![]()
Susan Einzig and the artist John Minton. He had a great influence on her.
Susan Einzig, who has died aged 87, was one of the 20th century's key British book illustrators, and a central figure in the postwar London art scene. Best known for her illustrations for the children's novel Tom's Midnight Garden (1958), by Philippa Pearce, she illustrated for a range of authors and publishers and was a regular Radio Times artist during its black-and-white heyday in the 1940s and 50s. She continued to paint, draw and exhibit until well into her 80s.
Born in Berlin, Einzig grew up in a Jewish middle-class family, in a spacious building that is now part of the city's university. Her father owned a garment factory and encouraged his daughter's artistic ambitions. She began art school at the age of 15 in a climate of growing antisemitism. In the spring of 1939, Einzig found herself on one of the last Kindertransport trains to reach Britain before the outbreak of war. Later she would learn of her father's death at the Nazi concentration camp at Theresienstadt; her mother managed to escape.
Enrolling as a student at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, Einzig learned wood engraving under Gertrude Hermes and John Farleigh, and was taught drawing and illustration by Bernard Meninsky, William Roberts and Maurice Kesselman. After an unhappy evacuation to Yorkshire, she moved to Northampton, where the London art schools were temporarily resettled.
After the war she began to receive illustration commissions. "There was an upsurge in work and no one to do it," she told me. "I didn't feel that I could do it either but I was on the crest of a wave of optimism." Her first commission, in 1945, came from Noel Carrington and his Transatlantic Arts publishing venture. Norah Pulling's Mary Belinda and the Ten Aunts was illustrated by drawing directly on to lithographic plates for each of six colours. Carrington had pioneered the use of this process, known as autolithography, using it with his hugely successful Picture Puffin series. Einzig recalled the sense of privilege that she felt as she was sent to the special "artists' room" at Cowell's printers in Ipswich, where a team of skilled lithographers were put at her disposal in the production of this charming little book.
Needing to support herself with a "proper job", she took a part-time teaching post at Camberwell School of Art, in south-east London, courtesy of the principal, William Johnson, who had taught her in Northampton. Among her students were Euan Uglow and Terry Scales. She was also put to work teaching ex-servicemen at Camberwell who had been given grants to retrain. These included the musicians Humphrey Lyttelton and Wally Fawkes.
It was at Camberwell that Einzig met the person who would be the greatest influence on her life, the charismatic, mercurial illustrator and painter, John Minton, who, along with Keith Vaughan, was also teaching there. "I was quickly drawn into this group," she said. "We all used to meet at weekends and draw each other. We went to the cinema and discovered the films of Jean Renoir, René Clair and Marcel Carné. We jived and jitterbugged to Humphrey Lyttelton's jazz band every Monday evening. We also got sucked into the drinking scene in Soho. It was all over within two or three years, but in my memory it seems to have been much longer."
Einzig took on numerous illustration commissions over the ensuing years, her distinctive black-and-white drawing style gradually shaking off the Minton influence and asserting its own elegant, literary identity. A lifelong love of theatre is often evident in the stage-like construction of many of her drawings.
Susan Einzig's cover illustration for Tom's Midnight Garden
The commission to illustrate Tom's Midnight Garden came about by chance: "I had been to see the children's book editor at Oxford University Press, who looked at my work and seemed very unsure about it. However, she gave me Philippa Pearce's manuscript to try to see if I could do it. I did two or three drawings and took them to show her, and then she asked me to do the book ... I was paid just a hundred pounds for the whole thing." Among the other titles she illustrated were Alphonse Daudet's Sappho: A Picture of Life in Paris, for the Folio Society in 1954, and E Nesbit's The Bastables, for Franklin Watts in 1966.
She joined the teaching staff of Chelsea School of Art, under Lawrence Gowing, continuing to teach there for more than 30 years. The list of her former students is long, and includes artists such as Sue Coe and Emma Chichester Clark, and the actor Alan Rickman.
Throughout her life she remained highly political and fiercely opposed to injustice in all its forms – she could never walk past a beggar without reaching for her purse. She was a loyal friend and an inspiring teacher.
She is survived by her daughter, Hetty, and two grandchildren.
• Susan Einzig, illustrator, painter and teacher, born 16 November 1922; died 25 December 2009
Recent Comments