A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart.
Not sure how I managed to miss this at the Internet Archive, a copy of Pogány’s lavishly illustrated rendition of Wagner’s Lohengrin from 1913. This followed two earlier Wagner adaptations for Tannhaüser (1911) and Parsifal (1912). Golden Age Comic Book Stories has scans of the other two equally stunning volumes.
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• The illustrators archive
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• Willy Pogány’s Parsifal
Parsifal by deviantArt user Divadlo. From the Mutual Friendly Opera Project, a series illustrating various operas.
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• The men with swords archive
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• The faces of Parsifal
• Willy Pogány’s Parsifal
A posting of Dugald Stewart Walker’s work this week at the always excellent Golden Age Comic Book Stories sent me back again to the Internet Archive to see if there might be further examples among their collection of scanned library books. Sure enough there’s not only a copy of the book which GACBS sampled from, Padraic Colum’s The Girl Who Sat By The Ashes, but also other fairy tale collections by Colum, including the one featured here, The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said (1918). Colum is well-represented in the Internet Archive’s American Library section and many of his titles seem to be at least partly illustrated. A cursory glance at some of the others turned up his retelling of Greek myths illustrated by Willy Pogány.
I’m not as keen on Walker’s work as I am other artists of this period—he has a tendency to give his adult characters gnome-like features—but the line work and compositions are first class. The Boy Who Knew What the Birds Said is especially nice for its many peacock details, some of which are featured below.
left: Bloom-of-Youth and the Witch of the Elders; right: What the Peacock and the Crow Told Each Other.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Peacocks
• Willy Pogány’s Parsifal
Parsifal by Jean Delville (1890).
Continuing the occasional series of posts examining the evolution of a particular design or image, this one begins with a mystical charcoal drawing by Belgian Symbolist, Jean Delville (1867–1953), our object of concern being that entranced or dreaming face.
My first encounter with Delville’s image wasn’t via the original but came with this Seventies’ version produced for a Charles Williams paperback cover by illustrator Jim Lamb. (And this copy is the only one I can find, reused on a recent audiobook of Williams’ novel. If anyone has a link to a larger copy of the paperback cover then please post it in the comments.) Yes, this is tenuous but when I eventually got to see Delville’s picture it made me think immediately of Lamb’s illustration. Many Dimensions is one of my favourite books by Williams and unusually for him it deals with Islamic rather than Christian mysticism; in that case if Lamb was borrowing from Parsifal then it’s a case of the right image for the wrong book.
Jim Lamb is another illustrator from this period who now works mainly as a landscape artist.
Bewilderèd Stood Parsifal.
One of a set of illustrations by Willy Pogány (1882–1955) for Parsifal, or the Legend of the Holy Grail retold from Ancient Sources by TW Rolleston (1912) at the Camelot Project. Lots of other classic illustrators represented there including some I hadn’t come across before. Rolleston’s book featured many colour plates but I tend to prefer Pogány’s very fine line drawings for this particular work. The indefatigable Bud Plant has a two-part Pogány biography which shows the artist’s versatility.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive