Herbert Paus

Men in Martial Dress

Story Illustration Herbert Paus was a native of Minneapolis and got his first job as a cartoonist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. Ambitious to become an illustrator, he enrolled in the Fine Arts School there, and later found employment in a Chicago art studio. Eventually, he moved to New York where he became a freelance illustrator. Paus had a strong sense of design, which was ideally suited to posters. He was a member of the Government’s committee on pictorial publicity during World War I, and painted many effective posters to support the war effort. This approach, combined with a striking use of vivid color, was carried over into his magazine illustrations and cover designs for such magazines as Woman’s Home Companion, American Magazine, The Youth’s Companion, and Collier’s. Among his many outstanding book illustrations were those for Maurice Maeterlinck’s play “Betrothal” as told for children entitled Tyltyl. Paus also painted for such advertisers as Hart, Schaffner & Marx, Goodyear, General Motors, Certain-teed, and Victor Records...

Man holding a sword. Louis Glanzman was an American-born artist popular for his works about American history. As a self-taught artist, Glanzman started his career illustrating comic books at the age of 16. During the 1950s, he became noticed for his illustrations of the popular Pippi Longstocking...

A naturalistic oil painting depicting two soldiers wearing regalia with a black horse. The scene is set in on a farm in a rural landscape. The paining measures 6.25 x 6.75 inches. ...

Bernhard Pankok (1872 Münster - 1943 Baierbrunn), General Wilhelm von Blume, 1915, aquatint etching, 34 x 29.5 cm (sheet size), 26 x 22 cm (plate size), signed in the plate at upper left, in pencil at lower right and dated in pencil at lower left. - At lower left old collection stamp, at the right broad margin with a small spot, otherwise very good condition. About the artwork The 1915 aquatint etching of General Wilhelm von Blume is based on a 1912 oil painting in the LWL-Museum für Kunst und Kultur in Münster. A second oil portrait of the general by Pankok is in the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. When Pankok painted the first oil portrait in 1912, the general had already been retired for 16 years. It is therefore a retrospective portrait. Accordingly, the orientation of his head is such that he is looking back in both the oil painting and the etching. Without fixing on anything in particular, he looks thoughtfully inwards and reflects on his life. Uniformed and highly endowed, it is his military activities in particular that he is reviewing attentively and, as his gaze reveals, quite critically. Pankok has literally written the sum of his experiences on Wilhelm von Blume's face: The physiognomy is a veritable landscape of folds, furrows, ridges and gullies, all the more striking against the flat background. It is clear that each of the medals was also won through suffering. However, by breaking the boundaries of the picture, his bust appears as an unshakable massif, which gives the general a stoic quality. The fact that the design of the portrait was important to Pankok can be seen from the different versions, the present sheet being the third and probably final revision, which Pankok dates precisely to 18 February 1915. Compared with the previous state, the light background now has a dark area against which the sitter's face stands out, the dark background in turn combining with the uniform to create a new tension in the picture. Pankok's taking up of the portrait of the high-ranking military veteran and its graphic reproduction can also be seen in relation to the First World War, which had broken out in the meantime. In the face of modern weapons of mass destruction, Wilhelm von Blume's warfare and military writings were relics of a bygone, more value-oriented era. About the artist After studying at the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1889 to 1891 under Heinrich Lauenstein, Adolf Schill, Hugo Crola, and Peter Janssen the Elder, Bernhard Pankok went to Munich in 1892, where he worked primarily as a graphic artist for the two major Jugendstil magazines "Pan" and "Jugend," which established his artistic success. Through this work he met Emil Orlik, with whom he had a lifelong friendship. In 1897, he exhibited his first furniture, and in 1898, together with Richard Riemerschmid, Bruno Paul and Hermann Obrist...