Notable Poster Artists & Illustrators, “B...-”

Leon Bakst
b. 5-10-1866; currently Belarus
d. 12-28-1924

Leon Bakst is best remembered as a scene and costume designer associated with Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes for such pieces as Daphnis et Chloé, Cléopâtre, Scherezade

FYI - one of Bakst student's was Marc Chagall.

Frederick Barnard
b. 1846; London, England
d. September, 1896

Frederick Barnard, who was commissioned to illustrate Charles Dickens work in 1871, set his personal task to “concentrate on scenes other than those that Hablot Knight Browne “Phiz” and Dickens had chosen to portray”.

FYI - Barnard married Alice Faraday, the niece of chemist Michael Faraday. Alice and their children were portrayed by family friend John Singer Sargent.

• famous dogs posters

She-Ba, Art Print

Romare Bearden
b. 9-2-1911; Charlotte, NC
d. 3-12-1988; NY (bone cancer)

Artist Romare Bearden, influenced by Cubism and Harlem’s jazz scene, is considered one of the most prominent African-American artists of 20th century. Bearden was also a writer, songwriter, book illustrator, political cartoonist, theater designer, humanitarian and played baseball in the Negro Leagues.

• Allan Rohan Crite: Artist-Reporter of the African American Community

Aubrey Beardsley
b. 8-21-1872; Brighton, Englnd
d. 3-16-1898; France (tuberculosis)

Illustrator and author Aubrey Vincent Beardsley worked in black ink emphasizing the decadent and the erotic in grotesque fashion.

Influenced by the style of Japanese woodcuts Beardsley made a significant contribution to the development of the Art Nouveau style and the poster movement.

Paul Berthon
b. 1872; France
d. 1909

Paul Berthon worked in the Art Nouveau style, producing posters and lithographs. Berthon's art was not used primarily in advertising.

Ivan Bilibin
b. 8-16-1876; St. Petersburg, Russia
d. 2-7-1942; Seige of Leningrad

Bilibin was an influential 20th-century Russian illustrator and stage designer who was strongly inspired by Slavic folklore. He died during the siege of Leningrad in WWII.

• more folk tale, children's literature posters

Peter Birkhäuser
b. 6-7-1911; Basel
d. 1976

Poster artist and portraitist Peter Birkhäuser began his visionary paintings in 1944 with his experience of a moth fluttering against a window. Both he and his wife went through Jungian analysis with Maria-Louise von Franz and over the next three and a half decades worked on more than 3,400 of his dreams with his paintings illustrating the imagery in the context of analytical psychology.

Elizabeth Blackwell
b. 1707(?); Scotland
d. 1758

Elizabeth Blackwell (née Blachrie) is not the Elizabeth Blackwell who earned the first medical degree in the US. This Elizabeth Blackwell was among the first women to achieve fame as a botanical illustrator.

As artist and engraver for the plates of A Curious Herbal, designed for physicians as a reference to medicinal plants, she bought her husband's release from debtors prison. (He was there because he squandered her dowry.)

William Blake
b. 11-28-1757; London, England
d. 8-12-1827

Poet and artist William Blake was apprenticed to an engraver at age fourteen by his parents who recognized his talent. Blake saw the disciplines of literature and art as “companions in a unified spiritual endeavors”.

• more William Blake posters
• more Isaac Newton posters

William Henry James Boot
b. 1848; Manchester, England
d. 9-8-1918

W.H.J. Boot is remembered as a landscape painter and illustrator of publications. See Trees, and how to paint them in water-colours (1883).

• more tree posters

William H. Bradley
b. 7-10-1868; Boston, MA
d. 7-8-1882

Art Nouveau illustrator and artist William H. Bradley, nicknamed the “Dean of American Designers”, was the highest paid American artist of the early 20th century and credited with popularizing the new poster art form in the US.

Bradley is also noted for publishing The Chap-Book ... a Miscellany of Curious and Interesting Songs, Ballads, Tales, Histories, and adorned with a variety of pictures and very delightful to read: newly composed by Many Celebrated Wrtiers; to which are annes'd a Large Collection of Notices of Books.......

• The Essence of Art Nouveau

C. E. Brock
b. 2-5-1870; Holloway, London, England
d. 2-28-1938

Charles Edmund Brock, who signed his work C. E. Brock, was an illustrator of books by authors such as Jonathan Swift, William Thackeray, Jane Austen, and George Eliot.

Hablot Knight Browne “Phiz”
b. 7-12-1815; Lambeth, England
d. 7-8-1882

Hablot Knight Browne, the artist known as “Phiz”, illustrated books by Charles Dickens that included David Copperfield, Pickwick, Dombey and Son, Martin Chuzzlewit and Bleak House.