Cold wind through dark hair - Harry R. Bennett

I've always been interested in pulp cover art and its offspring, paperback cover art. Admittedly much of the work is mediocre, so it's interesting to discover particular artists who worked in such limited fields and were able to produce paintings with some sort of personality. In fact it's remarkable there are so many such illustrators worth investigating considering what must have been ridiculous demands on their talent and time. That so much of this old ephemera (or at least the covers wrapped around it) still holds up must be indicative of the era's general quality of school instruction and the artists' talents -- a set of circumstances and opportunities that, unfortunately, seems to have almost completely evaporated after about 1970 (though many of the artists trained before then continued to do good work, of course, despite trends otherwise in the commerical art fields).

There's been no shortage of monographs, retrospectives, websites, etc. in the last several years dedicated to any number of these great illustrators, but considering the proliferation of paperbacks and the poor documentation of artists involved, it's likely there will continue to be rediscoveries before the bottom of the barrel is scraped.

And here I'm talking about the work of Harry R. Bennett -- not exactly an unknown in the field, but someone about whom I could find barely any info online other than a dozen or so images and the merest of biographical data. I began to notice his work on my regular visits to the "free/discard" stacks at the library, as well as the "free" boxes routinely placed outside the local used book stores. At first I didn't look for a particular signature, I just grabbed whichever ones struck my eye. At home, sorting through the bunch, I realized that several of these were clearly the work of one man, whose signature - if I was reading it properly - was Harry Bennett.

Many of these covers were for gothic romaces, which tend to alllow a little more creativity (within a limited scope, obviously) for the artists. The title and any other cover text is usually fairly restrained, less expansive and garish than on the traditional or historical romance varieties, so compositions can be deeper and more mysterious. The figures on most of these covers are often small and frequently alone, inhabiting an evocative, threatening landscape, the only shelter - if any - being a castle, lighthouse, etc. in the far distance. The cloudy, nocturnal gloom is more important than any specific details of character or plot and this is one reason why the cover art produced for this sub-genre is much more interesting to me than, say, the hyper realistic, idealized forms of the bodice-ripping series. Where the friendlier, brighter work of the latter is clearly a dream fantasy, the former is more akin to a nightmare.

The first ten of these images are scans I made myself. They're not all prime examples -- several of them are uninspired and probably rushed, but they still possess certain qualities - in diluted form - of Bennett's better work. As far as I can tell, most of these were featured on editions published from approximately 1960-1975.

His cover for The Secret Woman is fine, simple but effective. The ship's tangled, complex rigging behind the woman is interesting, and the best touch is the figurehead on the prow of the boat -- an ominous twin of the woman in the foreground.

The covers for Lost Island and The Phaedra Complex don't seem to be as carefully rendered as his other work, so they suffer in that regard.

These two - Skye Cameron and The Shrouded Walls - appear more thoroughly "finished" but are otherwise very unremarkable in composition.

My girlfriend was kind enough to notice these two and pick them up for me while she was at the used book store the other day. I hadn't seen either of these reproduced anywhere online, but they're obviously two of many that Bennett made for Victoria Holt's books.

I really like the limited palette of Legend of the Seventh Virgin, and the statues behind the running figure are a creepy touch.

This one is interesting, I think, for its "completeness" -- the picture feels "full" and is very well painted. Note the varying textures of rock steps and tile roofs, as well as the background flora and the broad swaths of fabric worn by the characters. The woman's aloof, skyward gaze is also fascinating.

This is a lovely painting, though curiously the credits page of the book says this jacket was "adapted by Harry Bennett from the original painting by Tom Dunn." Regardless, the colors and textures here are very nice. I wonder how large the original must have been for this? It has the appearance of being smaller for some reason.

Now these last two are good stuff. I don't know if he was more taken with the content, but they're much more inspired. The figure design on Mountain Man and paint application on Columbella is really unusual.

If Bennett had a typical career, he must have painted hundreds of covers in any number of genres and styles, but it was the gothic stuff that I first saw, and which continues to hold my eye. However, I have found a few scans online of some science-fiction work he did, and it's remarkably good and interestingly styled, which lends credence to my belief that SF is perhaps the most invigorating of genres, not just for readers but for those involved in its creation as well. Another example of Bennett's (rare?) science-fiction work is here -- and it's especially unusual that it depicts hardware. I'd love to see more of his SF jobs, if more exist.

The cover to the left is very nice, perhaps bearing the influence of Richard Powers, one of my favorite SF illustrators, and one of the most well-regarded.

I found many other examples of Bennett's work online, though many of the scans are too small or poor quality to be of any real use, and I've also come across several images that appear to be his work but I can't be certain -- again due to lack of credit or indistinct scans.

The excellent image to the left is by Bennett, but the site I found it at gave no indication of where it came from or what it was made for. Its vignette-like attributes might suggest a magazine illustration rather than a book cover?

I have a hunch that at least half of the eight tiny images above are by Bennett, but most of the scans are too miniscule or illegible to prove it. In a few of them I can just barely make out a signature that looks like it could be Bennett's. The main clue, naturally, is the nature of the art itself on each cover -- they look pretty convincing to me, but until I see any of these books in person, I guess I can't be sure.

There's no bibliography of Bennett's work that I could find anywhere on the net, but -- there is this: his son is an excellent artist in his own right, and I've written him and hope that eventually there'll be site dedicated to his father's work. Among the scant info I could find online was mention that Bennett illustrated the work of Dante in the late 60s, but I couldn't find a single image of this tantalizing project online.

Finally, the superb images to the left are two of four that can be seen at the Illustration House website here and here.

Posted by Jeff at 04:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)