Susan Einzig

(née Suzanne Henriette Einzig) 1922 Berlin, Germany – 2009 London, England)

Immigrated to England 1939

Illustrator and painter Susan Einzig was born into an assimilated Jewish family the Dahlem district of Berlin, Germany in 1922; her father encouraged her early interest in art and illustration. After being expelled from the local Lyceum because of her Jewish origins, she studied briefly at the Breuer School of Design in 1937. In 1939 she boarded one of the final Kindertransports to England, later followed by her mother and brother; her father perished in a concentration camp. She enrolled at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (relocated to Northampton during the war), studying drawing under Bernard Meninsky and Morris Kestleman (both of Jewish origin), and William Roberts, illustration under John Farleigh, and wood engraving under Gertrude Hermes. This ‘nourishing’ experience was followed by a difficult period as a technical draughtsman, a position secured through the designer Abram Games, for the War Office, and she was released from service days before the end of the war.

Afterwards, Einzig pursued a career as a freelance illustrator, specialising in children’s books, including Norah Pulling’s Mary Belinda and the Ten Aunts (1945), and most notably, Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden, for which she was awarded the National Book League’s Illustration Prize. Other titles included Alphonse Daudet’s Sappho: A Picture of Life in Paris (Folio Society, 1954), and E. Nesbit’s The Bastables (Franklin Watts, 1966). From 1947 onwards, Eingzig was a regular illustrator for magazines including the best-selling Radio Times and Lilliput. She taught at Camberwell School of Arts (1946–51), where she met artist John Minton – a close friend and significant early influence –followed by St Martin’s (1948–51), Beckenham (1959–60), and Chelsea Schools of Art (1959–65), where she became a senior lecturer in 1966, until her retirement in 1988. A member of the Artist Partners and the Society of Industrial Artists, she also designed posters for London Transport and the Empire Tea Board, among others; in her later career, she resumed painting, holding a solo exhibition in 1975.

Susan Einzig died in London, England in 2009. Four of her pen-and-ink drawings from Tom’s Midnight Garden are held in Seven Stories, the National Centre for Children’s Books, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Self-portrait, c. 1940

Oil on board

27 x 20.5 cm

Current whereabouts unknown © The Estate of Susan Einzig

Susan Einzig, Self-portraits

Susan Einzig’s youthful self-portrait (opposite), with its direct gaze, was probably painted about a year after she arrived in England as a refugee, during her time at London’s Central School of Art. The dark interior with its still life composition and free brushstrokes suggests a link to her German origins, while her later painting was more post-Impressionist in style and technique. Her self-portrait sketch (page 46) also dated to around 1940, is bolder, sparer, and more modern in execution, shorn of any unnecessary detail, and also more introspective.

Private

Private Collection

Susan Einzig, Tom’s Midnight Garden

Perhaps Einzig’s best-known work is her series of evocative black-and-white illustrations to the children’s book, Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, published in 1958, which earned her the National Book League’s Illustration Prize. This celebrated story, a narrative of love and loss, slips between fantasy and reality as the protagonist, Tom, attempts to lay to rest the ghosts of the past. Einzig is known to have visited Pearce and made careful notes in her preparation for this work, but it seems likely that the memory of the lost Eden of her own Dahlem childhood – living in a three-storey house, surrounded by a large tree-filled garden, where she played with her brother, Rolf – haunts these images. This is underpinned by her use of hand-rendered titles in the Neo-Romantic manner on the jacket, leading Martin Salisbury, Professor of Illustration at Cambridge School of Art, Anglia Ruskin University, to call Tom’s Midnight Garden ‘one of the most iconic book cover designs.’

In her later years Einzig returned to painting, particularly landscapes. A recurring motif of a path winding up and away between trees, sometimes including two figures walking towards or away from the viewer, has been collectively observed by the art historian Frances Spalding and the artist’s daughter, Hetty Einzig, as ‘a return’ – whether conscious or unconscious – ‘to the core themes carried over from her childhood: attachment, separation and loss’.