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Libraries > Digital Exhibits > Illustrations from The Story of Mankind > Van Loon the Illustrator
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Loon the Illustrator |
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Although
he had no formal training in art, Hendrik Willem van Loon
was as prolific an illustrator as he was a writer. Every one
of his forty-plus books featured his drawings, maps and sketches,
and many of his newspaper columns similarly were accompanied
by drawings. Other authors would often commission Van Loon
to illustrate their books as well. |
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Van
Loon proclaimed that:
most
writers can only write and most artists can only art. But
I can do both and so I ought to make my books into something
like a good Wagner opera and make the pictures carry the
text and vice versa.
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Van
Loon’s impulse to draw found expression in a variety
of forms. At both Cornell and Antioch, van Loon would arrive
in class with a large pad of paper, upon which he would draw
impromptu sketches to illustrate his lectures. When dining
with friends, he would animate his conversations with drawings
scribbled on the table cloths; when delivering his radio broadcasts,
he would doodle and scribble. He would even draw pictures
directly upon the walls of his study.
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Of
the drawings in The Story of Mankind, van Loon said:
While the author lays no claim to great artistic excellence…he
prefers to make his own maps and sketches because he knows
exactly what he wants to say and cannot possibly explain
this meaning to his more proficient brethren in the field
of art.
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Moreover,
van Loon believed that this impulse to draw should be a part
of every child’s education:
To all teachers the author would give this advice—let
your boys and girls draw their history after their own desire
just as often as you have a chance. You can show a class
a photograph of a Greek temple or a mediaeval castle and
the class will dutifully say, “Yes, Ma’am,”
and proceed to forget all about it. But make the Greek temple
or the Roman castle the centre of an event, tell the boys
to make their own picture of “the building of a temple,”
or “the storming of the castle,”
and they will stay after school-hours to finish the job…The
experiments of many years in the Children’s School
of New York has convinced the author that few children will
ever forget what they have drawn, while very few will ever
remember what they have merely read.
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Van
Loon’s drawings are difficult to categorize as art objects.
They are at once echoes of historical genre paintings, in
that they are formal visual depictions of historical events,
but they are more similar in style to editorial cartoons.
(One is reminded of Gustav Dore or Goya’s sketches of
the Napoleonic wars collected under the title The Disasters
of War.) Van Loon’s drawings were typically allegorical
rather than strictly mimetic or representational. Look, for
example, at “The Real Congress of Vienna,” which
is less a mimetic reconstruction of an event than a commentary,
an editorial. In the drawing, van Loon draws a few diplomats
and statesmen in a cavernous hall redesigning Europe, symbolizing
the event as anti-democratic and non-participatory. The illustrations
chosen for this exhibition have been selected to draw attention
to these allegorical, symbolic and editorial features. |
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| Source:
Cornelis A. van Minnen, Van Loon: Popular Historian, Journalist,
and FDR Confidant (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) |
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