In my previous survey of what’s in the public domain as of 1st January, I noted Charles R. Knight, a fine prehistoric artist, whose works are now in the public domain as of 1st January 2024. I had the impression he was a dinosaur artist. He was, and Google Images very firmly gives the impression he was a dinosaur artist. But he was also an artist of prehistoric man, which brings his work into the realm of potential sources for later fantasy art styles. I note for instance his 336-page book Prehistoric Man: The Great Adventurer (1949) is billed as “The saga of man’s beginnings in word and pictures”, by which the Stone Age is meant and apparently depicted in 25 plates.
This is not on Archive.org, and all they have is his Life through the ages in B&W pencil-work, which covers the earliest ocean life through to the cave bears of the Stone Age. In the book one will also find some deliciously malign looking shellfish…
The depiction of some of his early prehistoric hunters, obviously not very popular today (but accessible via a museum site), reminds me of the style of Frazetta…
Earlier work reminds me of the Brothers Hildebrant.
Turns out he was also the artist who did some of the astronomical hallway murals for New York City’s major Hayden Planetarium, which Lovecraft enjoyed late in his life.
Also now in the public domain, and which I was unaware of before, the early American children’s storybook Millions of cats (1928). Interestingly it shares some features with Lovecraft’s tales of Ulthar’s cats… namely the old cotter and his wife, and the encounter with a massed army of ‘cats’.
One wonders if Lovecraft ever saw it? The dating is right, and he must at least have seen reviews in the 1928 magazines.