EXTRACTS: Illustrators issue 21 © 2017 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

70 to Chicago where St. John set up a private medical practice and his wife studied at the Art Institute of Chicago. Nevertheless, Susan Hely was a free spirit that loved the artistic world and its bohemian life. In 1880, she left her husband and moved to Paris with her eight-year-old son James. They lived there for three years, Susan studying painting at the École Des Beaux-arts, and visiting museums and getting imbued with all the art the City of Lights had to offer. In 1883, both mother and son returned to America, and Susan Hely continued her studies at the National Academy of Design in New York. Her husband, ever supportive of his wilful wife, closed shop in Chicago and moved to New York where he set up a new medical practice while his wife opened a portrait studio in their home and their son attended public school. However, young Jim’s mind was set on following his mother’s footsteps, and he quit school in the eighth grade to become an artist. Although his father had wanted his son to take a partnership in a trading company he had bought, Jim was set on his artistic career and instead moved to California, where he lived in a two-thousand-acre estate belonging to a rich uncle. There he painted landscapes and studied with an acquaintance of his mother’s from the Paris years, Eugene Torrey, a landscape artist himself who provided ‘Swords of Mars’, Edgar Rice Burroughs 1936. The artist’s process from initial pencil rough, through to colour rough with watercolour and gouache and the final image. At this final stage, the titles were added on an acetate overlay. Imaged by Heritage Auctions, HA.com