Odalisque by Paolo Michetti

Odalisque (1873) 

Here is a Turkish-style odalisque (the lowest grade of girl in the harem) by Italian painter Francesco Paolo Michetti (1851-1929). The orientalist subject matter is unusual for the artist who specilaised in outdoor scenes. Michetti originated in the Abruzzo region of Italy and after studying at the Academia in Naples moved to Paris to continue his studies, exhibiting at the 1872 Paris Salon.

Self-portrait 

 In 1883 he bought an old convent building, back in Abruzzo, as his studio and home and took much of his inspiration from the local people and landscape. He also exhibited in Milan, Naples, Berlin and at the first Venice Bienalle. For the last twenty years of his life he lived as a virtual recluse and stopped exhibiting.

Pulp Covers by Norman Saunders

This surprisingly revealing cover was for a nineteen thirties pulp US magazine. Painted by pulp art supremo Norman Saunders (1907-1989), it appeared as the cover for the December 1936 issue of Saucy Movie Tales.  The other covers here are all from 1936 and 1937.

So called because of the cheap wood pulp paper on which they were printed, pulp magazines flourished in the United States from the end of the nineteenth century until the late fifties. Typically, as the case with Saucy Movie Tales,  they were 128 pages long and were in a 7" by 10" format.

Some of the magazines focussed on different genres, such as adventure, westerns, detective, science fiction and romance but many included a mixture of genres. In theory, Saucy Movie Tales was supposed to concentrate on tales of starlets, directors and the movie industry, although they quite often included other subjects too.

The saucy/spicy sub-genre offered (mild, by today's standards) erotic stories and cartoons which meant that they were sold "under the counter". There were thrusting breasts, slim legs, firm buttocks and states of undress but no actual sex. 

The interior illustrations included bare bottoms and bare breasts but no pubic hair, of course, as that would have been classed as obscene, rather than saucy. In Saucy Movie Tales stories there were, of course, the perils of the casting couch, innocent ingenues and even rape. Some were comic and some merged with detective or even supernatural type stories. 

Romanian born publisher Harry Donenfield was the man behind Saucy Movie Tales, Pep Stories, Saucy Stories and others,  Norman Saunders had been working for another publisher, Fawcett, in Chicago, before moving to New York and Donenfield's magazines.

Not wanting to upset his previous publisher, in case he needed to go back there, he used the pseudonym  Carl Blaine (an artist friend's first name and Saunders' middle name) to use on the Donenfeld Publishing covers, hence the Blaine signature visible on these paintings.

Saunder's publisher, Harry Donenfeld, had just avoided a prison sentence having been charged by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice with producing obscene periodicals, including Spicy Stories and Pep Stories.

Although, Norman Sunders would go on to paint many pulp covers, these ones were some of his earliest and were his most racy. Born in rural Minnesota, at the age of three his eye was badly injured and he needed multiple operations to restore the sight in his eye. After he recovered his sight he took to drawing. He turned down a scholarship to the Chicago Art Institute when he was offered the job at Fawcett Publishing,  In the early thirties he did some splendid pulp technology covers for Popular Mechanics, featuring seaplanes, flying tanks and such like.  

He was starting, as a freelance, to sell paintings to other publishers and by 1940 he had painted more than 400 pulp covers. By this time, Saunders was working in the conventional magazine (slicks) market but the war brought an end to this part of his life. He was drafted into the army and after some time in the military police was trained to paint military facilities with camouflage paint!

After the war he married one of his models, Ellena Politis, and having struggled with working with the slicks went back to pulp magazines, producing over 400 more cover paintings. His total of 867 pulp covers made him the most prolific pulp cover artist of all time. 

 After 1960, and his last pulp cover, he worked for trading card companies (he painted the original Mars Attacks cards), men's adventure magazines, and did comic book and paperback cover work. In the mid-sixties he did a lot of illustrations which featured dastardly Nazis, their female captives and the odd Nazi vixen, which I will look at another time.

Hatching girl by Georges Pavis

This illustration appeared in saucy French magazine La Vie Parisienne in 1926.  It was the work of Georges Pavis (1886-1977) who sold his first illustrations at the age of nine.  He studied at l'École des beaux-arts but was drafted into the army during the Great War, where he was badly injured at Verdun.  After the war he provided illustrations for all the main French magazines, as well as books.

Spaceships by Tim White

This afternoon my eye was caught by a click bait article on the Star Wars sequel novel Splinter of the Minds Eye by Alan Dan Foster. This was written as the story of a possible low budget Star Wars sequel before George Lucas realised he had a major hit on his hands.  Foster, because he did a lot of film novelisations, was regarded as a hack writer by the 'proper' science fiction community but I enjoyed several of his books when I was. admittedly, a teenager.

Monument (1974)

I used to read almost exclusively science fiction from about the age of eight, much of it more advanced reading age wise than my age at the time and there is no doubt it helped me in my English lessons at school, despite the derision it was held in by teachers (especially by the time I reached senior school and the books' reading age started to dip below where I was supposed to be).  I grew out of science fiction by the time I was about seventeen, when I discovered how to explore a much more exotic fantasy world; girls. 

Yes, it's that Gary Chalk, of wargames scenery and Battlecars fame, mentioned as a contributing artist!

Anyway, then as now, I have always had  a primarily visual, rather than a literary, sensibility (much to my sister's despair) and the mid seventies saw a burgeoning of UK science fiction book cover artists. At about the same time, New English Library launched Science Fiction Monthly (1974-1976) a broadsheet loose leaf magazine which featured novel cover art in big poster sized reproductions.  It was through this that I became familiar with many of the artists of the time like Chris Foss, Bruce Pennington and Tim White.  Although Foss (who, amusingly, did the illustrations for The Joy of Sex) was the master of the massive floating bricks style of spaceships I found White's work much more atmospheric.  He really did create whole worlds in his paintings.

Stopwatch (1975)

White was born in 1952 and he studied at Medway College of Art. In 1972 he started working at a number of advertising studios while doing fantasy and SF illustrations in his spare time.  In 1974 he got his first book cover illustration commission, for an Arthur C Clarke novel and became a freelance illustrator shortly afterwards.  His pictures from this period were very accomplished, given he was still only in his early twenties.

Icerigger (1975)

Back to Alan Dean Foster and it was his cover for that author's Icerigger which really was the definitive science fiction cover for me at the time.  It really stood out on WH Smith's bookshelves and it was probably the first book I bought on the basis of the cover alone.  Unlike Foss, although he was, of course, an able illustrator of the human form (especially beardy men and hirsute women) whose SF pictures rarely included human figures, White often depicted people in his paintings which gave them a human scale.

The Legend of GX 118 (1974)

All of these pictures appeared in Science Fiction Monthly and I think I had most of them up on my wall at some point. They really are some of my favourite SF illustrations of spaceships ever.

Wandering Worlds (1975)

I've always toyed with the idea of some sort of science fiction wargaming, especially as I read lots of SF and hardly any fantasy fiction but while I have played Warhammer and Lord of the Rings I have never played a SF game, although I have bought some Warhammer 40000 figures in the past but just didn't like the figures very much.  It was the Spacemarines flared trousers that put me off, primarily.  Still, maybe one day!

Pirates by Norman Lindsay

Captured (1938)

Anyone who has seen the enjoyable 1993 film Sirens will be familiar with the work of Australian painter Norman Lindsay (as depicted by Sam Neill in the film) but perhaps less so with his pirate paintings.  Lindsay scattered voluptuous naked women across his canvasses like so many ripe fruit on a Caribbean market stall.  

Pirates Reward

Pirates were one of Lindsay's favourite subjects but, of course, he couldn't resist filling his canvases with gorgeously curvy women as well.  So, in his paintings Lindsay's pirates seem more interested in collecting women than loot.

Pirates Return (1940)

Lindsay said of his pirate pictures:  "The pirate is a colourful ruffian and I have frequently got good subjects out of his sacking of cities for plunder in gold and women. He also gives me shipboard scenes to paint which call for a good deal of technical knowledge of ship construction. Also, there is this peculiar appeal in the pirate as the scoundrel adventurer, risking his neck if the law catches up with him... I have never painted a piratical subject that has not been snatched up by buyers when exhibited. I am constantly asked to paint pirates. As I never take commissions, I only paint pirates when a composition suggests itself."

Norman Lindsay and his mistress Rose Soady. Kensington 1909

Lindsay took the maritime technical aspects seriously and spent many hours making and rigging model ships, which he sometimes used as source material for his paintings.  This was something he became interested in after sketching ship models in museums in Kensington, during a trip to London, in 1909.

Rose Lindsay (1885-1978)

One of his principal models was his second wife Rose, who had modelled for him from 1902 before becoming his mistress and then later his wife, when he divorced his first wife in 1918.

 Ladies for Ransom (1938)

These two paintings were done in 1938 and 1940, coincidentally (or perhaps not) at the same time some of the biggest Hollywood pirate films were released.  The pirates here have coralled a positive cornucopia of female loot, from haughty Spanish Donnas to feisty dusky-skinned locals.  Lots of biting and scratching is predicted from this lot.

The Pirates Return (1940)

In contrast, this picture sees the pirates' women welcoming back their men after an expedition on the high seas.  If these ladies were captives then we seem to have seen a Caribbean equivalent of Stockholm Syndrome (Santo Domingo Syndrome?) here.  You can bet that the blonde in the centre just has to be the English Governor's daughter (they're always the worst) although her Spanish equivalent on the right is obviously keen to supplant her in the pirate captain's affections.

The Legatus is very jealous of Lindsay's life; spending your days drawing lovely women in your beautiful home in the countryside, making model ships and living to the age of ninety.  A pirates life for me!

Witches going to their Sabbath by Luis Ricardo Falero

Witches going to their Sabbath (1878)

This painting by the Andalusian artist Luis Ricardo Falero (1851-1896) is, without doubt, the greatest painting of witches!  Not only does it feature some of the most voluptuously gorgeous witches ever (the witch in the foreground could raise the dead) but it has bats, a skeletal pelican, flying monsters, ghouls and a goat.

Witches going to their Sabbath, study

Falero studied in Paris (having walked there from Spain) giving up a position in the Spanish Navy.  He eventually settled in London and died there at the young age of forty-five.  

Study of a witch

Falero's painting almost always contained naked or near naked women and often in a fantastical way ,as with his witches.  Ignoring, on the whole, the wizened crones of earlier times, Falero's witches were all curvaceous, gorgeous women.

Festival of the Witches (1880)

Two points on broom etiquette can be noted in the two paintings above.  Firstly, the witches' brooms are shown as flying brush first, which was the normal way before the more recent rocket-like brush at the rear depiction.  Secondly, his witches avoid any tasteless, sitting astride the broomstick, poses.   In fact this witch is decorously riding side-saddle!

The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers by Félix Philippoteaux

This painting is by Felix Philippoteaux (1815-1884) s called 'The Battle of Waterloo: The British Squares Receiving the Charge of the French Cuirassiers'. I had a postcard of this when I was a boy, which my father bought me on a visit to Apsley House (where it is displayed) in about 1971. I loved it, of course, because it showed those Airfix Napoleonic favourites; Cuirassiers and Highlanders. Philippoteaux was only born in 1815 and this painting wasn't completed until 1874, many years after the battle of which it captures the quintessence.

Philippoteaux collaborated with his son Paul on a vast (more than a hundred yards long) cyclorama of the Battle of Gettysburg . Since lost, several more copies were made including the one in the Gettysburg visitors centre

Home of the future by Syd Mead

This is not visual futurist Syd Mead's  most visually striking, ambitious or creative piece but for me it creates a whole retro-future world in one image. A world where you come home from work, in your sleek Sentinel car, to be greeted by a Symphony Angel lookalike dressed in a yellow, belly-baring trouser suit, matching gloves and boots and sitting on a yoga mat. It is an exercise in perspective, more than anything else, but the sleek. modular (the picture was done for a planned book for US Steel), modernistic house, built around the rocks and the trees. speak of a clean, glittering alternative future. I love this picture! Produced in 1970.

Ruins at Uxmal by Frederick Catherwood

This scene of Mayan ruins in Yucatan by the English artist and architect Frederick Catherwood (1799-1854) is a favourite and has been since I first saw this picture in a book on archaeology I was given for my tenth birthday.  This tiny book by CW Ceram, which is about the size of a postcard, captured my imagination from the start and no pictures more so than the mystery and atmosphere in Catherwood's illustration.

Catherwood's illustrated books, following his travels in Central America, introduced people to the civilisation of the Mayans, in the 1840s.  Later he ran a store  in San Francisco selling supplies to California gold rush miners.  

SS Arctic

He drowned, at the age of 55, when travelling on the American ship, the SS Arctic from Liverpool to New York, after the Arctic was struck by a French ship in poor visibility.  The ship sank slowly but there was no women and children first on board, with the six lifeboats mostly filled by the crew who ,ignoring discipline, crowded into them at the expense of the passengers, of whom only 28 were saved. No women or children survived and there was no subsequent enquiry.  Calls for the number of lifeboats to be able to hold all the passengers and crew of ships were ignored.

Beyond the Solar System by Chesley Bonestell

This painting is by the hugely influential illustrator Chesley Bonestell (1888-1986). When I was about nine or ten I got Willy Ley's book Beyond the Solar System (1964) from the library, purely because of this wonderful painting, used as the cover picture. 

Probably his most well known painting was one that was only a sketch, which he did for the film When Worlds Collide (1951), in which a rogue star destroys the Earth and scientists build a space ark to take a select few to the planet Zyra, which orbits it.  

In the final scene the spaceship lands on the planet and the explorers look out on what should have been a, no doubt, splendid matte painting by Bonestell. Unfortunately the producers refused to cough up the cash for the final painting and just used Bonestell's sketch instead. It should have looked so much better!

Bonestell's hugely influential pictures of spaceflight speak of a cool, clean, gleaming future that never was.

Lake Keitele by Akseli Gallen-Kallela

This is a 1905 painting of Lake Keitele in Finland by Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1865-1931). This wonderful painting is in the National Gallery in London. 

Portrait of Sibelius 1894

Best known for his paintings of Finnish mythology, which often end up on the covers of Sibelius CDs, he painted the man himself in a famous portrait done in 1894.

Démasquée (1888)

He also designed Finland's army uniforms after the Finnish Civil War in 1919. After naked ladies, the Legatus probably appreciates Baltic landscapes, as a genre, the most, although Gallen-Kallela could produce a sensuous naked lady when he wanted to, as in this example doe during the decade he lived in Paris.

The Plains of Heaven by John Martin

It’s Art Friday! I remember first seeing this painting by John Martin (1789-1854) on a school Art trip to the Tate Gallery in 1976. The most famous exhibit at the time was Carl Andre’s Equivalent VII (the ‘pile of bricks’). My best friend O and I were not impressed by the latter and hatched a plot to relocate one of the bricks to the gallery cafe but were, perhaps fortunately, spotted by a security guard before we had touched one. 

Although his paintings fell out of favour, he influenced many others from the Pre-Raphaelites to film producers, including DW Griffith, the French Romantics and even his friend Brunel, who based some of his railway bridge designs on Martin's work.

Painted between 1851 and 1853 this vast (2.4 x 3.5 metres) painting was more to my taste, to the extent that I bought a large and expensive poster of it in the shop there. No reproduction really does it justice and you really have to see the actual painting to get the full effect (it had only been left to the Tate in 1974). 

The The 2nd Prussian Infantry Regiment assaulting Plancenoit by Carl Röchling

This is one of my favourite Napoleonic Wars subject paintings, by German artist Carl Röchling (1855 – 1920). It depicts the 2nd Prussian Infantry Regiment, the 1st Pommeranian, assaulting Plancenoit during the Battle of Waterloo. Born in Saarbrücken, he studied from 1875 to 1880 in the Karlsruhe Academy of Arts  and later in the Prussian Academy of Arts.  He specialised in military paintings, especially those featuring the Prussian Army, and the Franco-Prussian war in particular, but also did some paintings of  American Civil War battles.

I first saw this painting on the cover of my copy of Albert Nofi’s The Waterloo Campaign and it had a lot to do with my buying a box of Perry plastic Prussians!

Brasenose College by Claude Buckle

This is a picture of my college at Oxford, Brasenose, by railway poster art master Claude Buckle (1905-1973). Originally trained as an architect, between 1932 and 1963 he produced dozens of posters for the railways, together with a number of those panoramic pictures that I can remember used to brighten up railway carriages when I was small.

Old Quad at Brasenose offers the finest view in Oxford, looking out over the dome of the Radcliffe Camera and St Mary's, the university church.  Dating from 1509 the third storey of the quad was added in the seventeenth century,

RMS Queen Mary by William McDowell

This poster of the Queen Mary, featuring  a painting  by William McDowell (1888-1950) was produced in 1938 for Cunard.  McDowell started working in the drawing office of  Vickers shipyard in Barrow-in- Furness. He became a full time artist after Word War 1 and worked on commissions for many of the great shipping lines at the time such as Cunard, Union Castle and White Star Line.

I haven't sailed on the Queen Mary (I'm not that old!) but I have had lunch on her!