Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp - Anne Anderson

Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp - Anne Anderson

Read more about Anne Anderson, the Scottish illustrator, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Anderson_(illustrator)

Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves - Felicitas Kuhn

“Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” - The Golden Book of Fairytales- Collins Publishing, 1966, United Kingdom. Illustration by Felicitas Kuhn (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felicitas_Kuhn).

Long-Lost Watercolors Of '1001 Nights' Bring New Life To Age-Old Tales

 

Long-Lost Watercolors Of '1001 Nights' Bring New Life To Age-Old Tales

"In the early 20th century, artists experimented with color and less realistic dimensions, and mixed the worlds of Eastern and Western mythologies. Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen, working in Europe during World War I, finished his own evocative version of A Thousand and One Nights. His mysticism-tinted take on the Arabian stories pushed visual storytelling to new heights.

Nielsen filled his illustrations with expressionist, nearly surrealist characters and whimsical landscapes, breaking the boundaries of what visual storytelling was supposed to look like. His use of bright reds and deep blues, of golden leaves and detailed floral elements, hinted at a mix of Asian folklore and Arab iconography, make of his work a revolutionary body of visual art.

But the illustrations were never published, and the watercolor images remained tucked away for more than 40 years. They were rescued from oblivion after Nielsen's death in 1957 and sat unused for another 60 — until now."

More on the story, the new book and reproductions of the artwork -

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2018/10/22/653642391/long-lost-watercolors-of-1001-nights-bring-new-life-to-age-old-tales

Robert Irwin - Visions of the Jinn: Illustrators of the Arabian Nights

From 1001 Nights

Gerard Genette’s term “paratext” is an interesting one when thinking about all of the elements that constitute a book/text/object.

A paratext is any associated part of that text that is not directly its narrative but instead works to present the text in a certain way.

Paratexts include titles, covers, font, introductions, attached essays, pictures and illustrations, even interviews by the author or publisher about the book – a kind of marketing of the text, for some reason, by its paratext.

A text like the Nights certainly seems like a book embedded in several paratextual layers.  Richard Burton’s paratextual addtions, for example, especially his incredibly numerous footnotes and essays, presented the Nights as a "true" picture of the people of the “Middle East,” even though they largely were not a true picture of anywhere.

An important paratextual amendment to many versions of the Nights are its pictures - accompanying illustrations - and Robert Irwin’s book Visions of the Jinn sheds some light on the illustrators responsible for visually representing what the Nights seemed to be about.

Like the translators of the Nights, everywhere and anywhere, these illustrators had vastly different conceptions of their object of study.  And like any writing or historical document these pictures also seemed to say something about the time period and place they were borne out of.

Robert Irwin is the author of several contemporary works on or about the Nights including the well known Nights-history book The Arabian Nights: A Companion.  His latest book, Visions of the Jinn:  Illustrators of the Arabian Nights (2010)  provides both a great overview academically of the subject and also a great introduction to a general audience to the splendor of the visual Nights.

From 1001 Nights

Irwin gives an overview of many of the illustrators of the many different variants of the Nights over the years.  Some interesting stand-outs include:

William Harvey (1796-1866) who made over 500 illustrations for Edward William Lane’s English translation, and, according to Irwin, it was “Harvey’s illustrations, rather than Lane’s text, that attracted the most attention and praise” (65). 

Also, according to Irwin, Harvey’s illustrations were the first serious attempt at rendering a truthful anthropological/architectural visions of the Middle East in the Nights, something which certainly changed the character of the Nights forever in its 19^th century European variants.

Much attention is given, as well, to Edmund Dulac, early 20^th century illustrator who incorporated a great deal of color and expressionism in his renderings, and a ton of information about the many different illustrators it can feel a bit overwhelming.  In addition there isn’t much information about the various countries represented and how much of an international work the Nights is.

From 1001 Nights

In the book movements from print to engraving to color are all covered.  Different artistic styles based either in classical visual arts or popular culture depictions such as comic books are also given some attention.  There are scores of artists, many relatively still unknown, and the book as a whole can feel a little scattered due to the amount of content and the breadth of its topic.  Given that it appears to be one of the first studies to address the illustrators of the Nights, however, this is to some extent forgivable.  Each artist of the Nights could easily have their own book, just as each version of the Nights has its own incredible biography as well.

It is also forgivable given what is the book’s incredible strength – its visual reproductions of the illustrations of the Nights, from full-page pictures to reproductions of actual Nights’ volumes, the plates are visually stunning and done at a level of reproductive clarity that I have not really seen in a book of visual arts, particularly regarding reproductions of books.

I’ve seen other reviews of this book that feature digital pictures but I don’t think the pictures these reviews have are from Irwin’s book itself, if they were they would have looked much better.

From 1001 Nights

The book is a part of a series based around the collection at the Arcadian Library, a private library in the UK holding one of the world’s best collections of the Nights.

I think this book is a must-have for any serious library at any research institution, any researcher or fan of the Nights, and it would make a good gift as well for anyone interested in art or literature.  It is a large coffee-table sized book with 240 pages.

Its price, at over $200 new, however, will undoubtedly limit its reach, however most comparable visual arts books are priced typically over $100 if not more, so it’s not completely out of the ballpark.

It's currently on sale on Oxford University Press' website (in the US) for $180, which is $40 less than listing - http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/28778/subject/ArtHistory/ModernContemporary/?view=usa&sf=toc&ci=9780199590353

Visions of the Jinn - Reviews

 Aladdin's Picture Book Arabian Nights, Illustration by Walter Crane, 1878

There are a bunch of great reviews out on Visions of the Jinn, here are excerpts of and links for two:

Many thanks to Ghada for passing along this review of Robert Irwin's new book on the illustrations/illustrators of the Nights from brainpickings.org.

Irwin's book is currently only in hardcover format and costs almost $200.

Here's part of the review, it has great pictures from the book so do visit their site, this review was reprinted in the Atlantic Monthly too, but don't know the connection between brainpickings and the Atlantic.

Link: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/01/20/visions-of-the-jinn-arabian-nights-illustrations/

From the review:  "Even though the editions since Lane’s scholarly translation had progressed in the realm of visual imagination, the content had remained rather sterilized and prudish. It wasn’t until the 1885-1888 publication of Richard Burton’s sixteen-volume translation that themes of sexuality emerged, complete with extensive notes on topics like homosexuality, bestiality, and castration. Though Burton’s original edition featured no pictures in order to avoid prosecution for obscenity, shortly after his death in 1890 a young friend and admirer of his by the name of Albert Letchford, who had trained in Paris as an orientalist painter, created 70 paintings, which eventually became the basis for the next edition of Burton’s translation. With a keen sensibility for fantasy and a shared interest in the erotic to complement Burton’s own, Letchford’s artwork featured many nudes and were infused with sensuality. Ironically, Letchford contracted an exotic disease in Egypt and died at a young age."

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Here is a more extensive review from the TLS, many thanks to Moti for passing this along, I've excerpted bits of it below, for the entire review see:  http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article858481.ece

Visions of the Arabian Nights

Elizabeth Lowry

Robert Irwin
VISIONS OF THE JINN
Illustrators of the Arabian Nights
240pp. The Arcadian Library. £120 (US $225).
978 0 19 959035 3

Published: 18 January 2012

"Nowhere is the fascination felt in Western culture for the East more evident than in its avid consumption of The Arabian Nights. Ever since Antoine Galland issued the first translation in French in the early eighteenth century, the stories have become a permanent part of the Western literary and visual landscape, spawning numerous adaptations, tributes and imitations. Princess Scheherazade, Aladdin, Sinbad the sailor and Ali Baba have acquired the status of cultural icons; genies, flying carpets and magic lamps, once curiosities of medieval Arab and Persian mythology, are now the stock-in-trade of modern occidental fantasy. There have been musical interpretations of the tales by Rimsky-Korsakov and Weber; cartoon versions by Disney, and lavish Hollywood incarnations. The influence of the Nights extends from the poetry of Goethe to Wordsworth to Rilke, to modern fiction from Fielding through Proust to Borges. In fact, so much of European and American literature has been influenced by the tales that it would be far easier, as Robert Irwin suggests in his The Arabian Nights: A companion (1994), simply to list the handful of writers who were not influenced by them.

Irwin returns to the theme in this sumptuous history of the illustrated Western editions of The Arabian Nights. Visions of the Jinn is part bibliographical exposition, part dazzling magic lantern show: its 164 colour-saturated facsimiles, photographs and black-and-white images and their accompanying analysis offer a visually stunning and sensitive account of the European response to this important text.

How Arabian are these nights? Although we have come to associate them with Arab culture, the tales are properly speaking a composite work deriving from the oral traditions of India, Persia, Iraq and medieval Egypt. The first written version is a Persian collection translated into Arabic some time in the early eighth century as Alf Layla, or “The Thousand Nights”, although the number of tales included fell well short of that (in Arabic, alf simply denotes a large quantity). The title The Thousand and One Nights (probably from the Turkish expression bin-bir, “a thousand and one”, which is again suggestive rather than exact) became attached to the text in the twelfth century. To this core stories were later added, until the work delivered on the promise in its title. The European translations that followed after Galland produced his courtly twelve-volume Les Mille et Une Nuits in 1704 differed in quality and in their unspoken agendas. The best known are by Edward Lane, Richard Burton and Joseph Charles Victor Mardrus. Lane’s translation (1839–41) is scholarly but prudish, and heavily bowdlerized to eliminate any sexual references that might offend its Victorian readers; Burton’s (1885) takes the opposite approach, ramping up the raunch; while reading Mardrus (1902) is rather like spending an afternoon with a slightly louche uncle who manages to combine whimsy with constant suggestiveness."

"The stories told by Shahrazad draw on a seemingly inexhaustible range of subjects. They are heroic, fantastical, comic, pious, obscene, tragic, didactic, brutal and sentimental in turn – quite a challenge to an illustrator. Some crack along at a tremendous pace and others fall prey to longueurs as Shahrazad meditates on knotty problems of philosophy or abstruse ethical questions (there is an intriguing insight here into what counts as a page-turner in medieval Persia: Shahrazad thinks nothing of including, say, asides on law and human physiology, confident that Shahriyar won’t summarily reach for the axe). The way in which the illustrators of the Nights chose to represent their subject matter, however, inevitably says as much about them as about it. In the eighteenth century, Western artists imagining the East had limited visual resources to draw on: prints of the costumes and peoples of the Orient by those who had actually been there were scarce, and the same sets tended to do the rounds – sixty Turkish drawings by Nicolas de Nicolay were a particularly popular source, and were still being used by Ingres early in the nineteenth century. In the frontispieces of this period, as Irwin points out, Shahriyar and Shahrazad often appeared in bed – but “invariably a nice, solid European bed”. It was not that the illustrators of the Enlightenment weren’t alive to the sexual and seductive overtones of the stories, but the emphasis was firmly on decorum. David Coster’s frontispiece for Galland’s edition shows the royal couple tucked up under a baldachin beneath a neo-classical ceiling. The demure-looking Shahrazad, in a French gown of fashionable eighteenth-century cut, is clearly in the middle of one of her more earnest disquisitions on faith and morals, although her breasts are incongruously bare. Just as the beds were European, so “the landscapes were commonly western and pastoral”. Sinbad and Ali Baba may wear turbans but they are dressed in togas, posing in front of classical ruins, or strolling in breeches through English woods.

It was only towards the middle of the nineteenth century that a broader and more reliable range of visual material about Arab and Turkish life was made available, and the illustrated editions of the Nights from this time begin to have pretensions to visual scholarship. Edward Lane’s three-volume, heavily annotated translation had a self-consciously didactic purpose, aiming to introduce readers to the Middle Eastern way of life. The pictures by William Harvey were intended to have an educative function, serving as the visual flourish to Lane’s learning, and their accuracy was vouched for by the translator himself. In fact, they were supposed to be even more accurate than the source material – as Lane assures the reader in his preface, thanks to his vigilance in standing over the artist and hectoring him with tips, the latter “has been enabled to make his designs agree more nearly with the costumes &c. of the times which [the] tales generally illustrate than they would if he trusted alone to the imperfect descriptions which I have found in Arabic works”. Unsurprisingly, Harvey’s boxwood engravings, though delicate and replete with authentic detail, are rather insipid."

Stories of 1001 Nights

This is a Dutch book I saw recently on ebay Australia. Looks like a great looking cover. From the description of the sale it was listed as a larger size book, published in Amsterdam by Mulder and Zoon, the seller said there was no date but he thinks it was from the 1930s (why, I'm not sure), he says there are illustrations inside and eight stories.

From 1001 Nights

Visions of the Jinn - Robert Irwin

From 1001 Nights

Robert Irwin has a new Nights book out called Visions of the Jinn that looks to shed some promising light on an under-covered topic.  The book is a bit pricey, 120 pounds, but looks to be a hardback oversized coffee table type book, making its price a bit more reasonable. 

Many thanks to Paul and Professor Z for passing this along.

Here is the Guardian's review, well more like a press release since it's also written by Irwin, with an excerpt pasted below.  It's well worth the read for its overview of the general history of illustrators of the Nights.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/mar/12/arabian-nights-illustration


"Things changed with the publication in 1839-41 of Edward William Lane's The Thousand and One Nights in three volumes. Unlike earlier English translators, Lane, who had spent years in Egypt, translated not from Galland's French, but directly from the Arabic. Lane intended his translation to have an improving, didactic purpose and he seems to have thought of it as a kind of supplement to his pioneering work of ethnography, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836). He thought that the stories of the Nights could serve as an introduction to everyday life in the Middle East. (Never mind about the flying horse, the jinn, the Roc, the magic lamp and the Old Man of the Sea.) His copious endnotes furthered his didactic aim and so did the illustrations. William Harvey, a pupil of Thomas Bewick and one of Britain's leading engravers, did the boxwood engravings, but Lane stood at his shoulder, checking the look of things and providing previously published engravings of Egyptian and Moorish architecture for him to copy. In general, the purpose of the pictures was not to stimulate the imagination or supplement the storyline, but to introduce the British reader to the authentic look of the Arab world. Just occasionally Harvey was licensed to use his imagination, as with his marvellous depiction of the giant jinni in "The Story of the City of Brass", or the battle of magical transformations in "The Story of the Second Dervish".

Dalziel's Illustrated Arabian Nights Entertainments, published in 1865, was the most spectacular illustrated edition to be published in the Victorian age. A number of famous artists were commissioned to produce pictures for it, including John Tenniel, John Everett Millais and George Pinwell. But Arthur Boyd Houghton, a less well-known illustrator, produced the most compelling and atmospheric images – masterpieces of Victorian book illustration. Although his pictures have an authentic oriental look, the orient they conjure up owes more to India than the Arab world, for Houghton had spent his childhood in India and had relatives in the Indian army.

Though selections of the Nights whose texts were designed to be read by children had been published from the late 18th century onwards, little thought had been given to what sort of illustrations might appeal to children. Walter Crane (1845-1915) was one of the first to illustrate stories from the Nights in colour and also one of the first to consider the visual tastes of children: "Children, like ancient Egyptians, appear to see things in profile, and like definite statements in design. They prefer well-designed forms and bright frank colour. They don't want to bother with three dimensions. They can accept symbolic representations. They themselves employ drawing . . . as a kind of picture writing and eagerly follow a pictured story." Crane did not merely illustrate books; he designed them in such a way that there would be a perfect match between text and image. His Aladdin's Picture Book (1876) is ravishing and, since Aladdin's story is, however notionally, set in China, he drew on Chinese and Japanese imagery.

Lane's translation of the Nights, while certainly scholarly, had been excessively prudish, as Lane excised stories and incidents with erotic content. When Richard Burton produced his translation from the Arabic in 10 volumes with six supplementary volumes (1885-8), he went to the opposite extreme and not only kept the sex scenes in but exaggerated them, and he produced extensive notes on such matters as homosexuality, bestiality and castration. The first edition of Burton's translation, which was published for subscribers only so as to lessen the danger of being prosecuted for obscenity, had no pictures, but soon after his death in 1890, a young friend and devoted admirer of Burton, Albert Letchford, produced 70 paintings which served as the basis for the illustrations in a new edition of Burton's translation that was published in 1897. Letchford had trained in Paris as an orientalist painter and he had spent time in Egypt. While hardly a great artist, he did share Burton's taste for the erotic and so nudes feature frequently in the illustrations. Moreover, he had a taste for the fantastic and some of his demons and temples are very weird indeed. He was shy and no businessman and consequently he was usually poorly paid. While still a young man, he contracted a disease in Egypt from which he later died in England.

These days adult fiction is rarely illustrated, but in the 18th and 19th centuries it was normal, and novels by Trollope, Surtees, Dickens and other much less well-known writers carried pictures. But towards the end of the 19th century, for reasons which are not clear, adult novels were no longer illustrated as a matter of course and illustrators found themselves restricted to working mostly on children's books. In the opening decade of the 20th century, gift books aimed at children became fashionable. They were expensively illustrated (and referred to by the historian of children's literature, Brian Alderson, as "cocoa-table books"). The colour plates on shiny paper were usually covered by protective sheets of tissue paper."

McLoughlin's Aladdin

1001 Thanks to JC for passing on some great scans from McLoughlin's Aladdin book series that I mentioned in this post:  http://journalofthenights.blogspot.com/2010/10/aladdins-lamp.html

From 1001 Nights

From 1001 Nights

From 1001 Nights

From 1001 Nights

From 1001 Nights

Albert Letchford and Adolphe Lalauze

These pictures were passed on to me by someone who is wondering of their origins and/or the names of the illustrations.

I believe the first is by Albert Letchford who did paintings for the second Burton edition and the second is by Adolphe Lalauze who did engravings for the same edition. I'm not sure of the titles of these but does anyone have a copy of them with titles for the illustrations?

The first publication of Burton's second edition of his Nights with these illustrations is: The 1894-1897 Burton Club edition by Nichols and Smithers - Albert Letchford and Adolphe Lalauze (who did engravings) illustrators. This puts the earliest date for the illustrations at 1894.

There were 70 illustrations by these guys (one collection of the illustrations is on ebay at the moment for $550!) and subsequent editions had less than 70 as far as I can tell.

If anyone could add anything more please do as a reply to this posting and thank you in advance.


This is what I suspect to be the Letchford painting (there is something about Letchford in several of Burton's biographies, he was a good friend of Burton's and painted most of his paintings for the Nights in Naples with local landscapes as backgrounds). It is from the frame story and illustrates the poor fate of the brothers Shahryar and Shahzaman...


Not sure what story this is from but the name on the bottom is clearly A. Lalauze, a semi-famous French engraver and artist.

- M