So when Sir James George Frazer’s book titled  The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, landed on my doorstep, I was more than enthusiast about its cover design which depicts a superb white unicorn!

Thanks so much Mairiuna for keeping your eyes open.  Had it not been for you pointing me to this great book, I would have missed it big time. Cheers my friend!

The Golden Bough by J.G. Frazer - MacMillan (London) - 1983

I’m really hitting a home run here, as the subjects covered by Sir J.G. Frazer are all up my alley, especially his insights on Body Mind and Spirit, Folklore and Mythology, and Anthropology. What a dazzling seminal work this bulky 971 page book is!

Just to give you an idea of what The Golden Bough is all about, I quoted below excerpt from Wikipedia and Google Books:

The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion is a wide-ranging, comparative study of mythology and religion, written by Scottish anthropologist Sir James George Frazer (1854–1941).

It first was published in two volumes in 1890; the third edition, published 1906–15, comprised twelve volumes. It was aimed at a broad literate audience raised on tales as told in such publications as Thomas Bulfinch’s The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes (1855).

It offered a modernist approach to discussing religion, treating it dispassionately as a cultural phenomenon rather than from a theological perspective. The impact of The Golden Bough on contemporary European literature was substantial.

 

Text copies of the 1922 edition:

• The Golden Bough from eBooks @ Adelaide
• HTML version of The Golden Bough
• The Golden Bough at Project Gutenberg
• Download MP3 of this audio book for free at LibriVox

Source: Wikipedia.com

 

The Golden Bough project, like Frazer’s own imagination, was rooted in the Scotland whose religious controversies of the 1840′s put belief in religion to test both practical – in the establishment of the Free Church – and intellectual, in attempting to harmonize biblical Christianity with evolutionary concepts of human history.

Source: books.google.ca

Peter Goodfellow - Source: http://www.artsbank.co.uk

While investigating about the book,  I found out that the cover art designer was Peter Goodfellow, a well know painter and book cover illustrator that fell in love with Scotland, just as the team here at Scotiana did!

” (…) Fortunately his wife was also captivated by this country and has a great understanding of his consuming passion.

The viewer of his landscapes sees this passion at a glance. The vibrant colours are arresting and the mood which is set can bring a lump to the throat.Inspired by art movements as far reaching as the early Italian Renaissance and German Expressionism, Peter Goodfellow’s paintings divine a rich artistic heritage.

Living in a remote glen in North East Scotland, Goodfellow paints both figurative and landscape works.For Goodfellow, colour is the all important ingredient in his oils and water-colours.

He declares himself to be an ‘out and out colourist’,and often paints the same subject repeatedly to distil colour and form.”Raw colour can capture a sense of time and create a sense of mood and atmosphere” believes Goodfellow.

Often looking to the landscape as a subject matter for his paintings, Goodfellow deftly describes through his rich vocabulary of colour the extraordinary beauty and power of the natural world.”

Source: Art-FromScotland

You are invited to click on the image below if you wish to view some of the marvelous paintings from Peter Goodfellow’s portfolio hosted on The Lost Gallery, which he co-directs with his wife Jean in Bellabeg, approximately 40 miles west of Aberdeen, on the A944, near Strathdon, Aberdeenshire.

Source: http://www.lostgallery.co.uk (Click on the image)

Surprise…surprise!

Just got an email from Mairiuna sending along the dust jacket of the 1949 edition of Sir James Frazer’s book, as well as the informational note she received from the vendor:

This copy was acquired from the impressive private library of Film Director Roy Ward Baker and bears his name to the ffep. He started in the film industry as a gofar boy,but worked his way up to the level of as assistant director on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938).

He served in the Army during World War II, transferring to the Army Kinematograph Unit in 1943. One of his superiors at the time was novelist Eric Ambler who insisted on Baker being given his first big break directing The October Man, from an Ambler screenplay, in 1947.

Ambler also adapted Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember for Baker’s 1958 screen version.His next two films, The Weaker Sex and Paper Orchid (1949) were popular but overshadowed by the success of Morning Departure (1950), also featuring John Mills.

Baker worked for three years at Fox where he directed Marilyn Monroe in Don’t Bother to Knock 1952.

He returned to the UK in 1953 and continued to work on films.

Wow…thanks for sharing this gem of a book with us Mairiuna

Talk soon,

Janice

One of the many Ronald Searle's cat drawings

Pourquoi les dessinateurs dessinent-ils des chats ? Parce qu’ils les aiment.

(Le Monde 2012-01-10)

Hi everybody !

A few days ago, Iain and Margaret sent us this message from Scotland :

You probably know that the cartoonist Ronald Searle (whose death was announced today) is believed to have found the inspiration for his dreadful St. Trinian’s schoolgirls – wise far beyond their years! – in the real-life Edinburgh school, St. Trinean’s. Searle’s cartoons inspired in turn such films as (I think, Iain!) - The Belles of St. Trinian’s and The Pure Hell of St. Trinian’s, comedies of the 1950′s .. .. Searle, a war-prisoner of the Japanese, did much else, but is best remembered for his nubile schoolgirls! 

Ronald Searle's 2012 New Year card dedicated to his wife Monica who died in July 2011

Though he was living in France since 1961 and died at Draguignan on 30 December 2011, I must admit I knew nothing about Ronald Searle before our friends’s message triggered my curiosity . I soon got deeply immersed in the reading of a number of pages devoted to him on the web for many newspapers have paid tribute to the satirist whose drawings had made famous, in the 1940s, St Trinean’s  College.

Ronald Searle - The Terror of St Trinian's and Other Drawings - Modern Classics Penguin 30 november 2011

The school is the antithesis of the Enid Blyton or Angela Brazil-type posh girls’ boarding school; its pupils are wicked and often well armed, and mayhem is rife. The mistresses (as female teachers in Britain were known at the time) are also disreputable. Cartoons often showed dead bodies of girls who had been murdered with pitchforks or succumbed to violent team sports, sometimes with vultures circling; girls drank, gambled and smoked. It is reputed that the gymslip style of dress worn by the girls was closely modelled on the uniform of the school that Searle’s daughter Kate attended, JAGS in Dulwich. The films implied that the girls were the daughters of gangsters, crooks, shady bookmakers and other low-lifes and the institution is often referred to as a “female borstal”. (Source: Wikipedia)

GEE WIZZ,  as would say Janice,  how “dreadful” are St Trinian’s illustrations !

But, whether we like or not the devastating style Ronald Searle uses on his most famous cartoon it’s quite interesting to inquire about the artist’s life and works not only because of the large scope and graphic quality of his drawings but also because  St Trinian’s, which Michael McNay described as a ‘home of little monsters, wicked as sin’, happens to be set in Edinburgh…

St. Leonard's Hall, Pollock Halls of Residence, Edinburgh University - Source Wikipedia

The first full-blown St Trinian’s cartoon in Lilliput came after his release from Changi and was based on a real school (now defunct), St Trinean’s, in Edinburgh, which Searle had heard of when he was posted to Scotland during the phoney war. Much later, he turned down an invitation to stand for rector of Edinburgh University because, he said, he had done enough damage already to the city’s academic reputation.

 (Ronald Searle obituary by Michael McNay  (The Guardian 3 January 2012 )

The above photo shows the gothic style building, situated in Edinburgh, which once sheltered St Trinean’s, the old girls boarding school which inspired Ronald Searle’ for the drawing of   St Trinians…

Ronald Searle (March 3,1920-Dec 30,2011)

On ignore si cela déclencha sa vocation, mais toujours est-il que la main de Ronald Searle se lance sur le coup des cinq ans : “Toutes les possibilités que pouvaient me donner une simple plume, un simple crayon, exercèrent sur moi une sorte de fascination qui tourna vite à l’obsession. Personne ne s’intéressait particulièrement à mes dessins, personne ne semblait choqué par leur caractère spontanément grotesque. Tout cela paraissait bien naturel pour un garçon qui se servait de sa main gauche…” Car la main de ce gaucher ne courait pas sur la feuille, elle dansait. (Le Monde 2012-01-10)

Searle was born on March 3rd 1920 in Cambridge, England, where his father worked as railwayman. He started drawing at about 5 and after leaving school at 15 he trained at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology for two years. At the outbreak of WWII, he enlisted in the Royal Engineers, one of the corps of the British Army. He was soon made prisoner which didn’t prevent him from drawing. He survived the  “Death Railway“, the line built during WWII by the Empire of Japan between Bankgok, Thailand and Rangoon, Burma and during which more than 6,000 British workers died (and many others from other countries).

Railway of Death Ronald Searle - Source: Perpetua

I started this blog in 2006 as a fan of the work of Ronald Searle.  Dissatisfied by what was available online at the time I decided to do it myself!  Initially it began as a collection of choice scans from my collection of books illustrated by Ronald Searle.
Most of these books are out of print so I thought sharing them online might encourage a community of Searle fans to contribute too.  Over the past 4 years other fans have sent me interesting material, even Ronald Searle himself has passed photographs & videos to me from his personal archive.  The site has coalesced into a sprawling archive of Searle’s oeuvre which I someday hope to organize chronologically-for now the best I can do is point you to some of the main sections in the links list on the right. (Matt Jones, author of the blog Perpetua)

The sketchbooks Searle brought home from Changi constitute a remarkable document of survival in the face of the grossest inhumanity and are probably the best visual record of war in the Imperial War Museum; they formed the basis for a book, To the Kwai and Back: War Drawings 1939-45 (1986). His mastery of the fine balance between description and expression was by now fully achieved. He had become, almost incidentally, one of the finest topographical artists of the century. (The Guardian 3 January 2012 )

In 1947, Ronald Searle married the journalist Kaye Webb; they had twins, Kate and Johnny. In 1961, he moved to Paris, leaving his family and later marrying Monica Koenig, a painter, theatre and jewellery designer. After 1975, Searle and his wife lived and worked in the mountains of Haute Provence.

Ronald Searle worked for many magazines : Life, Holiday, Punch, The New Yorker, the Sunday Express, News Chronicle, Le Monde,  Le Figaro Littéraire…

Searle received many awards for his work,  he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004  and Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in 2007.

Let us watch the TV  interview he gave in 2010, on the eve of his 90th birthday…

Ronald Searle's illustration - The Fall of St. Trinian's

St Trinian’s became a national institution, to the point where Searle began to hate his creation. He said later that he had never drawn that many St Trinian’s cartoons but that the impression was abroad that he did little else. In fact, after the popular success of the novel The Terror of St Trinian’s (1952), Searle balked at producing another in the sequence and instead, with his friend Geoffrey Willans, a BBC journalist, he devised Nigel Molesworth, semi-literate antihero of Down With Skool (1953) and its sequels; the gentler humour (some said whimsical) seemed to suit Searle better and his public lapped it up.

(The Guardian 3 January 2012 )

Molesworth Geoffrey Wilans and Ronald Searle Penguin Modern Classics 2000

I would certainly prefer Ronald Searle’s ‘gentler humour’ and I definitely love his animal pets drawings

Dessin de Ronald Searle Source Télérama © Estate of Ronald Searle and the Sayle Literary Agency

Like this one I’ve found on the blog of Télérama ©Reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Ronald Searle and the Sayle Literary Agency.

The St Trinian's Story 1959,Perpetua Ltd.,London, first UK edition

Here’s the list of the St Trinian’s cartoons:

•     Hurrah For St Trinians, 1948
•     The Female Approach: The Belles of St. Trinian’s and Other Cartoons, 1950
•     Back To The Slaughterhouse, and Other Ugly Moments, 1951
•     The Terror of St Trinian’s, or Angela’s Prince Charming, 1952 (with Timothy Shy (D. B. Wyndham-Lewis))
•     Souls in Torment, 1953 (preface by Cecil Day-Lewis)
•     The St Trinian’s Story, 1959 (with Kaye Webb)
•     St Trinian’s: The Cartoons, 2007
•     St. Trinian’s: The Entire Appalling Business, 2008

They proved to be so successful that, in  the 1950s, a series of comedy films was made on the subject.  Two of these films featured Alastair Sim, the well-known Scottish actor who played Miss Fritton, the headmistress as well as her brother

The Belles of StTrinians - Alastair Sim - Film 1954

Here’s the list of St Trinian’s  films :

•     The Belles of St Trinian’s (1954, the first film)
•     Blue Murder at St Trinian’s (1957, the second film)
•     The Pure Hell of St Trinian’s (1960, the third film)
•     The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery (1966, the final film of the quartet)
•     The Wildcats of St Trinian’s (1980, with Maureen Lipman taking on the Joyce Grenfell role)
•     St Trinian’s (2007)
•     St Trinian’s 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009)

I’ve found on You Tube a video which gives a good idea of St Trinian’s atmosphere in The Belles of St Trinian’s film and of the talent of the Scottish actor who plays a double part in this film.

I’ve learned that though he was Scottish, Alastair Sim had turned down the lead role in Whisky Galore  saying that he couldn’t bear professional Scotsmen !

Alastair Sim

This is the theme from the original 1950s St. Trinians film from the original soundtrack, which starred Alastair Sim & George Cole, with Joyce Grenfell. The dual role of headmistress Millicent Fritton and her twin brother Clarence, was one of Alastair Sim’s most memorable performances, George Cole’s portrayal of Flash Harry was later to inspire His role as Arthur Daley in Minder. (You Tube summary)

Alastair Sim A Christmas Carol 1951

As Christmas is not far behind us I’d like to end my post on an extract from an old version of the film A Christmas Carol. Alastair Sim is at his best in this film !

Enjoy !

A bientôt. Mairiuna

Edmund Sullivan - Illustrator (1869-1933) Source: bpib.com

Hi Mairiuna! I just can’t wait to start creating the audios for the Rob Roy novel but before I get to that, I thought I would write this post in which I will introduce you to Edmund J Sullivan, the man behind the beautiful illustrations contained in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.

Born in London in 1869, he studied art with his father. He was only 20 years old when he began contributing to various magazines including the Daily Chronicle, The Daily Graphic, The Pall Mall Gazette and Punch magazine.

To give you an example of his unique style, take a look at this superb drawing to illustrate one of the characters of the book, Blumine. (page 169, of the 1898 George Bell and Sons edition of Sartor Resartus, see book cover at the end of the post)

Blumine (Illustration by Edmund J Sullivan) Sartor Resartus

Blumine is, “the siren who, Calypso-like, seduced Teufelsdroeckh at the commencement of his career, but who also helped him see that it is not in sentiment, however fine, that the soul’s cravings can find satisfaction”.

Each chapter heading in the book has a small illustration. For example, this is the one showing at the beginning of Book II, The Chapter I, titled “Genesis” . It clearly denotes the excellency of Edmund Sullivan’s art.

Click on the links below to view each of the 79 illustrations, I’m sure you’ll be impressed !

Many thanks to George P. Landow for taking time to scan each of the drawings and for extending permission to add to our site.

George P. Landow

• Thomas Carlyle [Frontispice]
• Heading to the Introduction
• Heading to List of Contents
• Heading to Testimonies of Authors — A Reviewer’s copy
• Herr Diogenes
• Initial to Chapter I [Preliminary]
• Initial to Chapter II [Editorial Difficulties]
• Truth and the Prince of Lies
• The Wandering Jew
• Night Thoughts
• Herr Hofrath Heuschrecke
• Initial to Chapter IV [Characteristics]
• “He could clasp the whole Universe into his bosom and keep it warm”
• “On the proposal for a cast-metal king”
• A Laugh
• The World in Clothes — Heading to Chapter V
• The Aboriginal Savage
• The Stone Age
• Initial to Chapter VI [Aprons]
• The Laystall
• Initial to Chapter VII [Miscellaneous-Historical]
• Miscellaneous Historical Costumes (1-4)
• Miscellaneous Historical Costumes (5)
• Teufelsdröckh Surveys — Heading to Chapter VIII
• Adamatism — Heading to Chapter IX
• “Red Hanging Individual” — Heading to Chapter X
• Aspiration
• Attorney Logic
• Chaos
• The Old Adam and Eve — Frontispiece to Volume II
• Initial to Chapter I [Genesis]
• “Father Andreas”
• Old Kunz, The Swinherd
• Initial to Chapter III [Pedagogy]
• The Schoolmaster of the Future
• Shams
• Mount Parnassus
• Heading to Chapter IV [Romance]
• Heading to Chapter V [Sorrows of Teufelosdröckh]
• Blumine
• The Heart of Teufelsdröckh — Tailpiece to Chapter V
• “Like Unto a Wheel” — Heading to Chapter VI
• Initial to Chapter VII [The Everlasting No]
• “Metaphysics”
• Initial to Chapter VIII [Centre of Indifference]
• Shams
• “The Storm Fiend” –Heading to Chapter IX
• “The Lines of Truth and Beauty” –Heading to Chapter X
• “The Satirical Philosopher” — Tailpiece to Book II
• “Adam and Eve (circa 1830)” — Frontispiece to Book III
• “Initial to Chapter I” [Incidents in Modern History]
• “Initial to Chapter II” [Church-Clothes]
• “Initial to Chapter III” ["Symbols"]
• “A Fool’s Paradise”
• “Heading to Chapter IV” [Helotage]
• “A Peasant Saint”
• “Initial to Chapter V [The Phoenix]“
• “The Symbol Shop”
• “Initial to Chapter VI [Old Clothes]“
• “Teufelsdröckh’s Reverence for Empty Clothes”
• “In Monmouth Street”
• “The Bedlam of Creation”
• Initial to Chapter VIII” [Organic Filaments]
• Organic Filaments
• “Initial to Chapter VIII” [Natural Supernaturalism]
• “Time and Death — Tailpiece to Chapter VIII”
• “Initial to Chapter IX” [Circumspective]
• “The Real and the Ideal”
• “Initial to Chapter X” [The Dandiacal Body]
• “The Dandies’ Holy of Holies”
• “The Beggars’ March”
• “Initial to Chapter XI” [Tailors]
• “Sic Itur as Astra”
• “The Philsopher’s Pen — Heading to Chapter XII”
• “Finis Coronat Opus” — Tailpiece
• “Tailpiece to the Index”

George Bell & Sons Edition - 1898

Sartor Resartus Illustration by Edmund J Sullivan

The earliest known work for Edmund Sullivan is the image he did for the Society of Illustrators founded by Joseph Pennell in 1895, A London Garland.

Other Illustration Works

French Revolution-Thomas Carlyle-1837

The Pirate - Waverley novels - Walter Scott

Tom Brown’s Schooldays by Thomas Hughes (1896)

The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1896)

The Pirate by Walter Scott (1898)

A Dream of Fair Women and Other Poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson (1900)

A Modern Utopia by H. G. Wells (1905)

The French Revolution by Thomas Carlyle (1910)

Talk soon.

Janice