Page 88 - Gullivers

Anonymous illustrator 1863
who have illustrated it have not been from Anglophone backgrounds.Victor Ambrus who illustrated Michæl West’s 1963 retelling, and subsequently James Riordan’s 1992 retellings of the first two voyages
is, like Willy Pogány, Hungarian. Born in Budapest in 1935, he came to England
in 1956 after the Hungarian uprising in that year. Ambrus was one of a number
of illustrators taken up by the Oxford University Press in the 1960s, specifically to produce high-quality picturebooks, taking advantage of a revolution in colour reproduction. Ambrus’s style is energetic and dramatic. Drawing horses is a strength of his, and early in his career he feared that he would become known only as an expert illustrator of equine subjects. It
is, however, a pity given his expertise in this area, that he didn’t get a chance to illustrate the Houyhnhnms. His line is in places bold and vigorous, but elsewhere delicate and intricate, as in the scenes in Lilliput where ornate details on buildings and in Lilliputian costume is finely limned. Commenting on Ambrus’s work, Douglas Martin says ‘Victor Ambrus is a brilliant colourist, though not in a painterly sense, since whenever one looks closely into the colour, irrespective of how it has been
applied, it will be found to be informed and underpinned by sound draughtsmanship
in line’.
Gennady Spirin was born in Moscow
in 1948, but moved to the United States to further his work as an artist. Stylistically he is quite unlike Ambrus, but is similar in his minute attention to detail. His work
is self-consciously painterly, each page opening suggesting that here is a picture meant for hanging on a wall. This is a retelling of the Lilliput episode only by Ann Keay Benneduce, and the text is relatively short. Spirin’s palette is muted: shades
of terracotta and brown dominating
many scenes, sometimes intensified by
a blue background of sea or sky. While
his illustrations look formal at a glance, anything more than that will show that
he invests his characters with humour
and there is a great sense of activity and movement in all scenes.
An edition published in 2002 in the United States is worth noting only because of its illustrations – the text is reduced
to the point of banality. Germano Ovani does, however, with his light line and delicate colour capture visually something of Gulliver’s exploits in Lilliput and Brobdingnag. The most recent edition
82