there is little on the Web about her (and her Wikipedia entry mentions only her participation in an anthropological/naturalist expedition, with no mention of her art at all, or even her dates of birth or death).

Luckily for us in the OSR community, the things we do have of Dora are here illustrations from the books The Lances of Lynnwood (by Charlotte M. Yonge), Stories of King Arthur and His Round Table (by Beatrice Clay), and Granny's Wonderful Chair (by Frances Brown). There is a version of Fairy Tales of the Arabian Nights (by T.H. Robinson) that includes Ms. Curtis's illustrations. While an illustrated version is available as an ebook, and the book itself is in the public domain, there is unfortunately no copy at Archive.org with the illustrations included (though there is a version with the illustrations stripped out). There is, however, an online version with low resolution versions of the images at kellscraft.com. I've found a physical copy for sale that's not terribly pricey, so I hope to be ordering that later today, and possibly posting images when I receive it in the post.

Okay, so let's get on with it. Here you go...

Really Old Old-School Artist: René Bull

It's been quite a while since I've done one of these posts. But it's also been quite a while since I stumbled across a new artist that I felt like I wanted to cover. I'm not sure what had me looking through copies of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (well, actually I do, but I'd rather not say... yet), but I found an edition with which I was unfamiliar. This one features the art of British illustrator and photographer René Bull. I'll let you go to the Wikipedia link (just there) if you want the skinny on this Dublin-born son of a French mother and British father.

Bull's color work reminds of Edmund Dulac and Howard Pyle, in terms of tone and painting style. On the other hand, Bull's B&W work is, in a lot of ways, the overall "look" I had in my mind for the higher level mystics when I wrote the Basic Psionics Handbook. Particularly the image below that looks like the guy is floating on pillows.

Without further ado, here you go...

Really Old Old-School Artist: Edward Burne-Jones

First off, I can't believe it's been so long since I did one of my "Really Old, Old-school Artists" posts. Second, cannot believe I have not heretofore covered Edward Burne-Jones.

One of my earliest posts on this blog (back in my second-ever month of blogging) I wrote an article entitled "How the Industrial Revolution Inspired the Original Fantasy Game: A Brief Timeline." In that post, I spoke about the importance of writer/type designer/book publisher William Morris, and how his book The Story of the Glittering Plain was a direct influence on Tolkien, and through Tolkien was an influence on Gygax, and through Gygax was an influence on modern RPGs. Edward Burne-Jones was one of Morris's right-hand men. Not only was Burne-Jones a co-founder of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. (a furnishing and decorative arts manufacturer), but one of Morris's main book designers for the Kelmscott Press (founded by Morris in 1891 to publish limited-edition, illuminated-style print books).

Burne-Jones (or, more formally, Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones, 1st Baronet) was an artist/designer with toes in many pools (painting, stained glass, book design & illustrator, et al.), and his work in those pools was directly tied to the late Pre-Raphaelite movement. The Pre-Raphaelites were seeking to bring more realism to the "contrived" (my word) nature of the classical approach favored by the Mannerists that succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. Eventually, some of the PR's romantic fascination with medieval culture started to clash with this realism, leading to a falling out between the realists and medievalists among their number, Burne-Jones siding with the latter when the group split.

Why do I go through this whole bit of background before I show you some cool old illustrations? Because if Burne-Jones were more of a realist than medievalist, I doubt I'd be featuring him at all. Why? Because I'd rather see Burne-Jones illustrate the works of Chaucer (see below) than Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Don't get me wrong, I've seen some very cool illustrations by Burne-Jones's contemporaries for works by Coleridge, and at some point will most likely feature a few of those illustrators on this very blog. But... when you look at BJ's images below (all of which were taken from The Kelmscott Chaucer, published by William Morris's Kelmscott Press in 1896), you can see how most of the illustrations almost suggest encounter or plot points for an adventure.

I'm also including a couple of full page designs, so you can also see Burne-Jones's incredible ornamentation and lettering design. The only person that I think worked as well (actually better) at Morris's book-side was Walter Crane. To me, Crane's work has a bit more "energy" than Burne-Jones's. But Burne-Jones's work is very cool nonetheless. See for yourself...

Really Old Old-School Artist: A. Garth Jones

Every so often, I get lucky and stumble across a really old old-school artist of whom I've never heard. In the case of (Alfred) Garth Jones, I found his name in a minor entry in Modern Book Illustrators and Their Work—which in a few weeks will be officially 100 years old, so... uh... not so modern now as when the book was published. This is a book I've used before as a starting point for seeking out more really old old-school art. Somehow, I've heretofore missed the mention of Garth Jones. It's no wonder, though. Take a look at the book yourself, and you'll see how much great illustration is in there, and how you could research any number of artist represented therein, and not realize you'd missed a couple.

I happened to get the Google ebook result for this book (as opposed to the Archive.org link above) while searching for another illustrator's work (but at this point I couldn't tell you who that was). A short paragraph that begins on page 11 and finishes up on page 12 speaks of illustrations for "Poetry, fantasy, and romance." Jones's name is mentioned alongside the likes of Edmund Dulac, Byam Shaw, and OSR favorite John D. Batten.

Just a couple of biography bullet points and I'll get on to showing some of Jones's work.

Jones starting using his middle name of Garth (Alfred is his given name) to distinguish himself from artists with similar names. (Although I can't find specifics, I would imagine this includes Edward Burne-Jones, Alfred Roller.)

Demand for his work as a book illustrator declined after World War I. (In an age where folks like Virgil Finlay and Hannes Bok were creating new dialects for the evolving language of illustration, I imagine that Jones's style was become a bit unfashionable.)

Compared to the quantity of work Jones produced before World War I, his post-WWI output seems to pale by comparison.

I love the look of the penwork, and how even his pen and ink feels like woodcut.

Really Old Old-School Artist: Harry Clarke

In pulling together today's images from illustrator Harry Clarke, I thought to myself, "Damn! I never realized how much Russ Nicholson's work reminded me of Harry Clarke's." And well it ought to. Nicholson remarked in a 2009 interview at Sci-Fi-O-Rama, "...my gods were such as Aubrey Beardsley, Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac and Sydney Sime." Yup. I can TOTALLY see that. I think that's one of the reason I dig Nicholson's work so much.

I've featured Dulac here before, though the pieces I showcased were limited. I've never showcased Beardsley here, though I've mentioned his name several times, and his Merlin illustration graces the title page of the d30 DM Companion. Syndey Sime is someone I've been considering showcasing here, particularly his work for The Gods Of Pegana by Lord Dunsany's, with whom Sime had a long-standing partnership. But I digress.

Like a lot of the illustrators I've mentioned here before are from the "golden age of illustration" (approximately 1880-1920), Clarke was influenced by Art Nouveau. His father was a craftsman, and at that time, his profession was experiencing a rebirth with the Arts & Crafts movement (a reaction to the "cheap and nasty" mass produced goods of the Industrial Revolution), leading into Art Nouveau. That actually puts Harry Clarke a slight generation behind Aubrey Beardsley; Beardsley's influence on Clarke is obvious; but then, Beardsley was one of those guys that influenced a generation of folks. But again, I digress.

These first four are taken from the 1923 edition of Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination.




The one below left is from The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault,
and the one on the right is from Years at the Spring.



These final two are taken from an edition of Goethe's Faust.



Now, partially because you'll see the influence,
but mostly because I love his work, go check out Russ Nicholson's blog.

I love this piece of type.

It's the interior nameplate for Goblin Magazine from the run published in 1929. Goblin was a humor magazine published in Canada in the 1920s. It really has no RPG or OSR relevance other than the name (hopefully that's enough to seem relevant here).

My first thought upon seeing it was, "This would be a pretty cool title (and type treatment) for a microgame... if there wasn't already a microgame named Goblin."

My second thought was, "That kind of looks like the type that Rick Griffin did for those Grateful Dead posters in the late 60s and early 70s."

I suppose that if someone wants to start a zine named "Goblin," I might be persuaded to clean up the original image and convert it to a vector file.

Really Old Old-School Artist: Franz Stassen

Every once in a while, I stumble across one of those really old, old-school artists with a large body of work, and I ask myself, "How did I not find this guy before now?"

Today, I find it rather easy to answer that question about Franz Stassen. To start with, Franz Stassen's work was limited mostly to illustrations in books printed in Germany in the early 1900s (he died just a few years after the end of WWII). Now, let's dig a little deeper into why plenty of people would be happy if you never knew Stassen's name. Stassen was close friends of Siegfried Wagner. Not only was Siegfried the son of anti-Semitic posterboy Richard Wagner, but Siegfried himself was honorary president of the Nationalist Bayreuth Federation of German Youth (Bayreuth is a town in Bavaria where Siegfried was also conductor of its annual music festival). Now, if I told you that Stassen began his artistic career as a Naturalist (where the visual truth takes precedence over interpretation), it will probably come as no surprise that Stassen created four tapestries for Hitler's Reich Chancellery--showing scenes from the Edda sagas no less. (Sure, you remember the Edda; I talked about it briefly when I showcased Lorenz Frølich's work back in January of 2012.)

Oh. Wait! Did I mention that even though Stassen was married and his wife died about 30 years before him, he lived his life in the closet? (BTW, so did Siegfried.)

And then there's the part about how much of Stassen's work was destroyed during the war. Nonetheless, during his career, Stassen illustrated about 100 books (many of which feature page after page of his illustrations), 50 bookplates, and 25 postcards. Stassen's work became influenced by Art Nouveau, and he seemed to bounce easily between the more realistic and the more stylized in his illustration work. There are examples of both below. Compared to his more-detailed work with less variation in line weight, his illustrations with less cross-hatching and strong bold lines around the figure edges feature the visual trademark of the Art Nouveau illustration style made famous by Eugene Grasset.

All of the illustrations below come from the book "Siegfried Wagner and his Art," published by Breitkopf & Härtel in 1911. The first image accompanies the entry for Der Kobold (The Goblin), a story replete with a nymph, some fauns, and infanticide! (Turns out, this is something with which Siegfried seemed to have a preoccupation. There's an illustration in the book of a nude male child with two knives plunged into his chest and stomach--sorry, folks, not gonna show that here.)