Monster Pendants, 1582

Series of Monster Pendant engravings with Adriaen Collaert and Hans Collaert (I) attributed as printmakers, published by Philip Galle in 1582.

Example of one of the  pendants from which the engravings are based, dated somewhere in the 16th century.

Engravings found at the Rijks Musuem.

Frank Cheyne Papé

Illustration from Don Quixote Retold by Ronald D.K. Storer, 1961

Illustration accompanying the poem "O Where Are You Going" by W.H. Auden

Endpapers for James Branch Cabell's Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, 1921

Illustration from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, 1921

Illustration from James Branch Cabell's Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice, 1921

Illustration from Penguin Island by Anatole France, 1926

Artworks found at ajl, The George Macy Imagery, Power of Babel, and Enrique Freeque's Forum.

More artwork by Frank Cheyne Pape can be found in this previous post on Monster Brains.

A biography and list of books that Pape contributed art for can be found at Wikipedia. 

William Holbrook Beard (1824 - 1900)

Power of Death, 1889-90

The Discovery Of Adam, 1891

It Rains It Shines, The Devil Whipping His Wife, 19th C

The Fox Hunter's Dream, 1859

The Witche's Ride, 1870

School Rules, 1887

Bear Carousal, 1870

Divorce, 19th C

The Four Seasons, Winter, 19th C

Minerva Reflecting, 1870

"William Holbrook Beard (1824-1900), was born into a family of portrait, animal, landscape, and genre painters in the small town of Painesville, Ohio, near Cleveland. He is best known for his satiric genre scenes featuring animals as stand-ins for human beings behaving badly. He frequently used bears as protagonists. The present work is less anecdotal, and more hauntingly compelling than many of his satirical works. In the upper scene, an innocent child has happened upon a peculiar wooden grate on the ground in a clearing of a misty field. Noises from below the strange construction attracted the child's attention and led him to kneel down and listen. In the lower, underground scene, which is rendered in an entirely different palette of earth tones and fiery furnace reds, Beard has painted a scene of a devil flogging his wife. Reminiscent of the work of Salvator Rosa, the subject is doubtless related to a literary source, but has a painterly rather than illustrational quality.

Basically self-taught, the young artist began his career painting with his older brother James Henry Beard, and then worked for several years as an itinerant portraitist in his home state. He moved to New York City in 1845, but by 1850 left the larger metropolis for Buffalo. There he established a studio and became close to a group of successful artists including portraitist Thomas LeClear (whose daughter he married) and Swedish-born landscapist Lars Gustave Sellstedt, Buffalo's principal mid-century painter. Beard remained in Buffalo until 1856, the year he left for a two-year tour of Europe. He traveled extensively, and met and painted with many American artists including Emanuel Leutze, Sanford Gifford, Worthington Whittredge, and Albert Bierstadt. Upon his return to the United States, he spent two more years in Buffalo before settling into apartments in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, home to many of the nation's most celebrated painters. After his return from Europe, Beard concentrated upon satirical animal subjects. As William Gerdts has noted, "One of his most characteristic and controversial of such paintings was his March of Silenus (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York), a classical theme reinterpreted with a drunken bear attended by an entourage of goats, which led to the artist's election as National Academician in 1862."

In 1866, he traveled West by train to explore the landscape, and in Colorado his companion was Bayard Taylor, a writer and lecturer. During the trip, he wrote home to his wife that the landscape was monotonous, that he was disappointed in seeing so few buffalo, and the life out West was too hard. As a result of the trip, his wanderlust was sated, and he turned increasingly to his imagination as the source of inspiration for the habits and environments of his wildlife subjects. Many of his later paintings showed animals as physically realistic but atypical in terms of their behavior." - quote source

Artworks found at Heritage Auctions and Sotheby's.

William Holbrook Beard was previously shared on Monster Brains in 2008. 

Monster Patch Designs Available

3 original patch designs are now available in my store.

There is the head of a troll, a demon and a ghoul, printed on linen cotton canvas with high quality inks.  Each patch measures around 10 1/2 x 12 inches.










 

The Master of the Fertility of the Egg

Opera Nova Curiosa,  1695

A Concert Of Animals, Birds and Stylised Figures, Late 17th - Early 18th Century

Grotesque Scene With Animals, Late 17th- early 18th Century


"Maestro della Fertilità dell'Uovo or Master of the Fertility of the Egg is the name given to a yet to be identified painter active in the second half of the 17th and early 18th century in Brescia. The name is based on a work entitled La fertilità dell' Uovo (The Fertility of the Egg), which depicts dwarfs, geese and lobsters hatching eggs and is in the collection of the Milwaukee Art Museum.

The art historian Mariolina Olivera was the first to isolate a group of works by this master in her 1990 monograph Faustino Bocchi e l'arte di figurar pigmei. She placed the master in the circle of Faustino Bocchi, an artist active in Brescia around the same time and known for his genre paintings with dwarfs. The master’s oeuvre distinguishes itself from Bocchi’s more dreamlike work through its biting, satirical edge.

The identity of the Master of the Fertility of the Egg has yet to be determined. Some art historians have suggested he was Bernardino Dehò (1675-1717) from Cremona while others have pointed at Angelo Esseradts, known as ‘il Fiammingo’ (the Fleming), whose name was also Italianised as Everardi. Everardi was Bocchi’s teacher and introduced the bizarre and grotesque elements of Flemish art to Brescia.

The works of this master typically depict grotesque figures (usually dwarfs) and animals engaging in various human activities. The works generally ignore space and are characterized by strong foreshortening. The figures are often portrayed in profile and stand out against the dark, mostly flat backgrounds. This gives them the impression of being cut out.  The persons and animals in the compositions engage in disorganised actions and reactions. The compositions are full of absurd and grotesque elements and it is often difficult to make out what exactly is going on^. The master’s raucous style appears to constitute some form of 'moral zoology'. The absurd characters are possibly intended to show the madness of the human condition, and the vanity and ridiculousness of life." - quote source



Artworks found at Sotheby's 

The Torments of Hell (The Last Judgement) 1560-1600

Cornelis Bos - Allegorical Depiction of Hell, 16th Century

"Cornelis [Willem] Bos (c. 1506/10 — before 7 May 1555) was a Flemish engraver, printseller and book publisher, through whose images after paintings and reproducing ancient Roman sculptures, like the Laocoön, classic works were put in the visual repertory of Northern European artists. His work is often signed with the monogram C-B.

Cornelis was born at 's Hertogenbosch, whence his surname Bos is derived, but on 1 April 1541 he was enregistered as a citizen of Antwerp, where he was therefore already established as a member of the imagemakers' Guild of Saint Luke. His earliest identified engravings (1537) reproduce Maarten van Heemskerck's Prudence and Justice (1537). and a work by Agostino Veneziano. His re-engraving of work by Marcantonio Raimondi does not necessarily indicate that he ever made a trip to Rome. Until 1544 Bos worked in Antwerp as an engraver, commissioned by publishers in the city's extensive book trade for illustrations in books. His engravings, copied from the published engravings in Italian editions, served as illustrations for a brief summary in Dutch of the treaty on architecture by Vitruvius and for a Dutch translation of Book IV of Sebastiano Serlio's architectural treatise, both published by Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Bos' engravings illustrate a text on anatomy that he produced in 1542 by the printer and publisher Antoine de Goys.

In the summer of 1544 Bos was forced to flee Antwerp for his participation in an antisacerdotalist free-thinking spiritualist sect and was declared exiled by the Council of Brabant in his absence. It appears that he went to Paris, where an anatomical work published by Jérôme de Gourmont in 1545 repeats text used by Cornelis Bos and even makes use of the woodblocks formerly in his possession. A decorative patternbook also published by Jérôme de Gourmont, Livre de moresques was a pirated edition of a work published in Antwerp by Bos, c published at Paris, 1546; it served designers of mannerist scrollwork (bandelwerk) in the Low Countries. Between 1546 and 1548, from his secure refuge in Nuremberg,  Cornelis Bos would publish more than a hundred engraved designs of strapwork and grotesques. Bos also produced popular engravings of religious and allegorical subjects, often dependent for their composition upon the Kleinmeister of Nuremberg, with many parallels in the output of Virgil Solis." - quote source

Ten Studies Of Grotesque Heads, 17th Century

Monster Brains Logos

Matt Furie
  Johnny Ryan 

  Aleksandra Waliszewska

  Aeron Alfrey - Artwork taken from The Black Scorpion Poster.



John Kenn Mortensen

  Trevor Henderson

  Marcus Shafer

  Dieter VDO

  Fufu Frauenwahl


 And there is the new one at the top of the site created by Michael Skattum.


This week marks the ten year anniversary of Monster Brains so now is as good a time as any to share some of the amazing logos that Monster Brains has had over the years. Many incredible artists have contributed their own logos and I've included links to their various sites alongside their artworks.

If you appreciate Monster Brains and the work that I put into the thousands of artworks shared over the past ten years, if you anticipate the hundreds of future posts that I have in various stages of planning, please donate whatever you can. It will be greatly appreciated and every dollar donated makes it easier for me to take the time to work on the site.

The donation button can be found on the top right of the site.

Thank you! I look forward to many more years of discovering and sharing the more obscure and fascinating artists associated with the genre of monsters.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi - Triptychs

In the Ruined Palace at Sōma, Masakado's Daughter Takiyasha Uses Sorcery to Gather Allies, 1844

This week is the ten year anniversary for Monster Brains, I've chosen to share a wide assortment of Kuniyoshi's incredible work to mark the occasion. Over the years Monster Brains has grown from a simple collection of links to a vast resource onto itself. This is due, in part, to my obsessive nature in collecting the artwork that I'm passionate about for myself but also my commitment to sharing this work with others that will appreciate it as well.

That said, I make my living as an artist and it has been growing more difficult to take the time away from my work to research and prepare posts for the site. You would probably be shocked to know the amount of time that I invest into many of the posts on Monster Brains. I've resisted putting advertisements on the site to take on additional revenue but recently I have placed a donation button on the site. If you appreciate Monster Brains and the work put into the thousands of artworks that I've shared over the past ten years, if you anticipate the hundreds of future posts that I have in various stages of planning, please donate whatever you can, it will be greatly appreciated.

The donation button can be found on the top right of Monster Brains.

Thank you! I look forward to many more years of discovering and sharing the more obscure and fascinating artists associated with the genre of monsters.



In the Ruined Palace at Sōma, Masakado's Daughter Takiyasha Uses Sorcery to Gather Allies, 1844 (left panel)

In the Ruined Palace at Sōma, Masakado's Daughter Takiyasha Uses Sorcery to Gather Allies 1844 (middle panel)

In the Ruined Palace at Sōma, Masakado's Daughter Takiyasha Uses Sorcery to Gather Allies, 1844 (right panel)

The Earth Spider Generates Monsters at the Mansion of Lord Minamoto Yorimitsu

The Earth Spider Generates Monsters at the Mansion of Lord Minamoto Yorimitsu (left panel)

The Earth Spider Generates Monsters at the Mansion of Lord Minamoto Yorimitsu (middle panel)

The Earth Spider Generates Monsters at the Mansion of Lord Minamoto Yorimitsu (right panel)