Frank Cheyne Papé was a British illustrator of the “Golden Age” of book illustration. Born in 1878, there appears to be very little information available to us about his life and work. We know that his first work was around 1908. This early coloured work was similar in style and maybe influenced by artists of the 1890’s such as Walter Crane, and contemporaries Arthur Rackham and Edmund Dulac. Papé did illustrations for a series of fairy tale books in this early part of his career including those featured here which are taken from “The Russian Story Book” by Richard Wilson published in 1916. He is actually much better known for his later black & white style which illustrated a series of popular satirical works. His career seemingly came an abrupt and unexplained end in 1935 although he did continue to contribute illustrations for a little known children’s periodical “Uncle Ray’s Magazine” up until the early 1950’s. He died in 1972.

“Come Down” Cried the Hero’s Wife     

Diuk Stooped and Caught Chorilo by His Yellow Curls

Then the Princess Ran With Her Feet All Bare, Out Into the Open Corridor

The Water Tsar Dances

She Put Her Good Steed to the Walls and Leapt Lightly Over Them

Marina Lay Upon a Couch and Fondled a Fiery Dragon With Her Right Hand

For those of you who don’t know, the Library of Congress recently took the unusual but comendable step of uploading an initial 3000 (and counting - now over 6,500) images from its vast collection to Flickr, the popular picture hosting site. The idea behind this move is to invite the public to tag the images adding metadata to those which previously had little or none. The response apparently has been astounding. You can view the entire (and amazing) Flickr photostream HERE.

Amongst the photostream are 382 photochrom images. Photochrom is a process invented in Switzerland in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid whereby colourized images are produced from black and white photographic negatives via direct photographic transfer of a negative on to lithographic printing plates. The process was very popular in the late 19th century when colour photography was still not commercially viable. The resultant images benefit from beautiful and vivid colours.

Take a look at these examples from the L.O.C. Flickr photostream (best viewed by clicking images for full size)

Exchange Hall, Copenhagen, Denmark

Vik in Eidfjord, Hardanger Fjord, Norway

 Castle Street and municipal buildings, Aberdeen, Scotland

Parliament buildings, Quebec

Whirlpool Rapids, looking up Niagara

You can browse 6,500 photochrom images by subject on the L.O.C. website HERE.

Sorry for the lack of posts recently - I’ve been rather busy with other stuff so have neglected the blog somewhat. Anyway, today I have some amazing illustrations from a 1915 publication entitled ‘Researches Into Chinese Superstitions’ by Henry Doré. This appears to be a multi volume work and these particular illustrations are taken from the ‘Second Part - The Chinese Pantheon, Volume X The Boards of Heavenly Administration’ (a bit of a mouthful!). I don’t know much else about the text as it is written in French / Chinese but it seems to concern, as the title suggests, Chinese Gods & Goddesses, although there also seem to be a lot of references to diseases, medicines, remedies and suchlike. I also have no idea who creator of the illustrations is, although they are obviously Chinese in origin.

The Goddess Hastening Childbirth

The Mother of Lightning

The Lord of Remedies & Medicinal Plants

Yu-Hwa-Lung The God Who Happily Terminates Small-Pox

Tin-Kiao A Personification of T’ai-Sui

Click on any of the images to see the full sized version on FLICKR, or see the full set HERE.

Virginia Frances Sterrett was an American illustrator best known for her work for the 1928 publication of  The Arabian Nights. I have been an admirer of her brilliant illustrations for some time but knew little about her life and career prior to researching this post. Her story, it seems is something of a tragic one. Her first commission at the age of just 19 was for a 1920 publication of the work of Comtesse de Ségur; Old French Fairy Tales.

Old French Fairy Tales (click images to see full size)

Diagnosed with Tubercolosis and suffering from ill health, the following year (1921) she received her second commission for Nathaniel Hawthorn’s Tanglewood Tales.

Tanglewood Tales (click images for full size)

Plauged by deteriorating health, she only completed one further commission for Arabian Nights before her death in 1931. A tragic end for an extremely talented lady. Show me a better illustrator at work today and I will be very surprised!

There is a marvelous exhibition of her illustrations for Arabian Nights online HERE.

For more vintage, illustrated childrens books and fairy tales, click HERE, HERE or HERE.

You can see all of the colour illustrations from Old French Fairy Tales and Tanglewood Tales on FLICKR, or you can download them all in a zip file from HERE.

Sidney H Sime was an illustrator of the “Golden Age” (late 19th & early 20th centuries) best known for his work for Irish story teller Lord Dunsany. His carreer interested me as he is from my home city of Manchester. Seemingly, he was a “jack of all trades” before following his career as an artist. He has been cited as an influenced by many contemporary “fantasy” artists. The images presented here are all extracted from the books of Lord Dunsany which I found on the Internet Archive site.

The Book of Wonder

A Dreamer’s Tales

The Gods of Pegana

The Sword of Welleran

I collected 30 of Sime’s illustrations from the books of Lord Dungany and you can see the full set on FLICKR. Or, you can download a zip file of all the illustrations HERE.

Giambattista della Porta was an Italian scholar and playwright perhaps best known for his esoteric work Natural Magic. The illustrations I have for you today are taken from his 1586 publication De Humana Physiognomonia.

Phisiognomy is the is the assessment of a person’s character or personality from their outward appearance, most notably, their face. Della Porta’s serious and convincing system attempted to establish models for different characteristics by  juxtaposing human and animal types. He proposed that the qualities possesed by certain creatures may also be found in man. For example, the wide, clearly defined mouth of a sheep and a ’sheeplike’ man implied a stupidity and impiety common to both.

Despite the serious nature of the subject matter I found these fantastic illustrations to be great fun. I especially like the ‘lionface’ pictured above - I can’t help but think of the cowardly lion character from the Wizard of Oz when I look at it!

I found these images at the Historical Anatomies on the Web exhibition which is part of the of the US National Library of Medicine which has over 70,000 image available online.

You can see more illustrations from this book on FLICKR - HERE

Or you can download a zip file of all 22 illustrations HERE.

Journal des Dames et des Modes was a French fashion periodical published in the 1910’s and illustrated by some of the finest illustrators of the Art Deco period. Featured here are a selection of illustrations from what appeared to be a regular feature of the magazine - Costumes Parisienes. Many of the images are by George Barbier on whom I have posted previously but there are many other artists featured including Gerda Wegener, Armand Vallee, Umberto Brunelleschi and others whilst there are some pictures of which, I cannot determine the artist. Here are two examples of the the work of Wegener:

I particularly like this illustration by Roger Broders:

This beautiful print is by Arman Vallee:

You can see the full set of these illustrations (89 in all) on FLICKR. Or you can download a .rar file of the set HERE (23mb).

Browsing the Internet Archive this week, I came accross an Italian book with the magnificently long title: Le guerre festiue delle reali nozze de’ serenissimi e cattolici re di Spagna Carlo secondo e Maria Luisa di Borbone : celebrate nella felice e fedelissima città di Palermo, dall’ Illustrissimo Senato della medesima citta … nell’anno M.DC.LXXX (1680).

Can’t translate that precisely(!) but basically the book appears to concern knights and tournaments of 17th century Spain and features 11 full-page illustrations of horsemen in armor, each with emblem and motto atop his plumes, etched by Giovanni Battista Mansella.

See all the images on Flickr HERE or download a zip file of all the illustrations HERE.

Unfortunately, the quality of these probably isnt high enough for print making (I had a struggle getting decent quality images from the pdf - a lot of print screening, cutting and pasting as the screen capture in adobe just wasnt rendering the images properly when pasted). However it got me to thinking about vintage books on knights, armor and suchlike - a very popular subject - and there is masses of material available in the public domain on this topic so there is probably lots of potential for product creation there.

I found these magnificent posters on the Library of Congress’ ‘Prints & Photographs Online Catalog’ They were commissioned by the Austrian government during World War One to encourage Austrian citizens to subscribe to various Kriegsanleihe or ‘War Loan’ schemes.

These 2 posters are my favorites. The artist is Thomas Fasche - I find it interesting that posters produced, basically for war propaganda can have such artistic merit. These have a beautiful Art Nouveau style.

Many of the posters feature medieval imagry (valiant knights etc. representing the glory of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) :

I collected 15 ‘Kriegsanleihe’ posters in all, click HERE to see them all on Flickr.

Or click HERE to download all 15.

The prints and Photographs Online Catalog is a rich source of public domain images (1000’s available) which could be used for product creation (image cd’s, prints etc) although you need to be careful as not all images on here are in the public domain.

The images I have posted here are small, JPEG’s but also available, are the uncompressed archival TIFF versions. These are massive image files (up to 60, 70 MB!) with crazy resolutions (1200 dpi).  Even if you have a fast modern pc , it is going to struggle with images of this size. If you are patient however and can work with them in photoshop or whatever (I used Fireworks) you can get them down to a 300 dpi approx 1 MB image which is more workable and perfect for making prints. I think these would look stunning and would sell really well on Ebay.

E A Séguy was a French decorative illustrator who produced 11 books of patterns and illustrations in the early part of the 20th century. A distinctive feature of both the Art Nouveau and Art Deco periods (across which his work spanned) was the drawing of inspiration from the beauty of nature. Presented here are sample images from two of his books, dedicated to the study of insects - Insectes and Papillions. Click any image for full size.

Click HERE to see my full set of 42 Seguy illustrations on Flickr. Or, click HERE to download a zip file of the 42 images.