Willy Pogany was born in Szeged, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) on 24 August 1882. He moved to London c. 1904 as a self-taught illustrator of children's books. While only living in London for a decade, Pogany is considered a significant contributor to the Golden Age of British illustration in the early-twentieth century.
Illustrator Willy Pogany was born to a farming family in Szeged, Austria-Hungary (now Hungary) on 24 August 1882. Living in poverty with his siblings, he spent much of his childhood in a large farmhouse full of animals. Despite early aspirations to be an engineer, after painting and drawing in his spare time, he decided instead to become an artist, studying variously at Budapest Technical School and at art schools in Munich and Paris. Finding little work or income in Paris, he travelled to London c. 1904, where he became a well-known artist and illustrator and a member of the London Sketch Club. In England he married Lillian Rose Doris with whom he had a son, John, who was born in London (Pogany, 1951).
One of his first illustrated children’s books to appear in London was W. Jenkyn Tomas’ The Welsh Fairy Book in 1907, published with T. Fisher Unwin. Pogany subsequently published with Unwin several times, but it was with the publishing house George G. Harrap & Co. that Pogany produced his most successful illustrations. Visiting Harrap’s Covent Garden office with his portfolio in 1906, he was first commissioned to illustrate the company’s Treasury Verse for Little Children. He ‘made an amazing success of this job’, with the book selling regularly for some decades after, causing Harrap to later reflect that ‘we had found a genius’ (Harrap, 1935). Until 1914, Pogany produced significant books for Harrap each autumn, beginning with The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1909), for which he ‘used soft colour and line and simple imagery to create an atmosphere that led readers into a fantasy world of harems and minarets’ (Kaiserlian, 2008). He then illustrated what are considered his most successful books: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1910), Tannhauser (1911), Parsifal (1912), and The Tale of Lohengrin (1913). Pogany was responsible for hand-scripted text, green and mauve page decorations and borders, full-page black and white drawings, and tipped-in plates full of colour (Peppin and Micklethwait, 1983). These books were all ‘remarkable achievements’, claimed Harrap, ‘embellished by a wealth of artistic detail which differentiates them from all other English art books of the period’ (Harrap, 1935).
As a self-taught illustrator, Pogany’s work was inspired by many of the leading illustrators of the day, including his friend Edmund Dulac, Arthur Rackham, Charles Robinson, H. R. Millar, Byam Shaw and many others. Working prolifically in a short period before the First World War, he has been considered ‘Dulac’s most successful European contemporary during the highest peak of the Golden Age of book illustration in London between 1906 and 1915’ (Peppin and Micklethwait, 1983). With Unwin he illustrated The Hungarian Fairy Book (1913), written by Nandor Pogany, which showcased the ‘rich fancy and vivid imagination of the Hungarians’ and an ‘interest in his native country’s peasant art’ (Pogany, 1913; Dalby, 1991). In 1914 he created and designed two new series of fairy tale books in the tradition of Walter Crane and Randolph Caldecott, ‘each published at one shilling per volume to attract a wide audience’. The ‘Willy Pogany Children’ set included Hiawatha, The Three Bears, Red Riding Hood, Robinson Crusoe, and The Children at the North Pole, and each comprised 14 coloured plates printed alongside a single folding strip 70 inches long when fully extended, with accompanying letterpress on the verso (Dalby, 1991). Unlike Dulac, Pogany was not a naturalised British citizen, and soon after the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 he permanently immigrated to the USA. There he worked as an illustrator, theatre set and costume designer, including for the Metropolitan Opera from 1917-21. He also spent time in Hollywood as a portraitist of the stars and an art director for several film studios during the 1930s and 1940s. Towards the end of his life he published several practical handbooks on drawing, still in print as recently as the 1990s.
Willy Pogany died in Manhatten, New York, USA on 30 July 1955. He has since been regarded as a significant contributor to the early-twentieth century craze of ‘sumptuously bound’ Gift Books in both trade and special limited editions, part of an output which made ‘Britain a centre for illustrators from all over Europe’ (White, 1988). His illustrations have been included in several posthumous exhibitions, such as Fantastic Design and Illustration in Britain 1850-1930, shown at the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York, USA (1979), and Alice In Wonderland at the British Library in London (2015-2016). In the UK public domain Pogany’s first edition illustrated books are held by the British Library.
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