Jean de Bosschère | A Belgian poet and illustrator in wartime London | Lumitheca
Jean de Bosschère
1878–1953
Jean de Bosschère wrote poems in French and drew the figures that accompanied them into print. In London his books brought a further set of collaborators into the picture: translators who had to find an English rhythm for the words, even as his drawings crossed the language boundary intact.
Born in Uccle in 1878, de Bosschère trained in art in Antwerp. By 1909 he was publishing poetry with illustrations of his own. His finely outlined figures and sharply divided areas of black and white gave his pages a recognisable character well before English publishers took up his work.
The First World War displaced him from Belgium. He went to London in 1915 and became part of a circle that included the poet F. S. Flint and the novelist May Sinclair. He also illustrated books by others, including Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Designing for an established story gave him a different freedom from the one he exercised in a book whose inhabitants, words and costumes were all his own.
A bilingual book with three makers
The Closed Door was published in London by John Lane in 1917. French and English appear together. De Bosschère supplied the poems and drawings, Flint made the English translations and Sinclair introduced the work. In The City Curious it was F. Tennyson Jesse who retold the story in English.
The bird race in Beasts and Men, the Wigs of The City Curious and the machinery of Weird Islands show Bosschère moving between animal comedy, invented society and fantastic travel.
