EMERSON CURTIS, ROBERT (1898-1996)

"Adelaide" (1937)
(illustration for The Home Annual, 1937)
ink and bodycolour on paper
31 x 27cm
signed lower left
*private collection, Sydney
 
Curtis was an important Austalian Illustrator. He was born in Croydon, England, in 1898 and migrated to Australia in 1914. He trained as a commercial artist specialising in newspaper and magazine illustrations. In 1922, accompanied by a friend, the cinematographer Charles Chauvel he travelled to the USA. It was while living in San Francisco that he produced his first prints —small etchings of Alcatraz and boats in the harbour. Upon moving to Chicago in 1925 Emerson Curtis was impressed with the quality of the architecture and the vitality of the buildings being erected in that city. His style of illustration for papers and magazines was influenced by Joseph Pennell, an American lithographer, etcher and illustrator, who embraced the ‘Wonders of Man’ be they buildings, bridges or great canals. Emerson Curtis’s woodcuts and etchings of the 1920s reflect Pennell’s influence but they also have some of the gritty realism which is associated with the American ‘Ashcan school’. In 1928 he returned to Sydney where he produced a series of lithographs on the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. He continued to work in a documentary mode; a late project was recording the building of the Sydney Opera House.