As I’ve done every year since 2006, I’ll wish all Lines and Colors readers a Happy New Year with more New Years babies from the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, by the great American illustrator, J.C. Leyendecker.

Lots of great art in the year to come!

Like his fellow illustrator and predecessor on Bland Tomtar och Troll (Among Elves and Trolls), John Bauer, Swedish-American illustrator Gustaf Tenggren doesn’t get the recognition he deserves, even among aficionados of Golden Age illustration.

Ironically, Tenggren is probably better known for his later, very different style, in which he illustrated The Poky Little Puppy, than for his marvelous dark forests full of trolls and heroes, in which he picked up where Bauer left off.

Hopefully, Tenggren’s level of recognition may change, as he is the focus of a new website and blog devoted to the artist, and maintained by Lars Emanuelsson. Perhaps more importantly, Emanuelson is at work on a new biography of Tenggren, due to be released next year.

The Tenggren website is an excellent resource on the artist, with a biography and a history of his several periods of illustration and movie production work, along with a gallery of images.

Unfortunately, the images in the gallery, though numerous, are small. For larger images, I’ll point to articles on the Animation Resources site that revives much of the now gone ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archives site (see links below).

For more, see my previous post on Gustaf Tenggren.

[Suggestion courtesy of: Bertil Saukkoriipi]

A follow-up to my 2006 article on “Illustrator’s Visions of Santa Claus“, in which I attempted to chronicle how 19th and early 20th century illustrators shaped our contemporary vision of the Jolly One.

(Images above: Thomas Nast, Reginald Birch, J.C. Leyendecker, N.C. Wyeth, Norman Rockwell and Haddon Sundblom — with detail)