UNSUNG HEROES OF ILLUSTRATION 104 HD 1080p

Revere F. Wistyhoof isn't a name that's easily forgotten but nevertheless that seems to have been his fate. He was born in 1900 in Peoria, Illinois and in 1919 he began his studies at the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by more at the Art Students League in New York. The earliest dated work I found was this pair of quite unexceptional covers from Wireless Age magazine in 1924, but I found nothing else until 1930 with this cover for the Elks magazine, by which time his representational painted style had become more assured. And from that year onwards his generally good-natured, lightly humorous images started to feature with increasing regularity on the covers of any number of other mainstream American magazines. As with others at this time he frequently used the device of setting his figures against white backgrounds for visual emphasis, and although he was one of quite a few contemporaries chasing the tale of the dominant Norman Rockwell he was by no means slavish in his execution and application of colour. But the two were neighbours and on occasion he actually assisted him on some illustrations when Rockwell found it impossible to keep up with the demand for his work and nobody ever spotted the subterfuge. By the middle of the 1930s he started to attract advertising commissions and among others he had particular success with a press campaign for the John Hancock Insurance Company, which traded on his endearing renditions of his fellow Americans, even if only painted and reproduced in tonal monochrome. Unusually for the time Whistie Huff appears to have had no interest in working as an artist and was evidently more at ease with the demands of overtly commercial mainstream illustration than many of his contemporaries. Nevertheless he upheld traditional methods and invariably used human models to work from rather than photography, and he put this good practice to very impressive use up to the end of the decade. But other than this light-hearted image referring to the USA's involvement in the war it's at this point that reliably dated evidence disappears, so the best I can offer is guesswork. Among many other undated images I found there were quite a few depicting various stages of childhood from toddlers to teenagers, but where or when they were published I couldn't say with any authority. The clothing and other indicators strongly suggest they came from the post-war period but that's the best I can manage in terms of detective work. It's stated by a reliable source that during the 1950s and 60s he was a major contributor to the World Book Encyclopedia, but I found nothing in the form of visual evidence, so all I can offer in conclusion is that Revere F. Whistie Huff died in 1971 at the age of 71 and was promptly all but forgotten. Thomas Jefferson Mashamah was born in Holdridge Nebraska in 1900, although some assert it was either a year earlier or later. Following his studies at Nebraska University he worked briefly at the Kansas City Star, but his work also appeared in the New York Tribune and in 1922 he relocated to New York where he began an enduring professional association with the humor magazine Judge. Mashamah had a particular light and expressive touch with pen and ink and used this skill to portray all manner of characters. Although it was obvious from early on that he was particularly well suited to the creation of dainty but provocative young females at that time generally known as flappers. Throughout the decade his work appeared in monochrome in the pages of Judge and in colour on quite a few of its covers. His colour work was created with washes of watercolour applied over his spiky expressive line and although far from an afterthought his application was merely functional rather than fundamental. And although there is no definitive evidence it was fairly obvious that Mashamah's style and penchant for willowy females had been strongly influenced by the similarly styled slightly older illustrator Russell Patterson. In 1927 he created this cover for a humorous book but otherwise his output was entirely in the form of magazine work and he rarely if ever strayed his usual trademark topics. From 1928 until 1930 he wrote and drew a comic strip for King Features Syndicate called Petting Patty which was regularly printed in full core. In the early years of the 1930s it seems his association with Judge ended with a fairly brief but popular feature titled Laugh from the Shows. A page of monochrome gags arranged loosely across the page with the captions written by hand. But there was no shortage of other work and in 1932 his series Gags and Gals made its debut in the New York Mirror. Like Laugh from the Shows this was a collection of jokes, some of which were single panel and others which were sequential, printed most frequently in colour and apparently laid out in a fixed template for each instalment. In addition to his ongoing commitment to Gags and Gals Mashammer also started to appear with increasing regularity on the covers and in the pages of College Humour, and soon became a permanent fixture there too. In 1934 he married the actress Pauline Moore and although it was Gags and Gals which occupied most of his time he simultaneously continued to create other humorous work, most of which also made great use of his facility with Leggy Loveless and Hapless Males. Gags and Gals became so popular that in 1936 a couple of short live action movies were made and Mashammer himself even featured in them. The last instalment of the printed version was published in 1938 and when the USA entered World War II in 1941 his mix of mildly suggestive humour and renders of attractive females were published in several humour magazines and were a source of harmless morale boosting up to the end of the conflict. In 1946 Mashammer capitalised on his enduring popularity and published a how-to book for aspiring cartoonists titled Laugh and Draw with Jefferson Mashammer and it was undoubtedly not coincidental that at this time he also set up a cartoon correspondence course for others who aspired to follow in his footsteps. He was still producing more cartoons which were identical in nature to his earlier work although in keeping with the general cultural shift of 1950s America his females became considerably more extravagantly proportioned and the sexual innuendo more overt than his earlier creations. But although still riding high Jefferson Mashammer died at the age of only 60 in Santa Monica California in 1960. The German wildlife illustrator Wilhelm Aigner was born in 1904 in Holzminden, a town in Lower Saxony. Between 1920 and 24 he attended the arts and crafts school in Kassel followed by more training in both Hamburg and Berlin. When he started working professionally I don't know but between 1930 and 1938 he worked in-house for a printing firm. Unfortunately the only examples of his work I could find from this period were these non too promising lithographic posters. In 1939 he joined the German army and fought in both Poland and Russia but managed to survive and once the war was over he set about a career as a book illustrator. Among other commissions he created this collection of skillfully evoked line illustrations involving animals for an unknown children's book published in 1948. And in the same year he published an edition of Raynard the Fox for which I could only find the cover. I found other examples of what looked very much like juvenile fiction illustrations and even a solitary example of a comic strip, but most of these were undated so the best I can offer is that they were more than likely created at this time, and the evidence strongly suggests that it was with this narrative fiction illustration for older children, some of which was animal themed, that he was predominantly making a living during the 1950s. But it is also known that in the later years of the decade he began travelling in order to make observational drawings of wildlife in their natural habitats, mostly but not exclusively in various African countries. These were subsequently worked up into finished paintings for publication in book form, and although late to a career as a pure wildlife artist this came to be the defining feature of the rest of his career. Among other early published wildlife work was a collection of images of exotic fish and other aquatic life titled Our Aquarium, which was initially published in the Berliner Morgenpost in 1962 and was later republished in book form. In 1963 the book Mammals of the World written by Hans Fass was also published and it was his work for this book which consolidated Eigener's reputation as a wildlife artist. The success of the book was such that it was published several more times to meet demand in the years that followed, and Eigener became the writer's illustrator of choice on others with a wildlife theme, including Birds of the World a year later and Fish of the World in 1966. Eigener's images were well observed and anatomically correct visualisations of the various species but his painting technique and its combination with expressive gestural line work prevented them from appearing wooden and overly posed as the work of earlier wildlife artists had been. In 1968 he first began contributing illustrations to the encyclopaedia titled Grimmack's Animal Life and in 1971 what has come to be his best-known book The Encyclopedia of Animals was published. It contained colour illustrations of around 4,000 animal species and whatever his other successes to date had been this collection which is still being reprinted and avidly devoured by natural history enthusiasts to this day under a variety of different titles quickly became his defining publication. Throughout the 1970s and early 80s Eigener carried on making trips to far-flung destinations in search of yet more wildlife to discover and record and was even hired as a consultant for a TV wildlife series World of Animals in the late 1970s. He worked well into old age and was still creating more images of the world's wildlife up to his death in 1982 at the age of 78. Cecil Walter Bacon was born in the town of Battle in Sussex in 1905 and in 1923 he studied at the nearby Hastings School of Art. In 1926 he began working for an advertising agency in London before turning freelance in 1929, which was also the year he married. And in that same year he created this poster for London Transport promoting the historical tourist attraction Chislehurst Caves. This was the beginning of a relatively brief but fruitful professional association and in 1930 he created another too singing the praises of things to do in the capital while also designing another suggesting that living in the more rural Welling Garden city was actually a preferable alternative to the noise and bustle of the city. He continued to create more posters for London Transport but was also rapidly attracting more clients and was making a name for himself as a book cover designer and illustrator. There was also this striking colour image for a luxury hotel's brochure and from the middle of the decade his monochrome illustrations started to appear with increasing frequency in the pages and occasionally on the cover of the Radio Times. He designed this striking gangster novel cover in 1939 but as soon as war was declared Bacon joined the RAF. Nevertheless he was creating propaganda for the euphemistically titled Ministry of Information and there was some other work for books and magazines created during the war years even if his output had manifestly slowed down considerably. When the war ended Bacon became more prolific and resumed his career with the emphasis now on book work and by this point he was appearing more frequently in full colour than his early output. Among other commissions there was an illustrated edition of John Bunyan's 17th century moralistic tale Pilgrim's Progress and although I could find very little to show what I could find suggests this was a fine creative body of dramatic painted images. In 1951 he created this illustrated map as part of the vast amount of imagery commissioned for that year's Festival of Britain. One of Bacon's favoured means of expression was with scraper board and he wrote and illustrated a book about how to use this technique in 1951. Most of the monochrome images he had produced up to this point and particularly those published in the Radio Times had been created using this painstaking process. So it was perhaps a little ironic that from this point on the bulk of his work was actually created and reproduced in full colour by altogether different techniques. Among his more significant commissions of the later 1950s was a series of paintings for the educational books Looking at Everyday Things and Looking at Britain by Gene and David Gadsby, each of which illuminated aspects of modern life with the emphasis firmly on manufacture, farming and technological processes in Britain and abroad. His work continued to be published throughout the 1950s and it continued to be significantly diverse in terms of the graphic approaches he used, from his various methods in monochrome through to flat graphic designs and more painterly renders. In 1960 Bacon also illustrated another educational book From Cavemen to Vikings for a series titled Looking at History, following which evidence of his work becomes significantly thinner on the ground. Whether that's an indication of declining popularity or just another example of inadequate evidence I couldn't say. But the last verified example I could locate was this swirling borderline psychedelic design for a crime novel in 1970 and Cecil Bacon died in 1992 at the age of 87. I hope you found something to tickle your fancy among this quartet and I also hope I'll see you again for the next one.