EXTRACTS: Illustrators Issue 5 © 2013 The Book Palace (96 PAGES in Full edition)

66 ABOVE TOP AND FACING PAGE: Illustrations for Robin comic which the twins provided on a regular basis from the title’s debut in 1953. ABOVE: ‘Bill and Ben’ the twins not only drew the strip for Robin comic but also devised the puppets for the BBC TV show. their particular skills to the elements of each of the artworks they co-created, but it also reveals just how profound an influence their mother’s creativity had on the twins work. Doris Zinkeisen was the eldest daughter of Victor Zinkeisen awell to do shipper and yarnmerchant andClara BoltonCharles. Victor’s parents had arrived in Scotland in 1859 from Altenburg in Thuringia, East Germany. The aura of an exotic hinterland that the Zinkeisen surname bestowed seemed to perfectly accord with the artwork that she and her younger sister Anna produced to increasing acclaim throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Doris’ stage and costume design adding to her already enviable reputation as a leading society portrait painter. It was hardly surprising therefore that the stimuli that had provided such a powerful creative spur to Doris’ work should also manifest itself in the work of Janet and Anne, who were born to Doris and her husband Grahame Johnstone on the 1st of June 1928; Janet, always the more assertive of the sisters, preceding the arrival of Anne by twenty minutes. The delightful irony of their birth-date occurring under the astrological sign of the Heavenly Twins was not lost on the sisters, who would often jokingly refer to their zodiacal status as further evidence of their oneness. A painting of the twins by their mother perfectly encapsulates the description of them by their brother Murray as “being one and a half people rather than two”, as the dark hair framing the girl’s faces seems to merge them into one being. Their early years growing up in London were offset by