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[Georges] (Hulot)

(b Beauvais, April 26, 1863; d Paris, Feb 6, 1938).

French illustrator, typographical designer, writer and printmaker . He went to Paris in 1883 to pursue a literary career. His first humorous essays were published that year in the Chat Noir journal. He was introduced to the many avant-garde artists and writers who frequented the Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre and contributed to the journal. Of these Henri Rivière and Eugène Grasset were especially important to his artistic development, Rivière coaching Auriol in drawing while Grasset introduced him to typographical design. Auriol’s close association with Rivière culminated in the latter’s album of lithographs, Les Trente-six Vues de la Tour Eiffel (1902; for illustration see Japonisme), for which Auriol designed the decorative cover, end-papers and typography.

Auriol served as writer, illustrator and editor of the Chat Noir for ten years (1883–93). He produced book covers for the Chat-Noir Guide (1888) and the two-volume Les Contes du Chat Noir...

(b Prague, April 9, 1858; d Prague, May 23, 1934).

Bohemian etcher, illustrator, painter and writer. As the daughter of František Augustín Braun, a prominent Bohemian politician, she was able to play a significant role in Bohemia’s cultural life at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, especially in the area of Czech–French cultural relations. She was a frequent visitor to Paris, where her elder sister, who was married to the writer Elémir Bourges, lived. She was instrumental in familiarizing Bohemian artists with French culture and introduced them to such prominent artists as Rodin, Redon and others. In Bohemia she was much to the fore in bringing writers and artists together and in discovering such artists as František Bílek. She painted landscapes and together with her teacher Antonín Chittussi established contacts in France with members of the Barbizon school. She was, however, primarily an etcher and illustrator and she specialized in etchings of Old Prague, for example ...

(b Bordeaux, July 16, 1804; d Paris, Feb 18, 1868).

French painter, illustrator and writer. His early training was as a theatrical scene painter and a designer of lithographic illustrations. In Bordeaux he studied with Pierre Lacour (ii) (1778–1859) and worked with Thomas Olivier (1772–1839), chief scene designer at the Grand-Théâtre. He subsequently studied in Paris in the studio of the landscape and history painter Julien-Michel Gué (1789–1843) and worked for the decorators of the Théâtre Italien.

From 1827 Dauzats provided lithographic designs for Isidore-Justin-Séverin Taylor’s series Voyages pittoresques et romantiques dans l’ancienne France (1820–78). He travelled in the French provinces, particularly Champagne, Dauphiné and Languedoc, often sketching the medieval monuments that had come into vogue during the Romantic period.

Dauzats also collaborated on lithographs for many other publications, including Taylor’s Voyage en Orient. For this last project Dauzats travelled to Egypt, Syria, Palestine and Turkey in 1830, a trip that he described in his book ...

(Rowton)

(b Brighton, Feb 22, 1882; d Harefield, Middx [now in London], Nov 17, 1940).

English sculptor, letter-cutter, typographic designer, calligrapher, engraver, writer and teacher. He received a traditional training at Chichester Technical and Art School (1897–1900), where he first developed an interest in lettering. He also became fascinated by the Anglo-Saxon and Norman stone-carvings in Chichester Cathedral. In 1900 Gill moved to London to become a pupil of William Douglas Caröe (1857–1938), architect to the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. He took classes in practical masonry at Westminster Institute and in writing and illuminating at the Central School of Art and Design, where he was deeply influenced by the calligrapher Edward Johnston. Johnston’s meticulous training was to be a perfect preparation for Gill’s first commissions for three-dimensional inscriptions in stone, the foundation stone for Caröe’s St Barnabas and St James the Greater in Walthamstow, London, and the lettering for the lychgate at Charles Harrison Townsend’s St Mary’s, Great Warley, Essex. Further commissions followed after Gill left Caröe in ...

(b Lausanne, May 25, 1841; d Paris, Oct 23, 1917).

French illustrator, decorative artist and printmaker of Swiss birth. Before arriving in Paris in the autumn of 1871, Grasset had been apprenticed to an architect, attended the Polytechnic in Zurich and travelled to Egypt. In Paris he found employment as a fabric designer and graphic ornamentalist, which culminated in his first important project, the illustrations for Histoire des quatre fils Aymon (1883). Grasset worked in collaboration with Charles Gillot, the inventor of photo-relief printing and an influential collector of Oriental and decorative arts, in the production of this major work of Art Nouveau book design and of colour photomechanical illustration. Grasset used a combination of medieval and Near Eastern decorative motifs to frame and embellish his illustrations, but most importantly he integrated text and imagery in an innovative manner which has had a lasting influence on book illustration.

In 1881 he was commissioned by Rodolphe Salis to design furnishing in a medieval style for the latter’s new Chat Noir cabaret in Montmartre. This project brought him in direct contact with Montmartre avant-garde artists such as Adolphe Willette, Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen, Henri Rivière and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Grasset’s numerous posters include ...

(b Waal, Bavaria, May 26, 1849; d Budleigh Salterton, Devon, March 31, 1914).

English painter, illustrator, printmaker, stage designer, film maker, writer and teacher of German birth. He was the only child of Lorenz Herkomer (d 1887), a wood-carver, and Josephine (née Niggl), an accomplished pianist and music teacher. They left Bavaria for the USA in 1851 and lived briefly in Cleveland, OH, before settling in Southampton, England, in 1857.

Herkomer received his first art instruction from his father and from 1864 to 1865 he attended the Southampton School of Art. Later he often criticized the crippling academic methods to which he was exposed as a student. In 1865 he briefly attended the Munich Academy and spent the summer terms of 1866 and 1867 at the South Kensington Art School in London, where he found the teaching ‘aimless and undirected’. With the encouragement of his fellow student Luke Fildes, Herkomer took up black-and-white illustration; his first wood-engraving appeared in Good Words...

(b Amsterdam, Dec 4, 1868; d Bloemendaal, Dec 31, 1938).

Dutch painter, printmaker, illustrator, writer and stained-glass artist. He trained at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1886–90), under the directorship of August Allebé. Having initially painted and drawn Impressionistic landscapes, he started working in the ’t Gooi region in 1892, where, influenced by Vincent van Gogh and Jan Toorop, he made a number of Symbolist drawings and lithographs. In 1896 he married the Dutch writer Henriette van der Schalk. They both devoted themselves to the recently founded Sociaal Democratische Arbeiders Partij. In the years up to c. 1900 Holst produced among other things a series of lithographs of political cartoons with socialist content, as well as serene landscapes and paintings of girls from the village of Huizen. His allegorical murals (1902; in situ), on topics such as ‘Industry’ or ‘Commerce’, in the new Koopmansbeurs in Amsterdam by H. P. Berlage (1876–1903), marked an important point in his career as his first opportunity to construct a monumental piece of work. Partly inspired by the murals in the town hall at ’s Hertogenbosch by Antoon Derkinderen, he developed a tight, stylized type of design, which he believed to be ideal for visually representing idealistic and exalted thoughts. In his murals (...

(b Valencia, 1757; d Madrid, after 1807).

Spanish illustrator, printmaker and painter. He was nominated Miembro de Mérito of the Real Academia de S Fernando, Madrid, in 1781. He made reproductive engravings of paintings and illustrated such books as Juan Antonio Pellicer’s (1738–1806) annotated edition of Don Quixote (1797), the Fábulas morales (1781–4) by Félix María de Samaniego (1745–1801) and the 1803 edition of the short stories Novelas ejemplares by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547–1616). In his depiction (1790) of the fire in the Plaza Mayor in Madrid and in his interiors of prisons and barracks he pioneered the use of aquatint. He produced the series Caprichos y bombachadas and illustrated the title-page of Ideas y caprichos pintorescos (Madrid, 1807). He had two sons: Laureano (1802–58), an engraver, and Vicente (1796–1857), a history painter.

(b Philadelphia, PA, July 4, 1857; d Brooklyn, NY, April 23, 1926).

American illustrator, printmaker, and writer. Born into a Quaker family, he showed an early aptitude for drawing. Against his father’s wishes he attended evening classes at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and later entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Always outspoken and independent, he clashed with teachers in both places and never graduated. In 1880 he opened his own studio and undertook commissions for commercial illustration.

Pennell’s first published work appeared in Scribner’s Monthly in July 1881, and his drawings of American cities were soon to be found in many illustrated journals and books. In 1883 he was commissioned by the Century magazine to illustrate articles by William Dean Howells on Tuscan cities, and a year later, having married the writer Elizabeth Robins, he took up residence in London. In England he became part of a circle that included many of the best-known literary and artistic figures of the day, among them Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, and James McNeill Whistler....

[Sigmind]

(b Kassel, Dec 10, 1794; d Kassel, March 7, 1887).

German painter, printmaker, illustrator and writer. After having lessons in drawing from his father, the sculptor and printmaker Johann Christian Ruhl (1764–1842), Ruhl studied from 1806 at the Kassel Kunstakademie. In order to gain a more thorough training in history painting, he spent the winter of 1812–13 studying anatomy at the university at Göttingen and then a year at the Akademie in Dresden.

Ruhl achieved his first successes in Kassel with pictures of horses, as Horse Race in Antiquity (1813; Kassel, Neue Gal.). In 1815, after serving in the Hessian cavalry fighting Napoleon, Ruhl continued his artistic studies in Munich and formed a close association with the painter Carl Philipp Fohr. The two shared an enthusiasm for chivalric romances and undertook joint commissions to illustrate them. Examples by Ruhl include drawings for Ludwig Tieck’s Melusine (c. 1815–16; Kassel, Neue Gal.; Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst. & Städt. Gal.)....

[Kubota Yasubei; Shōsadō; Hitofushi no Chitsui; Shiokarabō; Nanda Kashiran, Kōzandō]

(b Edo [now Tokyo], 1757; d Edo, 1820).

Japanese print designer, painter, poet, writer and lacquer and shell-inlay artist. Orphaned at an early age, he was raised by an uncle. He studied honga (‘true or book pictures’) with the Nanga (literati painting) artist Tabete Ryōtai (1719–74) and ukiyoe (‘pictures of the floating world’) with Kitao Shigemasa. Early examples of Shunman’s work include the illustrations for the sharebon (‘witty book’; comic novel) Tama kiku tōrōben (1780) and the gafu (‘picture album’) Gakoku (1783) in the honga style. He was a prolific designer of bijinga (‘pictures of beautiful women’) and fūzokuga (‘pictures of customs and manners’), which show the influence, not of his teacher, Shigemasa, but of Torii Kiyonaga (see Torii family §(8)), one of the leading ukiyoe artists of the day. Shunman introduced the benigirai (‘red-hating’; using no red (pink) pigment) technique, which he employed in his Mutamagawa (‘Six crystal rivers’). In around ...

(b Florence, Aug 18, 1835; d Florence, Feb 11, 1901).

Italian painter, writer, critic, illustrator, etcher and teacher. He was a major figure of the Macchiaioli group, painting primarily landscapes, seascapes and street scenes in towns and villages in Tuscany and Liguria. As with many of the Macchiaioli, he did not always date his paintings, and their chronology must be deduced from exhibition catalogues and other contemporary sources. As a writer and critic he was the most ardent spokesman for, and promoter of, the Macchiaioli and wrote with insight and cutting wit about the art world of the second half of the 19th century.

He and his brothers Edoardo (c. 1830–51) and Egisto studied under their father, Giovanni Signorini (1808–62), an artist employed by the Austrian Grand Dukes of Florence to paint topographical views and scenes of local festivals. Telemaco Signorini’s first preference, however, was for literature, and he spent four years at the prestigious Scuola degli Scolopi in Florence, leaving in ...