The Martian by du Maurier

Regarded as one of the most influential poster artists in America, Edward Penfield joined the publishing house Harper and Brothers at the age of twenty-five as a staff artist and editor. Shortly after his promotion to artistic director, Penfield created his first lithograph for Harper’s Magazine in 1893. Following its runaway success, he made posters advertising each successive issue of the magazine for over seven years. Magazine readers and poster collectors celebrated his designs for their boldness, abstraction, and occasional comic touch. Penfield also created advertisements and cover designs for books published by Harper and Brothers.

As the most acclaimed artist working for Harper’s, Penfield was free to experiment with avant-garde styles. Less concerned with the dramatic curving lines of Art Nouveau than his contemporaries, Penfield synthesized a number of stylistic sources in his work, including Japanese ukiyo-e prints and posters made by contemporary French and British artists. Penfield’s work for Harper’s displays a late nineteenth-century American type—the wealthy and well-appointed middle-class individual enjoying leisure time. Penfield himself was part of this newly emerging middle class.

Born in France, George Du Maurier worked mostly in London and wrote three largely autobiographical novels. First published serially by Harper and Brothers, his most successful work Trilby (1894) concentrated on his bohemian rhapsody with Paris’s Latin Quarter while he was a student and famously coined the term Svengali. The Martian, which is advertised here, was also published as a serial, but never caught the public’s imagination in the same way as Trilby. Penfield’s large-scale poster, with its bright colors and bold design, also appears on the cover of the book’s first edition. The novel tells of a schoolboy in Paris who begins to lose his eyesight and is protected by a guardian named Martia, a female spirit from Mars. Du Maurier tragically lost sight in his left eye and had to abandon painting for drawing, which eventually led to a promising career as a caricaturist—perhaps he too had a protector?