The King and I (Original)
Medium: Gouache on Board
Size: 13" x 12" (340mm x 310mm)
Date: 1967
Code: BrookKingAndILL
This is the unique original Gouache painting by Robert Brook.
Anna and the King of Siam. The King and I is a musical by Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II based on the book Anna and the King of Siam (now Thailand) by Margaret Landon. It was made into a very successful film in 1956 starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner. The plot comes from the memoirs of Anna Leonowens who became school teacher to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s.
The stubborn attitude of the main characters is well captured in Robert Brooks detailed original. This is the original artwork for cover of Look and Learn issue no 297 (23 September 1967).
- Artist BiographyRobert Brook
Despite a great deal of digging, almost nothing is known about artist Robert Brook. He appears to have begun working for the educational weekly Look and Learn in around 1965. His work was often highly detailed, as shown in the illustration left that depicts a scene from Margaret Landon's novel Anna and the King, which was later turned into the musical The King and I (filmed in 1956, starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner).
This was one of a series of covers Brook produced featuring Famous Couples, others including Hiawatha & Minnehaha, Robespierre & Eleanor Duplay, Andrian Nikolayev & Valentina Tereshkova (two Russian cosmonauts) and Heathcliff & Cathy. Other cover series drawn by Brook included Animal Heroes and Famous Partnerships.
Inside Look and Learn, he illustrated the serial The Red Bonnet by Henry Garnett with some delightful black & white illustrations and a feature on The Literary Lambs (Charles and Mary). He often worked in colour, illustrating historical features such as The Tyrant of Mysore, about the Duke of Wellington's defeat of the Sultan of Mysore in 1799, and a long-running feature on Dancing Around the World, which ran for 20 episodes in 1968.
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