March « 2012 « Visual Rants

I love new sources of e-information and Trove is a blessing to people like me who sit at a PC all day! I discovered the National Library of Australia’s Trove last year and I have enjoyed browsing and searching it.

“Trove is an exciting, revolutionary and free search service. With millions of items, Trove is an unrivalled repository of Australian material. Trove is for all Australians. Whether you are tracing your family history, doing professional research, reading for pleasure, teaching or studying, Trove can help. With such a vast amount of material, we wanted to provide some help on getting started. Please see below for help on a range of topics. We hope you enjoy exploring Trove.”

Also it says:

“Find and get over 255,685,876 [as of today] Australian and online resources: books, images, historic newspapers, maps, music, archives and more”

Well, I did, and God bless them for their generosity. I can’t remember how I came across this picture on the Trove site but I instantly liked the drama and clarity of the figure work. And fortunately the artist’s signature was legible.

The_Australian_Women's_Weekly_(1932-1982)_Saturday_23_September_1933_p11

The Australian Women's Weekly Saturday 23 September 1933 p11

According to the wide-ranging ‘Comiclopedia’ by Amsterdam’s Lambiek comic shop, Wynne W. Davies, “was one of the artist working for the comic supplement of the Sunday Times, which was called Pranks. One of Australia’s first comic publications, it commenced publication in 1925 and featured Davies’ ‘The Strange Adventures of Percy the Pom’. Davies moved on to illustrating fiction magazines in the 1930s and 1940s and illustrated covers and interiors for Murder Mysteries, True Gang Life, Thrilling Western and Texas Rangers.” I also found the covers illustrated below on the excellent Fictionmags Index, where there a long list of Davies’ work

Murder Mysteries 1935

A movie poster site alerted me to the fact he produced a few posters for films – including the little known Hitchcock “Champagne”, but it wasn’t until I till trawled the Trove site a bit more that I found more information and a photo!

Champagne film poster

But I couldn’t believe what the Trove website had. I found this article about the fact that Davies returned to Australia after having been in the USA

MR. WYNNE DAVIES, the well-known Australian Women’s Weekly black and white artist, with Mrs. Wynne Davies (right) and Miss Maxine Darrow (left), his niece, who poses for all his illustrations.

Wynne Davies and family - The Australian Women's Weekly

And that really set me looking……

The Australian Women's Weekly Saturday 29 May 1937, page 37

This article tells us he spent some time in New York and in Hollywood where he was particularly interested in Art Directors – not Clark Gable, or Robert Taylor and friends – and loved Walt Disney Studios’ work

Here are some more of his work that I discovered and here’s the secret. If you have a spare lifetime, try this URL: http://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/result?q=%22WYNNE+W.+DAVIES%22