John Albert Bauer

John Albert Bauer (1882 – 1918) was a Swedish painter and illustrator. His paintings dealt with Swedish nature, mythical creatures, and magical places while he also composed portraits. He is best known for his illustrations in early editions of Bland tomtar och troll (Among Gnomes and Trolls), an anthology about Swedish folklore and children's fairy tales.He painted and illustrated in a romantic nationalistic style, with influences from the Italian Renaissance and Sami culture. Most of his works are watercolors or prints in either monochrome or muted colors, due to the available printing techniques of the time. His artistic expressions also included oil paintings and frescos. Bauer was still exploring these artistic techniques when, at the age of 36, he, Ester Ellqvist (his wife, also a famous artist) and their son, Bengt, drowned in a shipwreck on Lake Vättern. Bauer's favorite subject was Swedish nature, the dense forests where the light trickled down through the tree canopies. Ever since he was little he had wandered in the dark woods of Småland imagining all the creatures living there. His paintings frequently included detailed depictions of plants, mosses, lichens and mushrooms found in the Swedish woods.He is best known for his illustrations of Among Gnomes and Trolls. In a 1953 article in Allers Familje-journal (Allers Family Journal), his friend Ove Eklund stated that "although [Bauer] only mumbled about and never said clearly", he believed that all the creatures he drew actually existed. Eklund had on several occasions accompanied Bauer on his walks through the forests by Lake Vättern, and Bauer's description of all the things he thought existed made Eklund feel he could see them as well

Tuvstarr
(Still, Tuvstarr sits and gazes down into the water), painted in 1913, is one of Bauer's most noted works. Until the 1980s, the most reproduced and publicized of Bauer's works were two paintings depicting the princess and the moose from Sagan om älgtjuren Skutt och lilla prinsessan Tuvstarr (The Tale of the Moose Hop and the Little Princess Cotton Grass), published in 1913. The first picture is of the princess riding on the moose and the second is of the moose standing guard over the sleeping princess. They were mainly used as pictures on the wall in nurseries. The same tale also contains the picture of Tuvstarr gazing down into the tarn looking for her lost heart, an allegory of innocence lost. Bauer made several studies of this motif. During the 1980s the painting of Tuvstarr and the tarn was used in advertising for a shampoo. This started a debate in Sweden about how works of art, considered part of the national heritage, should be used. In 1999, the picture again appeared in advertising, this time in a manipulated version in which all the trees had been cut down and Tuvstarr seemed to be lamenting them. The award-winning advertising campaign was made by the Naturskyddsföreningen (The Swedish Society for Nature Conservation) and helped further the newly awakened environmental movement in Sweden. In his biography on Bauer, Gunnar Lindqvist argues that the picture has become too commercialized.

Still, Tuvstarr sits and gazes down into the water, 1913, watercolor

Bauer's last large work was an oil painting in 1917. It is of Freja, the old Norse goddess of fertility. Ester posed for the painting nude and Bauer depicted her as strong, sensual and forceful. Their friends teasingly called it "a breast picture of Mrs. Bauer"

Freyja (1917) 

Paul Koudounaris-Empire of Death-Heavenly Bodies

Paul Koudounaris is an author and photographer from Los Angeles. His charnel house and ossuary research and photos have made him a well-known figure in the field of macabre art, and he is a leading expert in the history of bone-decorated shrines and religious structures. He obtained a PhD in Art History from UCLA in 2004, with a specialty in Baroque-era Northern European Art. In 2006, he started extensively studying the use of human remains in religious ritual and as a decorative element in sacred spaces. He began writing about and photographing them for European newspapers such as The Prague Post, but in particular for magazines which specialized in the paranormal, such as the Fortean Times, including cover stories on sites in Europe, Asia, and South America. At the same time, he was compiling material for the first ever history of bone-decorated religious structures, visiting over 70 sites on four continents, some of which had never before been photographed or open to the public. He wrote two books about, full of stunning photographs.

The Empire of Death

In 2011, his research and photos were published by Thames and Hudson as The Empire of Death, the title taken from a caption at the Catacombs of Paris, one of the sites included in the book. The book included other famous ossuaries, such as the Sedlec Ossuary and the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, where he had been granted special permission by the monastery and Italian cultural authorities to photograph. A host of similar, previously unknown sites were also included in the book, however, and the text created a context for understanding the construction of these types of elaborate ossuaries as a Catholic phenomenon that was initiated during the Counter-Reformation.

Heavenly Bodies

His book Heavenly Bodies was released in 2013, and delved even deeper into study of obscure macabre art history by presenting the extraordinary story of a group of skeletons taken from the Roman Catacombs in the seventeenth century and completely decorated with jewels by teams of nuns. The book described how these extravagant cadavers, known as catacomb saints, were often mistakenly identified as Early Christian martyrs, then sent primarily to German-speaking lands where they were decorated and placed into Catholic Churches. Such skeletons are scarcely known nowadays, having been mostly removed and destroyed during the Enlightenment, but Koudounaris tracked down all the surviving examples and photographed them for the book. The title received a tremendous amount of press on its release, and Koudounaris was dubbed "Indiana Bones" by the UK press, in reference to his curious and macabre discoveries.

Jean Marembert

Jean Marembert was a French painter born in Bourbon l'Archambault in 1904 and died in 1968. He was an artist of fantastic imagination and skill; he enjoyed a long and successful career. Always the Surrealist, strange, bizarre, and often beautiful. Let's see some illustrations from 1927 by Jean Marembert for Petrus Borel’s 1927 edition, "Champavert, contes immoraux" (nouvelles, 1833).

Frank C. Papé (1878 - 1972)

Frank Cheyne Papé, who generally signed himself Frank C. Papé (1878 - 1972) was a prolific English artist and book illustrator.

Stefan Eggeler (1864 - 1969)

Stefan Eggeler (1894 – 1969) was an Austrian painter, printmaker and illustrator, studied art at the Vienna Academy. His first original etching was published in 1914 and during the following twenty years he created a number of outstanding engravings and etchings, most dealing with either figure studies or interior scenes. 

Etchings for Gustav Meyrink's Walpurgisnacht (1922):

Etchings for Die Herzen der Konige (1922) by Hanns Heinz Ewers: