Valuable information on two more Rubaiyat artists

Bob Forrest has been researching two more little known artists of the 20th century who illustrated Edward FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. These are Paul McPharlin (1903-1948) and Kathleen O’Brien (1914-1991). The full write ups on each of these artists are available on Bob’s website, via the following links. Our thanks once more to Bob for sharing his valuable research with us all.

https://www.bobforrestweb.co.uk/The_Rubaiyat/N_and_Q/Paul_McPharlin/Paul_McPharlin.htm

https://www.bobforrestweb.co.uk/The_Rubaiyat/N_and_Q/O_Brien/O_Brien.htm

Paul McPharlin. 

Though Paul McPharlin illustrated some twenty books for the Peter Pauper Press, including The Rubaiyat, he is probably better known as for his promotion of puppeteering as a respectable and serious art form. A man of many interests, as his numerous contributions to the journal Notes and Queries testify, he lived with his parents until he was over forty. He then married at the age of 44, but sadly died six months later of an inoperable brain tumour.

The editions of The Rubaiyat with McPharlin’s illustrations published by the Peter Pauper Press (PPP) were undated. Bob Forrest suggests that the first such edition probably appeared in 1940. For this, McPharlin did eight illustrations (including the frontispiece) accompanying the text of FitzGerald’s fourth version, with an illustrated colophon at the end. As Bob discusses in his full article, the illustrations seem to be generic rather than tied to specific verses, their content following the mildly erotic undertones imagined and exploited to a greater extent by the likes of Ronald Balfour, John Buckland Wright and John Yunge Bateman. There was also another edition of five of McPharlin’s illustrations published by PPP with FitzGerald’s first version of the text. The date of publication for this version is uncertain

Bob’s article provided copious images of McPharlin’s work, including his Rubaiyat illustrations, and it documents his life, and varied interests, as well as the many other books that he illustrated.

Kathleen O’Brien 

The Australian publishers, Gornall, based in Sydney, produced an edition of FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat in 1945. This used FitzGerald’s first edition and had a short introduction by E[dgar] A[llan] Gornall, in which he wrote, “Should the Fitzgerald (sic) version be lost to the world, by any strange chance, man would be poor indeed, for where there is Omar there can only be joy.” The somewhat erotic nature of the four black and white illustrations rather suggests that the artist, named on the cover only as O’Brien, was a man. In fact the illustrator was a woman called Kathleen O’Brien, better known for her cartoon strip “Wanda the War Girl.” and illustrator of a number of other books. Bob suggests that the erotic freedom of O’Brien’s wartime work may reflect the more hedonistic view of life fostered by the later years of the Second World War.

Bob’s full article on this artist takes a look at her life and work, with details of the Wanda cartoon strip, and images from it, as well as a discussion of the Rubaiyat and other illustrations, including for childrens’ stories and fairy tales. O’Brien had a distinguished later career as a fashion artist and continued working up to the age of 70.

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Bob’s work on Paul McPharlin and Kathleen O’Brien is also now published in print form as Nos. 34 and 35 in his series of booklets on Rubaiyat Artists. For details of the circulation of these booklets, see an earlier post https://omarkhayyamrubaiyat.wordpress.com/2023/06/29/bob-forrest-has-produced-six-more-booklets-on-rubaiyat-artists/.