Life and career
Maurice Greiffenhagen began his artistic training at fourteen by drawing from the Parthenon sculptures at the British Museum. His first sustained employment came through London’s illustrated press. He supplied pictures to the Illustrated London News, the Ladies’ Pictorial and Punch, where an illustrator had to make an incident intelligible in the space allotted on a printed page.
Alongside these commissions he built a career as a painter. An Idyll, exhibited in 1891, set a pair of lovers against a landscape of grass and poppies and became one of his best-known pictures. He later taught life drawing at the Glasgow School of Art. The surviving teaching work gives another view of the artist who had learned to draw from stone figures in London.
Work and ideas
His association with H. Rider Haggard extended over several publications. Greiffenhagen illustrated scenes from the fiction and also painted Haggard himself. The two commissions called for different kinds of observation. For the first he had to imagine a place and moment from a written account. For the second the novelist sat before him as a recognisable contemporary.
In The World’s Desire the story belongs jointly to Haggard and Andrew Lang. Greiffenhagen’s contribution belongs to the illustrated edition, where his figures give the reader a particular vision of the adventures of Odysseus in Egypt. The surviving portrait offers a rare companion to the illustrated novel. One shows the author Greiffenhagen knew personally, the other the people both men knew only through the story.
