Many authors are intertwined, in the minds of their readers, with the illustrators with whom those authors are most famously associated. Some of these associations are well-known even to the non-book-collecting public. Duos that might come immediately to mind, for example, are Dickens and Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne) or Carroll and Tenniel. Less well known, perhaps, are author-illustrator associations such as James Fenimore Cooper and F. O. C. Darly, which we examined briefly in last Friday's post.
One of the most important such associations, though little remembered today, paired America's most beloved poet with one of America's finest woodcut artists:
Robert Frost probably needs no introduction, even to today's general reader, who usually ignores poetry altogether, however gifted the poet. But the illustrator with whom Frost most often is associated, J. J. Lankes, has disappeared over the past several decades into undeserved obscurity.
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1884, Lankes came by his predilection for wood naturally -- his father, who worked at a lumber mill, often brought home scraps of wood with which the young Lankes would play. In 1917, Lankes produced his first woodcut, Flying Gosling, a harbinger of the nature themes with which most of Lankes' professional career as an artist would be concerned:
Although Lankes executed woodcuts for bookplates, greeting cards, portfolios such as Virginia Woodcuts (from whence derive the images below) and a variety of other purposes...
...almost 10% of the 1350+ woodcuts that he executed over a career spanning four+ decades were connected with the poetry of Robert Frost. As a recent exhibition of the Frost-Lankes' collaborations points out,
Robert Frost and J.J. Lankes' forty years of friendship and collaboration began in 1923 when Frost first saw a print by Lankes and then chose him to illustrate his poem "Star Splitter" for The Century Magazine. Although this event served as their formal introduction, Lankes was already familiar with Frost's poetry, and had even drawn on it for inspiration in some of his early prints. Welford D. Taylor, a prominent Lankes scholar, describes the appreciation that the poet and the printmaker had for each other's work: "What had impressed each man was a recognition of the aesthetic and thematic values he shared with the other -- a 'coincidence of taste,' as Frost put it. Both based much of their work on rural subjects, employed understatement and symbol and explored the question of human significance in the over-all scheme of nature...."
In addition to his well-regarded illustrations of Frost's poetry, Lankes executed woodcuts for the works of a number of other authors as well:
As can be seen from the above titles, Lankes was as well regarded in his day for his architectural woodcuts as for those inspired by nature. In fact, his personal favorite among the many woodcuts he executed was a series he did of Pennsylvania Dutch barns for a projected (though, sadly, never published) book.
Of course, to fully grasp the extent of Lankes' talent, one should collect not only the many books he illustrated, but also the many stand-alone prints that he executed. Sunday Afternoon, for example, was published by the American Artists Group in 1936 (image via Art of the Print):
The detail in many of Lankes' woodcuts is fine enough that a cursory glance often mistakes them for wood engravings rather than the woodcuts that they are....
Recent Comments