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St. John art in # 4 of |
J. Allen St. John began his artistic career in 1898. He was born in 1875 (around the time of Franklin Booth, Ivan Bilibin, J.C. Leyendecker and Gordon Grant). When he was eight years old, he went with his mother to spend several years in Paris where she studied art. His early years are rather vague, but Darrell C. Richardson, in his indispensable J. Allen St. John: An Illustrated Bibliography, reprints this data from a catalog of The American Academy of Art:
J. Allen St. John
Life Drawing and Illustration "Studied at Art Students League of New York under William M. Chase, F.V. Du Mond, George de Forest Brush, H. Siddons Mowbray, Carrol Beckwith, and Kenyon Cox; in Paris with Jean Paul Laurens; in Belgium and Holland with Henri Vierin."
early St. John art from March 1898 issue of Harpers Monthly
The
matriculation at Art Students League seems to have occured
from 1897 to 1900. From 1901 to 1903 he was an instructor at
the Chase School of Art. By 1898 St. John was working commercially
in New York for the New York Herald to possibly as late
as 1918. From 1906 to 1908 he returned to France, studying at
the Academy Julian with Laurens. He moved to Chicago circa
1912 where he immediately got work doing magazine covers (see
left) and began a long relationship with the publisher A.C. McClurg
& Co. The actual relationship started in 1905 with the publication
of The Face in the Pool. This book, written and illustrated
by St. John, was a "Faerie Tale" that really didn't
work. It had b&w illustrations very obviously influenced
by Howard Pyle (reproduced in full in ImageS B&W #4) and four color plates that wandered all over the
stylistic map (see image at right). Whatever its merits as a
book, it marks the first collaboration of St. John and McClurg.
It just might be that because the company was willing to publish
the first book of a young, untested artist that St. John was
willing to move to Chicago and devote so much of his efforts
to them.
In
1915, McClurg hired him to provide small b&w chapter headings
for the second novel in a new series by a little-known author
named Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was The Return of Tarzan
and had originally been serialized in seven issues of New Story
magazine in late 1913, two with cover illustrations by N.C. Wyeth
- one of which was used on the dj of the McClurg edition. The
next novel in the series, The Beasts of Tarzan, was a St.
John extravaganza. He painted the color wrap-around dust jacket,
and provided a b&w frontispiece and title page illustrations
plus 38 pen & ink drawings in text. A new novel appeared every
year for two decades and every one featured St. John art: St.
John dust jackets and St. John b&w interior illustrations.
Some were pen & ink, others, like the one at left from the
1920 Tarzan the Untamed, were b&w reproductions of
paintings. Early on he illustrated other books like King Arthur
and His Knights (1916) for Rand McNally, another Chicago firm,
but McClurg books and teaching at the Chicago Art Institute
and later the American Academy of Art seemed to occupy
the majority of his time.
So many of the pen & ink drawings were reproduced within
the text, on the same barely-adequate paper. When Russ Cochran
published the 1976 first volume of the Library of Illustration,
I can't convey how grateful I was to see these illustrations reproduced
on coated paper, from the originals! The sample above right is
taken from that volume. It's impossible to overstate the impact
these illustrations had on a generation of artists. Frazetta, Krenkel, Williamson, Crandall, and others all
felt the aptness of the style to the adventure image.
When
the flow of Tarzan and Pellucidar and Mars
and Venus stories ceased in 1936, and the demand for book
illustrations faded, he had already found another outlet for
his prolific paint brush: the Pulps! During the
late teens and '20s, he'd provided some covers for Blue Book
and art for The Green Book and The Red Book Magazine,
all from Chicago's Story-Press Corp. The late 30s found his work
in The Boy's World and the '40s were spent primarily on
or in various and sundry pulps from Chicago-based Ziff-Davis,
like Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures. When
the pulps faded out around 1950, he dabbled in covers for some
of the digests, like Mystic (11/53) at left.
In 1916, The Beasts of Tarzan was just one of a half-dozen
books that St. John was called upon to illustrate. There was no
reason to believe that it would be any different than The Boss
of the Lazy Y or The Corner Stone or Alice in Wonderland
(I've never seen a copy, but I'll bet it's marvelous), also from
that year. He was still very vigorously pursuing book illustrations
throughout the teens and early 20s according to the entries in
Richardson's Bibliography. Something about the Burroughs
subject matter resonated with St. John, but there were many other
authors who had multiple books with his dust jackets and/or art:
Robert Ames Bennet (6), Ray Cummings (2), Marvin Dana (2), Byron
Dunn (3), Oscar J. Friend (4), Edgar A. Guest (10), W.D. Hoffman
(8), Margaret Hill McCarter (3), L. Curry Morton (4), George W.
Ogden (5), Randall Parrish (2), Robert E. Pinkerton (2), Charles
Alden Selzer (2), Edith Van Dine [L. Frank Baum] (2), and Dillon
Wallace (3). Many of these were Westerns. So it's a mistake to
view him as simply "the Burroughs artist." In fact,
Cochran speculates, and I concur, that had he not been so closely
associated with ERB, western fiction and the "outside of
New York" McClurg, he could easily have developed a classical
reputation as one of the period's great illustrators. He's conspicuously
absent from the great books on American illustration by the Reeds
and Pitz.
He was a teacher at the Chicago Art Institute from 1917-1935 and with the American Academy of Art from 1935 until his death in 1957.
Learn more about J. Allen St. John in the following
books:
| J. Allen St. John | Stan Vinson in The World of Comic Art V1:2, 1966 |
| The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library of Illustration - Volume 1 | Russ Cochran, 1976 Russ Cochran |
| J. Allen St. John: An Illustrated Bibliography | Darrell C. Richardson, 1991 Mid-America |
| The Vadeboncoeur Collection of Knowledge | Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. 1998 |
| The Vadeboncoeur Collection of ImageS B&W 4 | Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. 2008 JVJ Publishing |
|
Illustrations are copyright by their
respective owners. This page written, designed & © 1998 by Jim Vadeboncoeur, Jr. Updated 2011. |
