J. Allen St. John and His Furniture
Feature discovered on the Web by William C. Wagner
Grandmaster
of fantasy J. Allen St. John is best known for majestically illustrating
ERB's creation of the wildly entertaining jungle sovereign, Tarzan. He
began his artistic career as a young boy. At the age of eight he traveled
with his mother to Paris to study art. His mother’s father was Hilliard
Hely, an artist of considerable talent who gained most of his artistic
training in Paris. Much of St. John’s earliest and fondest memories consist
of spending time with the so-called "Bohemians" his mother gathered around
her, and one of his greatest pleasures was strolling though the Louvre,
the Luxembourg, and the other countless quaint and charming corners of
the city where no one but the dreamers dared to venture.
Several years later, St. John returned to the States to spend time with
his father, who seemed to have plans other than drawing for his adolescent
son. When the boy was sixteen, his father decided that he should train
to become a merchant and arranged a partnership between himself and a man
with sensible experience. Feeling as though his life was beginning to bind
around him like an unwanted cage, the headstrong teenage rebelled, and
his father had no other choice than to send him to his uncle’s ranch in
California, in hopes that his son would bend his defiant behavior towards
something more constructive, like becoming a cowboy.
St. John daydreamed of the time he had spent in Paris and of how happy
and content he felt simply sketching. While on a trip to Los Angeles, fate
grabbed him by the wrist when he ran into Mr. Eugene Torrey, an accomplished
artist, and at one time a student who studied at L'Ecole des Beaux-Arts,
one of a number of influential art schools in France. St. John took a chance
and tossed all other prearranged plans to the wind, deciding to study art
under his newly found friend for the next three years. He toured the sights
of California, gaining inspiration from the magnificence of Yosemite and
drawing and painting the old Spanish missions. His artistic abilities advanced
steadily.
It was in 1905 when publisher A. C. McClurg & Company forged a relationship
with the young St. John. Their first collaboration was "The Face in the
Pool." This was a fairy tale written and illustrated by St. John which
never quite worked out to any advantage. McClurg hired him again in 1915
to provide black & white chapter headings for the second Tarzan novel,
The
Return of Tarzan. The third novel of the series, The Beasts of Tarzan,
featured St. John’s art for the color wraparound dust jacket, black &
white frontispiece, title page illustrations, and an additional 38 pen
& ink drawings to accompany the text. Over the next twenty years, a
new Tarzan novel was produced annually featuring St. John’s art. He illustrated
other McClurg books, as well as the occasional book for Rand McNally, in
addition to teaching at the Chicago Art Institute and the American Academy
of Art.
In 1980, Russ Cochran was in Chicago and visited St. John’s former studio,
then occupied by Jim Romero, who gave him a tour and showed him several
St. John paintings as well as the ornate carved table and chair. After
some negotiation, Cochran purchased a large painting, as well as the ornate
1900-1910 table and chair believed to have been St. John’s writing desk.
The table is high oak flat-topped, with quarter-cut oak top and finger-fluted
molded edge with bowed drawers in the base. The drawer at the bottom has
a foliate "C" scroll carving with large masks and sabre legs ending in
claw feet, and a center shelf to hold books. The accompanying mahogany
chair has scroll-carved ears and open carved center cartouch base, with
a serpentine "X" stretcher and carved legs. At the time of this writing
(January 18, 2008), the St. John table and chair are being auctioned by
Hake’s Americana & Collectibles.
