Graphic Design and Typography

(b Cincinnati, OH, Jan 31, 1875; d Sellersville, PA, Sept 4, 1955).

American printmaker and illustrator. Among the pioneer generation of women printmakers in America, she was known for her humorous satires of the American scene. Raised in New Orleans, she moved to San Francisco where she studied art at the Hopkins Institute (c. 1896–7) and joined the Sketch Club (a professional organization that offered exhibition and collaboration opportunities for women).

By 1903 she had settled in Greenwich Village. Three years later she married the painter and etcher Eugene Higgins (1874–1958), and set aside her career. When the marriage ended 11 years later, she became a secretary of the Whitney Studio Club (where she attended evening sketch sessions), shed her married name and traveled abroad. During a trip to Paris in 1926–7, she discovered the medium that suited her artistic temperament: lithography, and studied the technique with Edouard Dûchatel (fl 1880s–1930s) in Paris.

After returning to New York, in ...

(b Hamburg, Nov 19, 1865; d Badenweiler, June 11, 1902).

German designer, illustrator and painter. He trained as a businessman before entering the Kunst- und Gewerbeschule in Hamburg. He studied at the Kunst- und Gewerbeschule in Nuremberg and from 1885 attended the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich. His early paintings are naturalistic landscapes but around 1890 he shifted towards Symbolism (e.g. the Four Ages of Life, 1893–4; untraced). In 1894 he decided to devote himself to the decorative arts. Encouraged by Justus Brinckmann, a collector and museum director, and Friedrich Deneken (later Director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld), Eckmann studied the Japanese woodcut collection at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, Hamburg. Using traditional Japanese techniques, he began producing his own woodcut designs in 1895. Three Swans on Dark Water (1895; Hamburg, Mus. Kst & Gew.) reflects a general preoccupation with late 19th-century music, art and literature with swans as symbolic images, and they were a frequent motif in many of his subsequent works. Eckmann’s woodcuts, as well as ornamental borders, vignettes, bookplates and other graphic designs, were illustrated in such periodicals as ...

(Gustaf Aristides)

(b Kiiala Estate, nr Porvoo [Swed. Borgå], July 21, 1854; d Haikko, nr Porvoo, Aug 18, 1905).

Finnish painter, illustrator and etcher. He was Finland’s leading artist in the late 19th century, introducing French influences into Finnish art but also helping to gain a broader international interest in his country’s culture. He was not a great innovator, however, and although his reputation in Finland remained firm, international recognition dwindled after his death until the renewal of interest in realism that took place in the late 20th century.

Edelfelt’s father, Carl Albert Edelfelt, was a member of the Swedish aristocracy who had moved to Finland as a young man, eventually rising to the position of General Director in the Department of Housing, while his mother, Alexandra Edelfelt, was an acquaintance of Finland’s national poet, J. L. Runeberg. She played an important role in instilling in Edelfelt the romantic idealism that became the guiding principle of his life and art. In 1869, while still at school, Edelfelt began taking classes at the School of Drawing established by the Finnish Arts Association in Helsinki, and from ...

(b Drammen, May 5, 1877; d Kristiania [now Oslo], Feb 2, 1899).

Norwegian painter and illustrator. His artistic education began at the age of nine, when he enrolled at the school of art of Knud Bergslien (1827–1908) in Kristiania, where he was a pupil from 1886 to 1889. Even from this early period his painted studies and drawings, for instance of his sister Signe and brother Carl (both 1887; Oslo, N.G.), reveal striking maturity. In 1891 he was a pupil of Erik Werenskiold and from 1891 to 1892 he studied at the Arts and Crafts School in Kristiania. Egedius discovered his strongest impetus and greatest inspiration, however, on his first visit to Telemark in south-west Norway in summer 1892. The artist Torleif Stadskleiv (1865–1946), whom he met there and who became his closest friend, endeared the region to Egedius with stories of its traditions and people. In 1894 Egedius studied for a short period under Harriet Backer, and he made his début at the Kristiania Autumn Exhibition in ...

(b New York, July 22, 1827; d Saratoga Springs, NY, Jan 22, 1889).

American painter and illustrator. After graduating from Columbia College, New York, in 1847, he immediately departed for Europe to pursue artistic training. He visited Italy and France, but staying in Germany, specifically Düsseldorf, was his main objective. There he studied with Karl Friedrich Lessing, Carl Ferdinand Sohn, and fellow American Emanuel Leutze, and in Paris he was instructed by Thomas Couture. During the early 1850s he travelled between America and Europe but finally settled in New York in 1853 until his move to Saratoga Springs after marrying in 1877. Ehninger exhibited regularly at the National Academy of Design, New York, where he was elected a full member in 1860. His work reveals interests shared by the other Americans in Düsseldorf: these were mainly history and genre painting, with occasional forays in European landscape. But he quickly returned to American subject-matter; Yankee Peddler (1853; Newark, NJ, Mus.), for example, describes the initiative of an itinerant entrepreneur in the young nation....

Term used to describe heterogeneous, insubstantial, printed (and less commonly manuscript) matter that was produced for short-term use and then disposal. It may embrace such disparate material as valentines; bill-headings; posters; trade cards; advertisements; temperance and electioneering literature; street ballads; book prospectuses; bookmarks; noteheadings; concert and theatre bills; tickets; seedsmen’s lists; religious broadsheets; labels; and packaging. The precise parameters of the term have occasioned much discussion, but the distinguishing feature of ephemera is that it was not intended to survive. (Souvenirs and cigarette cards, produced for collectors, should properly be excluded, although in practice they seldom are and thus are included in this discussion.) Interest in ephemera is predominantly British and North American, though in Australia in the late 20th century enthusiasm was growing significantly. This article therefore draws mainly on British examples in its discussion of interest in printed ephemera.

The appeal of ephemera is in the glimpse that it affords of the past, devoid of any interpretation. Historians increasingly value these rescued evidential data, through which human nature is seen in all its various aspects: from the cruelty of exhibitions of ‘freaks’ to the benevolence of charity; from the mundane label for chutney, for instance, to the entrance ticket to a coronation. To take one isolated example, a Covent Garden playbill of ...

(b Frankenstein nr Breslau [now Wroclaw], Dec 15, 1868; d Munich, 1940).

German painter, illustrator and interior designer. He studied at the Kunstschule in Breslau under the German painter Albrecht Bräuer (1830–97), and later at the Pinakothek in Munich, absorbing the work of the Old Masters. He continued his training in Paris at the Académie Julian (1892–4), and established a studio in Munich (1895). With other non-academic painters of the period he rejected the influence of the French Impressionists and allied with the Symbolist painters of the late 19th century. He drew inspiration from wild places and as a young man travelled to the Baltic Sea and to the Riviera and Brittany coasts. He was fascinated by Norse legends, Grimms’ fairy tales and Johann Gottfried Herder’s Stimmen der Völker, all of which had an impact on his subject-matter. His early paintings of bucolic landscapes with figures were executed in flat, calm colours with well-defined outlines, reminiscent of the work of Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. In a long, prolific career he designed costumes and stage sets, stained glass, ceramics and bookbindings....

(b Mexico City, 1836; d Mexico City, 1868).

Mexican illustrator and printmaker. According to the obituary by Hilarión Frías y Soto, Escalante “was fortunate enough to escape scholastic corruption … His training was artistic, though disgracefully very incomplete.” This may indicate that Escalante trained in lithographic workshops without attending the Academia de S. Carlos, a recently restructured school for artists.

Although Escalante’s portrait of Pedro Picasso—his music teacher—was accepted at the Academia’s exhibition of 1855, his work as an illustrator did not take an academic route. He became involved in liberal politics at the end of the Three Year War in 1861 and was the first caricaturist for the biweekly newspaper review La Orquesta, which he founded that year with Carlos Alejandro Casarín, who used the pseudonym Roberto Macario in honor of the Honoré Daumier character Robert Macaire (a flattering swindler). Escalante chose to address local problems in his illustrations and both recorded and influenced the implementation of the liberal ideology and the strict enforcement of the ...

(b Melun, Seine-et-Marne, Aug 14, 1870; d Paris, April 17, 1950).

French painter, illustrator and stage designer. Disdaining the traditional art schools, he studied part-time at the Académie Colarossi in Paris under Gustave-Claude-Etienne Courtois (1852–1923) and Jean-André Rixens (1846–1924) but was mostly self-taught. In 1891 he exhibited at the Salon des Refusés and the following year at the Salon des Indépendants. His early works, such as Suburban Railway (c. 1895; Paris, Mus. d’Orsay), showed a strong debt to Impressionism. He was a friend of Renoir as well as of Paul Signac, Henri Edmond Cross, Louis Valtat and later Maurice Denis, Bonnard and Vuillard. In 1898 he visited Morocco where he painted such works as Moroccan Horseman (1898; see Cailler, p. 7). After his return to France, he concentrated on studies from nature, paintings of women, children and flowers and decorative projects for private patrons. In 1904 he exhibited at the Salon d’Automne, becoming its Vice-President in ...

(b Santa Maria de Lamas, La Coruña, 1744; d Madrid, 1812).

Spanish painter and illustrator. He served in the Benedictine monastery of S Martín Pinario, Santiago de Compostela, and his artistic talents won him the protection of the sculptor Felipe de Castro. Ferro moved to Madrid, where he won several prizes at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando in the 1760s. He was named Academico de Mérito in 1781 and began to work for the court in 1783. He had an aptitude for spectacular and grandiose compositions, which can be seen in his large paintings of religious scenes, such as the altarpiece of the Holy Family, painted for S Francisco el Grande, Madrid, or St Augustine and Child for the church of the monastery of La Encarnación in Madrid. He also painted canvases for the monastery of S Rosendo in Celanova (untraced) and for the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela as well as painting portraits and historical scenes (e.g. ...

(b Liverpool, Oct 18, 1844; d London, Feb 27, 1927).

English painter and illustrator. He first studied art at the Mechanics Institute in Liverpool and at the nearby Warrington School of Art. In 1863 he won a scholarship that enabled him to study at the South Kensington Art School in London and subsequently at the Royal Academy Schools. By the late 1860s he was earning money as an illustrator for such popular periodicals as the Cornhill Magazine and Once a Week.

Fildes’s illustration Houseless and Hungry, which appeared as a wood-engraving in the first issue of the Graphic (4 Dec 1869), a socially conscious weekly, was the turning-point of his career. The engraving depicts homeless paupers queuing outside the casual ward of a workhouse. When it was shown to Charles Dickens by John Everett Millais, the author commissioned Fildes to illustrate his novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood. The unfinished book was published posthumously in 1870 with a set of 12 illustrations by Fildes....

(Nikolayevich)

(b Moscow, Jan 20, 1883; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], Dec 3, 1941).

Russian painter, graphic artist and poet. He came from a working-class background; orphaned in childhood, he moved to St Petersburg, where he earned money through embroidery, house painting, restoring buildings and icons, and other tasks such as retouching photographs and making posters and wrappers for goods (a practical apprenticeship he never forgot). His interest in drawing and painting developed through copying, making portraits and the close study of human and animal anatomy. He entered the Academy of Arts, St Petersburg (1908) with difficulty but he left without graduating; his only important teacher was L. E. Dmitriyev-Kavkazsky (1849–1916), with whom he studied privately. Largely self-taught, he was a man of considerable intellectual powers.

Filonov’s earliest mature work dates from 1909–10, notably A Hero and his Fate (oil on canvas; St Petersburg, Rus. Mus.). Subsequently, partly for financial reasons, he generally painted in watercolour or oil on paper. He wandered extensively through Russia, the Near East and western Europe. From ...

(b Evanston, IL, 1956).

American performance artist. Finley is noted for her controversial pieces and her work has been called “obscene,” “lewd” and “vulgar” because she has graphically examined such subjects in her art as politics, sexuality, scatology, identity, violence and abuse, among other divisive topics. Her works are also called theatrical solo shows. She explored feminist content through her performances, which were often derided by the public, even after she developed her audience within the art world. In her art, she combined monologues with manipulation of her body, including pouring substances onto herself. Using her partially or fully nude body, she entices the viewer, but then quickly subverts the experience of looking at her by pouring, smearing, or otherwise covering parts or all of herself. Her writing is well-crafted and provocative both in subject and form.

Finley studied art as a child at the Art Institute of Chicago’s Young Artist Studio program in ...

(b Edinburgh, April 4, 1880; d London, Dec 30, 1969).

Scottish painter, printmaker and illustrator. After studying at Daniel Stewart’s College, Edinburgh, he was apprenticed as a lithographic draughtsman and designer from 1894 to 1900 and studied part-time at the Royal Institute of Art, Edinburgh. He worked in London as a medical illustrator from 1900 to 1902, and then as a commercial artist, joining the staff of the Illustrated London News (1903–7). He illustrated limited editions of the classics, including Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (London, 1910), Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (London, 1912) and Homer’s The Odyssey (London, 1924).

Flint established his reputation with watercolour landscapes of Scotland, France, Italy and Spain, many of them containing references to local customs, as in Ascension Day, Catalonia (Eton, Berks, Coll.). Having produced landscapes of Spain from 1921, he became particularly associated with figure studies of girls either nude or in Spanish costume. His delight in the female form also found expression in a book of caprices, ...

(b Reims, Oct 23, 1852; d Paris, July 11, 1931).

French painter, printmaker and illustrator. Around 1860 he moved with his family to Paris, where he was taught by Jacquesson de la Chevreuse (1839–1903), Jean Baptiste Carpeaux and André Gill. He participated in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71) and was a friend of the poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud; the latter is the presumed subject of a portrait (1874; priv. col., see 1982 exh. cat., no. 1) that may have influenced Manet’s late portrait of Mallarmé (1876; Paris, Louvre). Forain first met Manet through his friendship with Degas in the early 1870s at the salon of Nina de Callias. He continued to associate with Manet, meeting the group of young Impressionists at the Café Guerbois and the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes. In 1878 Forain painted a small gouache, Café Scene (New York, Brooklyn Mus.), which probably influenced Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (...

(b Leonfelden, Upper Austria, Nov 2, 1878; d Stockerau, nr Vienna, Nov 5, 1936).

Austrian designer, painter and illustrator. He studied from 1899 to 1902 under Kolo Moser and Karl Karger (1848–1913) at the Kunstgewerbeschule in the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, and in 1903 under Ludwig Herterich (1856–1932) at the Kunstakademie in Munich. He was represented at the 15th exhibition of the Vienna Secession in 1902 and produced woodcuts for Ver Sacrum in 1903. He was co-founder of the Vereinigung Wiener Kunst im Hause; he designed the poster for the exhibition of 1903–4 and showed stained-glass windows, naturalistic watercolours of peasant types, and tapestry designs. He made numerous study trips to Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and especially Italy, where he studied the work of glassmakers and mosaicists in Ravenna, Rome and Venice. From 1906 he worked intensively to revive the art of the mosaic, prepared the foundation of the Wiener Mosaik Werkstätte (trade licence 1908) and added his own glassworks in ...

(b Upper Norwood, Surrey, Jan 25, 1872; d Kensington, London, March 10, 1945).

English illustrator, painter and designer. She entered the Royal Academy Schools, London, and won a prize for a mural design in 1897. She specialized in book illustration, in pen and ink and later in colour. Among her many commissions were illustrations to Tennyson’s Poems (1905) and Idylls of the King (1911) and Browning’s Pippa Passes (1908). She was particularly popular with the publishers of the lavishly illustrated gift-books fashionable in the Edwardian era. She exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy and the Royal Water-Colour Society. She took up stained-glass design (windows in Bristol Cathedral), which modified her style of illustration to flat areas of colour within black outlines. She also painted plaster figurines and designed bookplates.

Fortescue-Brickdale continued the Pre-Raphaelite tradition, reworking romantic and moralizing medieval subjects in naturalistic and often strong colour and elaborate detail. Her most important oil painting is The Forerunner...

(b Tynemouth, Northumb., Feb 4, 1825; d Weybridge, Surrey, March 27, 1899).

English painter, illustrator and collector. After a short and unsatisfactory period working in the family brewing business, he was able to convince his Quaker parents to allow him to pursue a career in art. He was apprenticed to a wood-engraver, Ebenezer Landells (1808–60), who recognized Foster’s talent for drawing and set him to work designing blocks for engraving. Foster also provided designs for Punch and the Illustrated London News. In 1846 he set up on his own as an illustrator. The rustic vignettes of the seasons that he contributed to the Illustrated London News and its counterpart, the Illustrated London Almanack, established him as a charming interpreter of the English countryside and rural life and led to his employment illustrating similar themes in other publications. During the 1850s his designs were much in demand; he was called upon to illustrate volumes of the poetry of Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott and John Milton. His range was limited, however, and he was criticized for relying on the same rural imagery regardless of the nature of the text....