1911 - 1996
Artist Extraordinaire
During the first half of the 20th century there were some artists whose contribution to the field cannot be exceeded. Those artists included, among others, Harold R. Foster (Tarzan and Prince Valiant), Burne Hogarth (Tarzan), Winsor McCay (Little Nemo), George Herriman (Krazy Kat) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon). Burne Hogarth somehow became one of my all time favorite of all these. I have been searching his printed works as far as I can remember.
Burne Hogarth is
remembered best from his vision of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan (Illustrator of
Tarzan newspaper Sunday pages
1937-1950). However I like at least as much, if not more, of his own creation Drago
(1945-1946). In english there has been one
black & white version from Pacific Comics Club available. The color
version, even if re-colored, has been published only in Europe (Spain) as far
as I know. Some attempts to create a decent or even great Drago color
reprinting has been under work but so far no publications exists.
As
were the case in early days publishing the artists themselves created the color guides. Color guides were done onto
copies of the original art. The color guide was then transferred very
accurately to actual printing process by professionals. This was the case at
least with the more successful strips. Maybe the accuracy were not so high with
the less successful strips. The color guides created by Hogarth are clear
example of Hogarth’s talent. Some hand colored proofs can even be found from
the markets and, while being expensive, they do command 3 figure prices. I have one of these myself. My sample is originally from
the collection of Danton Burroughs. Danton Burroughs (grandson of Edgar Rice
Burroughs, died 2008) got this directly from Burne Hogarth. Through some ways
it ended up into auction. There are not many of them around because of the fire
that occurred at Danton's house which
destroyed most of them. In addition, shortly after this fire, Danton passed
away (some think due to the stress of losing a lot of his father's and
grandfather's personal things affects on this). So there is no more access to
any of the items should some have survived.
Burne
Hogarth hand-colored also several original Sunday pages by the request of
Danton Burroughs. 17 of these were made. These are considered to be Hogarth’s best works ever by many collectors.
Occasionally some of these originals have been seen for sale at auctions in
very high price.
Later on in the seventies Hogarth
did manage to create
still two magnificent
Tarzan books. In style these were different to Sunday pages as also the art was
now much more in focus. Also, in my opinion, the experience as an art teacher
is visible very clearly in these books. In addition Hogarth’s biography includes several how-to books as
well as some prints and portfolios.
Also here in this blog and
additional pages you will see a checklist of
Hogarth’s published
material. Actually one of the motives of creating this blog was to share
information of Burne Hogarth and maybe even make contact to other Hogarth fans.
There
has not been any insightful art book solely of Hogarth’s art ever published. Some
has been under work but at least so far not published. If looking for Hogarth’s
whole career I am not certain are there so much non-published fantasy art existing?
Traditional art yes, but are people interested in that? In a format of
how-to-book yes but I see that the latest How-to-books have already been a kind
of art books for the artist’s non-fantasy art. The actual “art of” book however
would be very welcomed and I hope once done it would concentrate more on Tarzan
and fantasy art as those are much more close to my heart than his traditional
art. Maybe collecting original art as much as possible and as large size as
possible, referring to current successful AE editions.
