Several editions of The Rubaiyat illustrated by Jeff Hill were published by the Peter Pauper Press, all using FitzGerald’s fourth version. None of them was dated, but gift inscriptions in various copies suggest that many appeared in the late 1950s and 1960s, though the first edition seems to have appeared in 1956 (1a). All contained the same nine woodcut illustrations, including the frontispiece, but used different colour schemes (1b) and had different covers. The copy used here has the cover shown in Fig.1a, its frontispiece and title page being shown in Fig.1b, the frontispiece presumably relating to the famous quatrain 12 (“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough &c.”) Three other examples are shown here as Fig.1c, probably relating to its facing quatrain 28 (“With them the Seed of Wisdom did I sow &c”); Fig.1d, clearly relating to the potter’s shop of quatrains 82ff; and Fig.1e probably relating to quatrain 101 (“And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass &c.”) Note that though I cite quatrain numbers here, the quatrains are actually unnumbered in the book itself, which, to add to the difficulty of referencing it, is also unpaginated. [The illustrations can be browsed here.]
These are not among my favourite illustrations of The Rubaiyat, to be honest. Though they are neat in their execution, they are not very imaginative, in that they attempt little by way of the symbolic embellishment that enhances the Rubaiyat illustrations done by some other artists. This is rather odd because, over a period of 27 years, from 1952 to 1979 (1c), Hill illustrated or decorated no less than 41 books published by Peter Pauper Press, plus 3 others printed by the Press for other publishers, and, as we shall see, many of these show that Hill had plenty of imagination, which rather makes one wonder why he wasn’t more adventurous in his Rubaiyat illustrations. But what of the artist himself ? Though one can glean some information about him from these books and more from contemporary newspaper clips (mainly from his principal stamping ground of North Carolina), a search for Jeff Hill in online ancestry records reveals nothing at all. He is like the invisible man. The reason for this is that Jeff Hill was not his real name, which turns out to have been George Franklin Hill Jr. The origin of the nickname Jeff is not clear, but I wonder if it arose from a simple phonetic running together of his initials G.F. Be that as it may, once we know this he starts to appear in ancestry records as a commercial artist, and newspaper clips confirm him to be the artist working for Peter Pauper Press – i.e. Jeff Hill.
George Franklin Hill Jr was born on 20 July 1922, the son of the Reverend George Franklin Hill and his wife Lou Shelton Zoeller Hill, a school teacher. He grew up in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. In the early 1940s he attended the University of North Carolina, where he contributed to, and produced posters for, “Tar an’ Feathers”, the campus magazine. He graduated in 1943 with majors in Studio Art and Art History, and a minor in Archaeology. That year he moved to New York City, working for several Madison Avenue advertising agencies, but in 1947 he returned to North Carolina, to Raleigh, continuing to work in advertising, but also teaching and exhibiting his work. His first illustrated book – actually a 64 page booklet – seems to have been Carl Goerch’s Pitchin’ Tar, which could have been subtitled “Everything you ever wanted to know about North Carolina, and a lot of things you didn’t”, published in Raleigh in 1949. Fig.2a (p.17) shows the knighting of the Indian chief, Manteo, for his services to Sir Walter Raleigh (after whom the city is named) on Roanoke Island, and Fig.2b (p.55) is Hill’s cartoon illustrating why the use of the expression “you–all” (drawled as “y’all”) is plural, never singular. (Incidentally, the tar in the titles of the booklet and the above mentioned campus magazine comes from the fact that North Carolina was a producer of tar, pitch and turpentine, which led, for some reason not fully understood (but see Goerch p.5), to North Carolinians being dubbed “Tar Heels.” Thus, in the occasional newspaper report, Hill is referred to as a Tar Heel Artist.)
In June 1944 Hill had married Ida May Davis at Louisburg, North Carolina, and in the 1950 US Federal Census, both aged 27, they were recorded as living at 1936 Smallwood Drive, Raleigh. He (as George Frederick Hill Jr., of course) was listed as a freelance commercial artist, she as a clerk in the State Archives Department. (In fact, she had a degree and an MA in Art from the University of North Carolina, and in the 1960s was to have a successful career as an art researcher and museum curator, first at the Ackland Art Museum at that same university, and subsequently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.)
Hill’s long career with Peter Pauper Press began in 1952, but we shall turn to that later, and concentrate here instead on some background material.
In April 1952 Hill held his first solo exhibition of 31 woodcuts at the Ferree School of Art in Raleigh. From an article about the exhibition in the Raleigh News and Observer on 6 April 1952 (p.48) we learn that by this time Hill had built up a great reputation for his printmaking, despite the general disdain of the fine arts for such work, having exhibited some of his prints at key venues in New York, Lakeland (Florida), and Boston. The article goes on:
In his current exhibition Hill proves himself to be a versatile artist with a great deal of technical skill. His technique, however, is always merely the servant of his expression rather than, as with so many woodcut artists, an end in itself. He never becomes involved in displays of technical intricacies and he never loses sight of pictorial expression and design.
Religious, mythological and contemporary subjects are interpreted in a language of simplified design that makes frequent use of expressive distortions. Most dramatic of Hill’s works is His Last Days, a large figure of the crucified Christ combined with six small panels portraying events before and after the crucifixion.
Simpler in conception but, perhaps, equally successful are some of Hill’s scenes of nudes that are handled either in contour or in broad areas of flat texture and tone. The prints make up an exhibition that has variety both in subject matter and in treatment and that is uniform in its high artistic merit only.
We shall see some of Hill’s “expressive distortions” as well as some of his nudes later, but I regret that I have never seen “His Last Days”, nor his woodcut “Two Apostles” which was exhibited at the Florida International Art Exhibition in February and March of 1952. Both of these serve as a reminder that he attended the Christ Episcopal Church of Elizabeth City, of which his father was rector. Whether his faith had much to do with him illustrating Little Book of Prayers in 1960 and The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence in 1963, both published by the Peter Pauper Press, or whether these were simply just two commissions among many others (like the Jewish–related books or the Hindu Proverbs, to be discussed presently), is not clear. Two illustrations from the former are shown here as Fig.3a (p.4) and Fig.3b (p.9), and they rather skilfully capture the style of a medieval icon or illuminated manuscript.
In an interview with Jane Hall in the Raleigh News and Observer on 5 November 1961 (p.13), conducted in conjunction with his exhibition at the Carolina Art Sales Gallery, Hill revealed that he only did his first woodcut in 1951, but had done 566 by the time of the interview; that though he did work in colour, he preferred “the shadow world” of black and white; and that though he did design his drawings, he preferred it when the pencil carried him along, “almost like automatic writing.” He also revealed the amount of research that went into some of his book illustrations. “In one instance,” the interviewer recorded, “he read 33 books before sitting down at his drawing board” adding that one of his most difficult research problems was trying to find a description of a Russian road–side shrine in 1800 for use in Tolstoy’s What Men Live By, published by Peter Pauper Press in 1954. The photograph of Hill with some of his work, shown in Fig.4a, accompanies this interview. (The book on the right of the picture is his illustrated edition of Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil – see Fig.9a below.)
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Hill was art director for the National Grass Roots Opera Foundation, founded in Raleigh in 1948, and which had been touring nationally from the 1949–1950 season onwards. In 1956 he painted a portrait of David Witherspoon, a North Carolina tenor who was well known in his day. On a more mundane level, he also seems to have pitched in to help with the stage sets on occasion.
Hill was also a keen amateur geologist, with a particular interest in “lightning stones” or fulgurites, having collected some 1300 of them with his father at Nag’s Head, on the coast some 200 miles to the east of Raleigh. They were subsequently donated to the geology department of the University of North Carolina. An early article about these ‘thunderbolts’ appeared in the North Carolina newspaper The Asheville–Citizen Times on 15 August 1948 (p.16), under the heading “His Ring is a Piece of the Moon – Thunderbolts are his Hobby.” Fig.4b is a photograph of Hill holding one of his ‘thunderbolts.’ The stone in his ring was presumably a lunar meteorite (2).
In addition, Hill was a keen gardener. In January 1966 he treated the Highland Garden Club in Raleigh to a talk on “Witches’ Brew – Herb Lore and Cultivation.” Again, in May 1972 he gave a talk on herbs to the Thorn and Thistle Garden Club, also in Raleigh. In fact, Hill wrote and illustrated two gardening books for the Peter Pauper Press: Friendly Weeds and How to Grow Friendly Ferns, both published in 1976. In his Introduction to the former, Hill put forward an argument which holds much appeal for someone who, like me, weeds the garden only under pressure, namely, that dandelions are weeds only because there are so many of them, and if orchids grew in such profusion, they would surely be counted as weeds. “The definition of weeds, therefore,” he wrote, “can be completely inverted – it’s all a matter of personal value. So there!”
Hill retired from commercial art in 1984 to devote some time to producing wooden religious icons, and to listening to his large collection of jazz records and tapes. He died at a nursing home in Elizabeth City on 26 June 2009 and is buried (alongside his sister (3)) in the Old Hollywood Cemetery in Elizabeth City (Fig.4c).
One of the earliest was an edition of Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, undated, but known to have been published in 1953. Fig.5a is the headpiece of the “Introductory” (p.5) and Fig.5b the headpiece of “Hiawatha’s Wooing” (p.39).
Closely following this in date came India Love Poems, selected – and with an Essay on Woman in India – by Tambimuttu. This book, for once, is actually dated 1954. The nature of its subject matter, not surprisingly, gave Hill the opportunity to indulge in a few nudes, which he did sixteen times over. Fig.6a (p.45) and Fig.6b (p.73) are two examples. The illustrations seem to be generic, relating to no poem in particular, and looking at them I wonder if Hill took his lead from the erotic Indian temple sculptures of Khajuraho and such–like, given the research which we know backed up his illustrations. The use of a broad white outline, with details supplied by narrow white outlines, is reminiscent of his Rubaiyat illustrations, whereas his Hiawatha illustrations are made up of white outlines of uniform thickness.
Similar indulgence in the nude was provided by Women Pro & Con, this again actually dated, to 1958. It is a collection of thoughts on women written by literary men of the past, mostly con, but with a few pro here and there. Perhaps predictably more than a dozen quotes come from Oscar Wilde (for example “Women are made to be loved, not to be understood”, from “The Sphinx without a Secret”.) Fig.7a shows the front cover (note the mask!) and Fig.7b is the illustration on p.20 (there are six illustrations in all, in addition to the cover.). In the Apologia at the front of the book, having sought to partially excuse the preponderance of con over pro (quality making up for quantity, in effect), the editor writes: “Our artist has, we think, been wiser than our authors: he has shown his women as half light and half dark: but always intriguing.” In addition to his two–colour effect, Hill has returned to a white outline of uniform thickness, but with outline made up of numerous straight line segments.
Though it is undated, Hill’s illustrated edition of Francis Thompson’s well–known poem The Hound of Heaven is known to have been published in 1957, the year before Women Pro & Con. Its frontispiece is shown in Fig.8a and the illustration on p.17 in Fig.8b. The tormented poet shows through in both illustrations, and their style is a forerunner of his extraordinary illustrations relating to another tormented poet, Charles Baudelaire, who merits a section to himself.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
The year 1958 saw the publication of the Peter Pauper Press first edition of a selection of poems from Baudelaire’s Flowers of Evil (Fleurs du Mal), translated and with a Foreword by Jacques Leclercq. Hill did ten illustrations for this, including the cover. These expressionist woodcuts are so different in nature from anything he did before (or later!), that they merit some explanation and this involves knowing something of Baudelaire’s life.
Born into well–to–do family in Paris in 1821, his father introduced him to poetry and art, and he absolutely worshipped his mother (Leclercq dubs it “his monstrous Oedipus complex.”) Following his father’s death in 1827, her re–marriage to an unsympathetic military man the following year severely upset his status quo, the result of which seems to have been that in his late teens he suffered from depression and became rebellious. By the age of 20, having written some of his earliest poems, already deemed by some as of “precocious depravity,” he was living a Bohemian life in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It was here that he contracted the syphilis that was later to contribute to his death, probably from a prostitute nicknamed Sarah la Louchette (Squint–eyed Sarah.) In 1841, in an attempt to rescue the young poet from his disreputable life style, his step–father packed him off to India, but he jumped ship and headed back to Paris. It was here in 1842 that two things happened. Firstly, he came into an inheritance which he proceeded to squander rapidly in the life of a Bohemian dandy, involving drink, hashish and opium. (In 1860 he was to write a book, Les Paradis Artificiels, about his experiences, his section on opium owing much to de Quincey’s Confessions.) Secondly he was to meet the love of his life, his “mistress of mistresses”, his “Black Venus”, Jeanne Duval (which may or may not have been her real name.) She was of French and African mixed–race, born in Haiti in about 1820, and was, in the words of Leclercq, “unbeautiful of aspect, a slave to drink and narcotics, a lesbian into the bargain and, if not a nymphomaniac, then surely a paragon of pruriency.” To add to the mix, she may also have worked as a prostitute. Though their relationship was tempestuous as well as passionate, it lasted several years before she drifted off into obscurity, the date of her death (from syphilis) remaning unclear. But for Baudelaire she was the epitome of alluring sexuality, and at the same time of fatal attraction. Duval’s eyes, her hair, her dark skin, her breasts, her scent, her slim figure and her sinuous movements, all inspired Baudelaire to pen some of his most erotic poems, now regarded as masterpieces, but scandalously obscene in their day. Six of these poems are included in the Peter Pauper Press edition, namely “Of her hair” (p.17), “Dancing Serpent” (p.23), “Carrion” (p.26), “Sed non satiata” (p.28), “The Balcony” (p.34) and “Exotic Perfume” (p.38). Starry–eyed they are not, for when it came to women, torment, vampirism, death and bodily corruption were never very far from his thoughts – “Carrion” is morbidly bizarre, to say the least! Though Duval was Baudelaire’s principal muse, some of his early poems were inspired by the aforementioned Sarah la Louchette. Others, written in the early 1850s, were written for Apollonie Sabatier, his “White Venus”, a singer, artist’s model, up–market courtesan and salon hostess, with whom he had a brief affair (“To her who is too joyful” in the Peter Pauper Press edition, p.40, was inspired by her.) Yet others were written for another of his lovers, “the green–eyed Venus”, actress Marie Daubrun, though none of these features in Leclercq’s selection. However, though it is known from contemporary letters for whom many of these poems were written, some remain unattributed, and may be of a generic nature.
When Fleurs du Mal was first published in 1857, Baudelaire was hauled into court for offences against religion and public decency, and six of its 100 poems were ordered to be removed from the book on the grounds of obscenity (4a). Oddly, none of the above cited poems inspired by Jeanne Duval were included in the banned six, though that inspired by Apollonie Sabatier was. Be that as it may, besides “To her who is too joyful”, four other banned poems are included in the Peter Pauper Press edition, namely, “Lethe” (p.32), “Jewels” (p.22), “Lovers of the Damned” (p.42), and “Metamorphoses of a Vampire” (p.55).
Syphilitic, and after a life of drink and drugs, Baudelaire seems to have suffered a massive stroke, for he died paralysed and speechless in a Paris nursing home in 1867, aged only 46.
We are now in a position to take a look at Hill’s illustrations for Flowers of Evil. Fig.9a is the cover (4b) and it is seen to have captured well the face of Baudelaire as in his portrait dating from 1862 (Fig.9b). The image of him which faces the end of Leclercq’s Foreword (Fig.9c) is seen to be the poet in tormented, melancholic mode, be it on account of his morbid preoccupation with Death, “Poet and tomb were friends since Time began,” from “Posthumous Remorse” (p.35); his lack of recognition as a poet “exiled on earth amid a jeering crowd”, from “Albatrosses” (p.22); or the torment resulting from his passion and lust for woman as a “blind, deaf machine, geared to increase man’s pain” from “Tyranny of Woman” (p.28.) He was not ‘a Happy Bunny’, as the saying goes.
Fig.9d (p.16) faces the poem “Of her hair” and the bizarre Fig.9e (p.29) faces the poem “Sed non satiata” (But not satisfied (5)), both related to Jeanne Duval, as noted above, the latter presumably explaining Leclercq’s comment in his Foreword that she was a nymphomaniac. Readers will perhaps wonder why Hill depicts her as white skinned instead of dark, the more so since Leclercq describes her (without naming her !) as “a negress.” But actually, her skin was not that dark, as is clear from the photograph of her taken by Nadar, one of the first of what we would now call celebrity photographers, probably in the late 1850s (Fig.9f), a photograph which, incidentally, shows that her hair was indeed one of her most striking features. Hill used the same ‘model’ for all of Baudelaire’s love / lust poems, written for Duval or otherwise, and Leclercq does not say anything about which poems were written for whom, if indeed for anyone in particular as opposed to being generic, though Hill could easily have found out if he had had a mind to, given his propensity for background research. I wonder, therefore, if the ‘model’ was simply an all–purpose one, not based on any particular one of Baudelaire’s lovers, and whose white skin was of no more significance than the purple background ? Certainly, knowing Hill’s working methods, I doubt the white skin was just a mistake.
Finally, Fig.9g (p.21) relates to the poem “Hymn to Beauty”, depicting “the panting lover with his mistress in the night”, and Fig.9h (p.45) relates to the above–mentioned lesbian poem “Lovers of the Damned,” in which the lovers are named as Hippolyta and Delphine – illustrations for two very different poems using the same generic ‘model’ as Fig.9d, Duval or not. Incidentally, neither “Lovers of the Damned” nor Baudelaire’s banned lesbian poem “Lesbos” (not in Leclercq’s selection) appears to be connected with Duval, so I am not clear where Leclercq picked up the idea that she was a lesbian.
These rather expressionist illustrations are not, perhaps, to everyone’s taste, but personally I find them some of the most interesting examples of Hill’s work, well worth a digression, and certainly much more imaginative than his Rubaiyat illustrations.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
In 1960 Hill went into a different mode again with Soliloquies and Speeches from the Plays of William Shakespeare, Fig.10a (p.49 – Hamlet) & Fig.10b (p.61 – Katharine from “The Taming of the Shrew”) being two examples. In 1967 he returned to the great Bard, in another different style, in Shakespeare: Wisdom & Wit, Fig.11a (p.45) & Fig.11b (p.52) being two examples. These illustrations have the appearance of improvised drawings of the type which Hill likened to automatic writing in the newspaper interview quoted earlier. It is not clear to which plays these illustrations belong, but the former may well be King Lear and the latter, perhaps, Ophelia. In between these two Shakespearean books he had illustrated Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven and Other Poems (undated, but c.1961), the illustration facing the opening lines of “The Raven” being shown in Fig.12a (p.4) and the illustration facing the poem “Lenore” in Fig.12b (p.41).
In 1962 he decorated or illustrated no less than three books of proverbs: Hindu Proverbs and Wisdom, its dust–jacket design being shown in Fig.13a and an example of its illustrations in Fig.13b (p.29); Japanese Proverbs & Traditional Phrases, its charming dust–jacket design being shown in Fig.14a, and its title–page with a typical decoration in Fig.14b; and African Proverbs, its cover design being shown in Fig.15a and one of its decorative headings (Ivory Coast) in Fig.15b.
Cherry Blossoms, a book of Japanese haiku decorated by him was published in 1960, followed, in 1962, by a similarly decorated Haiku Harvest – a sample two–page spread from which is shown in Fig.16a (p.8–9). This was followed in 1968 by A Haiku Garland – a sample two–page spread from which is shown in Fig.16b (unpaginated).
In 1966 came Exciting Days in Samuel Pepys’ Diary whose selected text and illustrations by Hill ranges from the Great Plague (Fig.17a – p.37) to the famous diarist groping the maid at an ale–house at Blackfriars in London (Fig.17b – p.29.) Hill clearly enjoyed illustrating Pepys’s extra–marital exploits, for he illustrated two others besides this one!
In 1968 came Marriage: Pro and Con, something of a companion volume to Women: Pro & Con, mentioned earlier, though with no Apologia at the front. By now Hill was playing with illustrations constructed from a single continuous line – Fig.18a shows the front cover & Fig.18b the illustration on p.45. Needless to say the well–known old English proverb “Marry in haste and repent at leisure” features, as does the less well–known one (new to me) “Never rely on the glory of the morning or on the smile of your mother–in–law.”
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
In 1963 appeared The Wisdom of Moses Maimonides, containing a selection of quotations from the works of the great 12th century Jewish philosopher. Compared to the titles of the Peter Pauper Press editions encountered above, this one might seem an unlikely commercial venture, though actually some of his sayings have achieved popular appeal. The front and back of the unfolded dust–jacket are shown in Fig.19a, the front being presumably intended to be Maimonides himself, and the back the well–known Jewish menorah or seven–branched candlestick. Like the menorah, the torah scroll and Star of David (Fig.19b – p.17) are fairly common knowledge, but Hill must have done quite some research to come up with the Ziz (Fig.19c – p. 24), the giant griffin–like bird of Jewish mythology, or the Hoopoe Bird (Fig.19d – p.49), said to have helped lead Solomon to Sheba.
Re–drawn versions of these illustrations, with different colouring, were used, with the odd extra here and there, in Wit and Wisdom of Israel (1968), The Wit and Wisdom of the Talmud (1974) and Sex in the Talmud (1979), not as saucy as it sounds, being subtitled “Reflections on Human Relations”.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
In 1962 the Peter Pauper Press printed, for the American Patriots Society of Tampa, Florida, The Cat can yield but its Skin, by Currie B. Witt and Lavinia Lee Witt. It was in the instantly recognisably Peter Pauper Press format, and illustrated with some wonderful cartoons by Hill (6) – the cover and dust jacket design is a classic for a start (Fig.20a). Basically the book stitches together text adapted from the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Woodrow Wilson, the ‘joins’ being papered over by contributions from the Witts (father and daughter.) It imagines Franklin descending from Heaven to visit the President of the USA and comparing notes on the state of America in their respective eras. Franklin cannot believe the amount of often hidden taxation that Americans now pay and imagines that tax collectors must need protection to prevent them from being massacred by angry mobs (p.17), Fig.20b being Hill’s imaginative depiction of such a scene. The title of the book, incidentally, relates metaphorically to taxation, for in tax terms “the cat can yield but its skin”, this again being wonderfully depicted by Hill in Fig.20c (p.21). (Hill was a cat lover, by the way – he had a cat nicknamed Tripod, as it only had three legs following an altercation with a dog.) The book also covers discussions about imposing democracy in other countries, foreign aid, free trade, government subsidies and complex bureaucratic controls, but my favourite bit of the book concerns Madame d’Hardancourt Brillon de Jouy, a skilled amateur musician and composer whom Franklin had met in Paris when he was sent as ambassador to France in 1776. Franklin explains to the President that in Heaven he had angered God by trying to reform ‘the constitution’ there, so that in return for following two extra commandments, one could be allowed to break one of the traditional ten, in his own case, the one about not coveting one’s neighbour’s wife. As Franklin puts it, “Mr President, if you had ever known Madame D’Hardencourt (sic) Brillon de Jouy, you would realize somebody was going to get Coveted, or somebody was going to have to move out of the Neighbourhood.” Hill’s picture of her is delightful – Fig.20d (p.11.)
Later, in 1965, the Peter Pauper Press published Abraham Lincoln, Wisdom & Wit and in 1970, The Words of Theodore Roosevelt, both illustrated by Hill. Then, in 1974, came The Spirit of ’76. The year ’76 is, of course, 1776, the year of American Independence, and the book is a compilation of quotes relating to this from George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin and others. Hill’s illustrations are suitably pro–American, starting with the cover (Fig.21a) through the American Eagle (Fig.21b – p.9), the American flag and the Liberty Bell, to the Declaration of Independence (Fig.21c – p.52), which is quoted in full.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
In the newspaper interview with Jane Hall in 1961 (quoted above), Hill said that among the 20 or so books he had illustrated for the Peter Pauper Press was an edition of Love Poems from the Greek Anthology. In 1955 the Press certainly did publish such a book, with translations by Jacques Le Clercq (7), and it is listed as #309 in Donnelly and Dobkin (as in note 1a.) But neither the book itself, nor Donnelly and Dobkin’s listing, mentions Jeff Hill as illustrator. Its title–page is shown in Fig.22a with two sample illustrations in Fig.22b (heterosexual love) and Fig.22c (homosexual love) – the latter one of only two such illustrations (out of fifteen), both lesbian. They roughly imitate Greek vase paintings and their outlines of uniform thickness are in the style of Hill’s Hiawatha illustrations, so they certainly could be by Hill. But if they are by him, why is he not named ? A simple oversight, or what ? Enquiries at the Peter Pauper Press threw no light on the matter, and unfortunately Jeff Hill himself is no longer around to ask.
[The illustrations can be browsed here.]
Note 1a: Carl J. Weber and James Humphry III in FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat – Centennial Edition (1959), in their checklist of the collection at the library of Colby College, Waterville. Maine, date the library copy illustrated by Jeff Hill to 1956 (#213). Jos Coumans, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: an Updated Bibliography (2010), #149 also dates the first of the editions to 1956. Oddly, Sean Donnelly & J. B. Dobkin, in their book The Peter Pauper Press of Peter and Edna Beilenson, 1928–1979: a Bibliography and History (2013), date none of their Jeff Hill listings (##452–5 inclusive.) Roger Paas in his catalogue Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Related Materials: the John Roger Paas Collection (2023), #3745, says that Donnelly & Dobkin #452 “may be from the printing dated in the ECB (= English Catalogue of Books) to January 1956, with copies priced at 7/6 (= 7 shillings & 6 pence.)” The ECB entry simply says that Peter Pauper Press used Mayflower & Vision Press of London as their distributing agents (re. which, see Donnelly & Dobkin p.xxiv) for an edition of the Rubaiyat in 1956, though it doesn’t name Jeff Hill.
Note 1b: The copy used here in Fig.1, with the illustrations in white outline on a purple background, is Donnelly & Dobkin #452. Their #453 & 454 have yellow outline on an orange background and their #455 has light blue outline on a lime green background. There is also an edition with a yellow / gold outline on a black background.
Note 1c: For a full list see Donnelly & Dobkin p.295–6.
Note 2: For a good later article about them by Will Bernardin, titled “This Rockpile Is Safe During Thunder Storm,” see The High Point Enterprise, 8 May 1966 (p.33).
Note 3: Jeff Hill and his wife must have divorced, for in 1972 his wife married William R. Nolte in Philadelphia, where, as noted earlier, she was a curator at the Museum of Art. She died as May Davis Hill Nolte on 21 May 1988, aged 65. She is buried in Oakwood Cemetery, in Louisburg, North Carolina, where she had grown up and where she had married Jeff Hill in 1944.
Note 4a: The six poems were first published in Belgium in 1866 under the title Les Épaves (“Wrecks” or “Waifs”) with a frontispiece by Felicien Rops. The ban on their publication in France was not lifted until 1949.
Note 4b: A variant of this edition, also dated 1958, has the purple background on the cover and in the illustrations replaced by brown. Another edition, also dated 1958, was issued under a different cover, here shown as Fig.9i. Which edition came out first is not clear, and Donnelly & Dobkin list only one edition (#167).
Note 5: “Sed non satiata” (but not satisfied) seems to be a misquotation of “necdum satiata” (not yet satisfied), a phrase applied by Juvenal to the nymphomaniac Empress Messalina, wife of Claudius (Satire 6, line 130.)
Note 6: In the Raleigh News and Observer, starting on 3 December 1951 and running through the pre–Christmas period, Hill illustrated a twelve part cartoon strip aimed at children, “The Life of Santa Claus”. It seems to have been commissioned as an advertising gimmick for the Hudson–Belk department store. (Recall also Fig.2b. Hill similarly did the cover and illustrations for Currie B. Witt’s Some Secrets for My Grandson, also published by the Peter Pauper Press for the American Patriots Society, in 1968. Witt clearly wrote this in the belief that his daughter was about to give birth to a son. Unfortunately, she gave birth to a daughter, so he had to add a PS giving some thoughts on personal relationships, husbands and homes! Fig.23 is Hill’s wonderful opening illustration to Some Secrets.)
Note 7: The translator (Jacques Le Clercq) was the same as the Jacques Leclercq who translated the edition of Baudelaire illustrated by Hill. For the Peter Pauper Press he also translated Balzac’s Epigrams on Men, Women and Love (1959), Rimbaud’s Poems of the Damned (1960) and Verlaine’s Poems (1961), though none was illustrated by Hill. He was a professor of French Literature and Romance Languages at Queen’s College, City University of New York. He died in New York in 1972 aged 74.
**********
I must thank Sarah Longstreth of the Peter Pauper Press for fielding my various questions about Jeff Hill and his books, and the Press itself for the use of so many of the illustrations featured in this essay. They are, after all, about the only permanent record we have of most of the artist’s work. I must also thank Roger Paas, Fred Diba, Joe Howard, Sandra Mason and Bill Martin for proof–reading this article and making a number of useful comments and suggestions.
**********
To return to the Notes and Queries Index, click here.
To return to the Index of the Rubaiyat Archive, click here
.
