Yesterday, February 13th, marked the one hundred and fifteenth birthday of Robert Stewart Sherriffs.* Born in 1906 to a merchant family in Arbroath, Scotland, he moved to London in 1927. Sherriffs quickly found work as a cartoonist and caricaturist, specializing in portraits of theater and cinema stars. That would remain his primary vocation until his death in 1960. However, it was when his career intersected with the legacy of Christopher Marlowe that Sherriffs ventured into DMR Blog territory.

Christopher Marlowe was the first great Elizabethan dramatist. He was also a brawler, a shot-caller, a scapegrace, a scoundrel and an international man of mystery who died at the ripe old age of twenty-nine. Read his Britannica entry here to get a fuller picture of the man.

Marlowe's masterwork is generally considered to be his epic two-part play, The Life and Death of Tamburlaine the Great. The name says it all. The play is Marlowe's fantasticated depiction of Timur the Lame, the Asiatic conqueror who terrorized both East and West just two centuries prior.

A limited illustrated edition of Marlowe's 'Tamburlaine' with art by Sherriffs was published in 1930. The book is quite rare today and has never been reprinted. I would imagine that most people familiar with Sherriffs’ caricatures who picked up the book were a bit startled. His ‘celebrity’ work, while highly competent, was very much in the style of the time. His ‘Tamburlaine’ art was a different beast entirely.

Sherriffs’ admitted artistic influences were Aubrey Beardsley, Alphonse Mucha and Edmund Dulac. They are much more evident in the fifteen plates he did for ‘Tamburlaine’ than they were in his day-to-day work. Sherriffs’ illustrations are extravagant, grotesque, surreal—much like the play they illustrate. The plates are also highly-stylized and sometimes exhibit an exquisite sense of design. Overall, they form a phantasmagorical saraband imbued with a strange vigor and power.

It’s a pity that Sherriffs did nothing else like this for the rest of his career. I think a Sherriffs rendition of Beckford’s Vathek would’ve been something. The same goes for Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘The Dark Eidolon’.

One commenter over at John Coulthart’s website had this to say:

“Someone needs to send those to Michael Moorcock as illustrations for a novel he hasn’t written yet.”

I can see that.

*Not to be confused with the worthy Gordon D. Shirreffs—another man with strong Scottish connections—about whom I blogged the other day.