Cyrus Leroy Baldridge

Following yesterday’s post on the 1940s cover of Lao She’s Rickshaw Boy I follow up with a brief nod to the illustrator of that edition – Cyrus Leroy Baldridge. Baldridge (1889-1977) was an American animator, artist, explorer and adventurer with a most exciting past (the whole story here) who travelled to China after the First World War. In 1921 he published A Chinese album, monotypes by Cyrus Leroy Baldridge in the journal Asia and later  A Turn to the East. Partially his art was considered interesting as he adopted various ideas from Chinese and Japanese artistic styles and had lived and studied with Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo in the 1920s. He also provided sketches for the 1941 Translations from the Chinese by Arthur Waley.