[One of the amazingly talented artists at the Disney Studios during the ‘30s and ‘40s was Campbell Grant. His work appeared in many of the animated stories and in the Little Golden Books series including “Snow White” and “Pinocchio” – and in Fantasia. In-depth details will appear in a chapter of the third volume of the upcoming They Drew As They Pleased book series. Mr. Grant also worked on incidental projects and a few of the original artworks from these have recently come to light. Mr. Grant’s son Gordon is offering these for sale for the first time to readers of this blog. Sample images are included here. He is asking $2,500 for each original – but high-quality prints are also available at $250 each (coming to you matted and shrink-wrapped). The giclee prints are derived from 1200 dpi scans and are very good. The originals are gouache on illustration board. Gordon Grant can be reached at: trailgrant45@gmail.com]
That Image of the priest with the penguins I read on the Wikipedia List of unproduced Disney animated shorts and feature films that the title of the unproduced film is is Penguin Island: "This proposed feature was about a fictitious island of great auks that exists off the northern coast of Europe. The story begins when a wayward Christian missionary monk accidentally lands on the island and sees the great auks as a sort of Greek pre-Christian pagan society. Partially blind, he mistakes the animals for people and baptizes them."
ReplyDeleteThanks Brendan: While you are almost certainly correct to believe that this image was created to illustrate the story Penguin Island (written in 1905 by French author Anatole France), despite what Wiki says I can not find any evidence that Disney was trying to adapt the book in the '30s (or later on). The Disney That Never Was by Charles Solomon does not seem to mention the project and none of the documents I have about unproduced Disney projects (and I have a lot of documentation on that subject) does either.
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