Kay Nielsen (1886 - 1957)

[tangledtale]

I'm keeping an ongoing collection of some of my favourite Nielsen illustrations for my own reference. It will probably be intensely boring for everyone else. You've been warned.

Comments

[lishesque]

Wow, these are gorgeous! I haven't seen them before. I like the "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" one the best. The waves look Asian, but the top band thingy (not sure what it is!) looks very Viking.

[tangledtale]

I so want a giant print of that one so that you can see the detail in the top part. And yeah, he mixes his traditionalism and the orientalist influence that was so popular around the Belle Epoch very well. I like his Art Noveau-ness.

[boojumlol]

omg, these are stunning! Thank you for posting them. Where did you find them all?

I'd only seen the ones in the Sur La Lune shop before now. I have a t-shirt of the first image you posted and another from 'The Twleve Dancing Princesses'. I'm still tempted to buy more, even though I can't really afford it.

[tangledtale]

I'm glad you liked them! And I love that one of the Dancing Princesses and am completely jealous that you have one on a t-shirt. If I saw a stranger on the street wearing Kay Nielsen I think I would die of spontaneous joygasm.

I can't actually remember where I got most of these. I used to be an *ahem* obsessive googleimages searcher for high resolution illustrations but never saved any of the sources, unfortunately. Given the nature of the internet, most of them are probably gone now. animationarchive.org is good though. And that really giant bluebeard one was from storybookland which crops up with some amazing scans every now and then.

[tangledtale]

Oh! And if you're interested in looking at more pretty children's illustrations this thread on thefashionspot forum is pretty good (albeit fairly inactive now): http://forums.thefashionspot.com/f81/childrens-book-illustrations-25554-30.html

I've discovered some pretty great illustrators there.

[alexandral]

These are absolutely stunning - thank you very much for posting!

[tangledtale]

No problem! I'm glad you liked them. And I love the John Bauer illustrations you posted on your journal aaages back. The quality of the illustrations you found were great and I can only attempt to replicate that with my own offerings. :)