Anton Otto Fischer

Story illustration for “Smoke Bellew” by Jack London for Cosmopolitan Magazine

1911

The marine paintings by Anton Otto Fischer are as authoritative as only a working sailor could make them.

Born in Munich, Germany, but orphaned as a boy, Fischer ran away to sea at 16 and spent eight years before the mast on a variety of sailing ships. Paid off in New York, he stayed to apply for American citizenship and to teach seamanship on the school ship, St. Mary's. He later served as a hand on racing yachts on Long Island Sound and worked as a model and handyman for the illustrator A.B. Frost. When he had saved enough money, he spent two years at the Académie Julian in Paris under Jean-Paul Laurens.

Returning to the United States, Fischer sold his first picture to Harper's Weekly in 1908, around the time he moved to Wilmington to receive critiques from Howard Pyle. Everybody's Magazine sent him the first of several Jack London stories. In 1910, he began a 48–year association with The Saturday Evening Post, which included illustrating serialized characters such as Peter B. Kyne's "Crappy Ricks," Norman Reilly Raine's "Tugboat Annie," Guy Gilpatrick's "Glencannon," as well as serials for Kenneth Robert and Nordhoff and Hall.

In 1942, he was given the rank of Lieutenant Commander as "Artist Laureate" for the United States Coast Guard and was assigned North Atlantic convoy duty on the Coast Guard cutter Campbell during the winter of 1943. The Campbell was disabled during a successful attack on a German U-boat, and Fischer's dramatic paintings of this experience were published by Life magazine. The pictures are now in the Coast Guard Academy at New London, Connecticut.

In 1947, Fischer wrote and illustrated a book about his earlier sailing years, entitled Focs'le Days: A Story of My Youth, published by Charles Scribner's Sons.

Find original Anton Otto Fischer paintings and prints on 1stDibs.

(Biography provided by The Illustrated Gallery)