Over-commissioned

During the 1920ies, Gustaf was overwhelmed with jobs for the commercial market. There where a number of companies producing silverware, glassware, watches and silk stockings, all wanting to hire "Gustaf Tenggren, the young talented artist, rapidly coming into fame", as The New York Daily Mirror put it in an article from the mid twenties.
But at the same time he kept his illustration commissions. As his time was heavily scheduled he often worked double, as can be seen from these examples.

Cover for Bland Tomtar och Troll, Åhlén och Åkerlund 1926

1926 was the last year he illustrated the Swedish fairy tale annual Bland Tomtar och Troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls). The cover of his tenth book in the series shows a small boy on a winged horse, which has got nothing to do with any tale in the book. The illustrations were delivered to Åhlén och Åkerlund in May 1926.

Cover for Ruth Campbell, Small Fry and the Winged Horse, Volland 1927

In July the same year he delivered illustrations for Small Fry and The Winged Horse to be published Volland in 1927. The thought that the Bland Tomtar och Troll cover was first meant for Small Fry but refused by the publisher is not far away. 

Mercury running on the waves, illustration from Small Fry and the Winged Horse

Additionally you can see sea swallows on the BToT cover that appear in an illustration in Small Fry. It's easy to imagine the piles of drawings and paintings all mixed up on the drawing table in Tenggren's Manhattan Studio. And in the parlor at the same time, a young woman is waiting to sit for her portrait. Poor man.

Self-recycling

All of his life Gustaf Tenggren was adaptive for new styles, techniques and motifs. There are several examples where influence from other artists is obvious: Arthur Rackham, John Bauer, Axel Gallén-Kallela, Ivar Arosenius and Edmund Dulac are just some of them. That is simply the price you pay to be working within a tradition.
Among the artists he loved to get inspiration from, he counted himself. He kept a vast and growing archive of images from magazines, art books and illustrations, including his own. Here is one of the more apparent examples: a tale of giants from Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Grimm's Eventyr, 1923

The Tenggren Tell-It-Again Book, 1942

The first one is from Grimm's Eventyr, published by Jespersen's forlag in Denmark 1923. The second comes from The Tenggren's Tell-It-Again Book, published by Little, Brown & Co in 1942.
The difference in style is obvious. Between the two, Gustaf Tenggren had been flushed through the big style washing machine, Walt Disney's Studios, where he did play a large role for the style of many animated film classics: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia and Bambi to mention some. Still, I think he made it through to the other side very well. He kept his draftsmanship and eye for color all of his life; you can always spot a Tenggren artwork, be it old or new... sorry, less old.

Once in a Blue Moon

When Gustaf Tenggren first arrived in USA in autumn of 1920 he started off in Cleveland, OH. But as his commissions got more frequent and his wages rose, he decided to try out the competition in the main media center, New York, NY. In 1923 he went there and already the first year he had seven book illustration commissions. But he also got into advertising illustration, and produced spectacular ads for a number of large campaigns. One of the most memorable was the Blue Moon Silk Stockings which was introduced in 1925 by Largman Gray Company. Their slogan was "Longer wear with every pair".

Blue Moon Silk Stockings, first published in 1925.

The design with the girl on the moon was extremely popular and was used for boxes, posters magazine ads and even an adhesive transfer to put on your car. This girl was maybe one of the first pin-up girls, before the concept was even invented. It is still one of the most popular Art Deco designs to be copied to numerous bric-a-brac items for sale in tourist shops and on the Internet. Too bad no one knows the name of the artist nowadays.

A scene from Atlantic City, 1927. The Blue Moon girl is mirrored on
the big sign on the house but the exposure is ultimate.

Tenggren goes comics

Here's another finding  from the vault of Kerlan Collections in Minneapolis: a comic strip by Gustaf Tenggren! It covers some thirty pages and I have a vague memory from seeing this in some old clipping from The New York World Magazine. Any information on the origin of this comic story is welcome!

Page 12 from an unidentified comic story by Gustaf Tenggren.
Kerlan collection of the University of Minnesota Libraries
with permissions from the Archives and Special Collections.

It's not a proposal or a dummy, since every page is thoroughly sketched and cleaned up in ink, although the text is left out for the paper to fill in. The cartoon is a fairy tale kind of story about a selfish king. It's probably made in the late twenties, when Tenggren had some other commissions for The New York World Sunday Magazine. It resembles the style in Mother Goose Book from 1928 or Seldom and the Golden Cheese form 1933. Just imagine what stories there might be, had he made more of these. 

A not so Merry Christmas at all

As is the case in many of Hans Christian Andersen's so called fairy tales, The Little Match Girl is a tragic story, not at all suitable for small children. The poor girl is forced by her parents to sell matches in the street a freezing Christmas Eve. Nobody buys from her but she doesn't dare top go home. To keep warm she lights one after of the matches and sees the loveliest sights, hallucinating from cold, until she freezes to death in a corner, while people are hasting by on their way home to their families. Now there's a nice goodnight tale for your toddler!

Little Match Girl, Grosset and Dunlap 1944

Anyway, in 1944 Gustaf Tenggren illustrated this story for Grosset and Dunlap. When I first saw this book, I was not surprised that the end was changed: the little girl doesn't die at all, she gets rescued and wakes up in a warm bed in a rich house where she could stay. Of course, that's natural; a commecial book company simply can't give children the brutal facts of cruel poverty.

The little match girl gets rescued and wakes up in a warm bed
with a caring old lady that wants her as her grandchild.

The very last image of the book where The Little Match Girl is lying
on a cushion, but still in her raggedy beggar's clothes. The painting is ambiguous;
is she really sleeping or is she in fact dead after all?

But I hadn't expected Gustaf Tenggren to produce such a lame ending, since he was a stern and realistic artist and with a deep respect towards the literature classics. I always suspected that Tenggren was unwillingly forced to change the ending; at least I hoped so.
That's why I was quite pleased when I browsed through the dummy for Little Match Girl in The Kerlan Collection - there it was, the real end illustration. Gustaf had meant to illustrate the actual story as it was, in all its sadness. But naturally, the drawing had been rejected. So here they are, both of the endings. You choose.

Gustaf's suggestion from the book dummy for the last image.
This is a dead Little Match Girl, no doubt about it; Gustaf has even written so in the text above.
The last picture in the actual book bears a certain similarity to this one.
Kerlan collection of the University of Minnesota Libraries
with permissions from the Archives and Special Collections.

Grimm's Fairy Tales illustration

An interesting Tenggren painting is sold at Bonhams, NY tomorrow Wednesday Dec 11.
http://www.bonhams.com/auctions/21029/lot/1309/
This is an alternative for one of the illustrations in the Grimm's Fairy Tales that was published first time in Sweden 1922 and in Denmark 1923. A later edition was published in Germany as Grimm's Märchenschatz, but with the same set of prints as in all editions.

Original Tenggren watercolor illustration, 1918-19

Tenggren worked on the total of thirty illustrations from 1918 - 1920 and actually delivered the last four of them after he had moved to the USA. Tenggren's original Grimm painting are very seldom to appear and this is a unique opportunity to acquire a spectacular Tenggren piece in his early fantasy style.

Print from Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Sven the Wise and Svea the Kind

Here's another wonderful example of the Tenggren treasures of Kerlan Collection: an original drawing from Sven the Wise and Svea the Kind. I wanted to show it in all it's misery, yellowed and spotted with age; let's call it patina.

Original drawing for Sven the Wise and Svea the Kind.
The Siren of the Woods is being tormented by the Vittra

The book was published in 1932 by Harper and Brothers. It is a compilation of Swedish folk fairy tales rewritten by Alicia O'reardon Overbeck, and contains some of the most outstanding illustrations by Gustaf Tenggren. 

One of the color plates. The Siren of the Woods is luring the young Lapland boy.

 There are two color plates and 14 line b-w drawings. This is Tenggren at his very best, with all the penmanship you see throughout his twenties and thirties. Too bad there's only one single illustration left in the collection, but it's a great one!