Art from 'In Powder and Crinoline' ~ Kay Nielsen

Jan 10, 2009 10:27

Once upon a time, Danish illustrator Kay Nielsen was one of the world's foremost fairytale artists, considered the equal of those two other masters to emerge from the Golden Age of Illustration, Dulac and Rackham. In the late 30's he worked for Disney on the film Fantasia, and began designs for an early version of The Little Mermaid (would that it had been made!) before being laid off in 1940. He had difficulty finding work afterwards, and died in poverty. Sadly, today Nielen's art is far less well known than that of his contemporaries, though I am sure he will be more familiar to my descerning readership than to the public in general ~_^ A nice reasonably priced overview of his paintings may be found in Nielsen's Fairy Tale Illustrations in Full Color from Dover Publications.

The subject of today's post are the illustrations from Nielsen's earliest work, In Powder and Crinoline: Old Fairy Tales (1913) by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, which, to my profound sorrow, has long been out of print. I have spent a deal of time culling these images from several different sites, (http://www.nocloo.com/gallery2/v/kay-nielsen-powder-crinoline/?g2_page=1, http://www.artsycraftsy.com/nielsen_prints.html, http://gemmaross.blogspot.com/2007/09/kay-nielsen-illustrations.html). I had intended to spread them out over several entries, but having collected them all together, I haven't the heart to break them up. So! The page under the cut make take a bit to load, but I promise the results will be worth your patience. Enjoy ^_^
































faery art, rococo art, art, kay nielsen

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