Artur Heinrich Vonner was born in 1877 and brought up in the obscure Pomeranian town of Greifenhagen an der Oder, where he showed from an early age a talent for painting and illustration. He fled to Hamburg in 1895 to avoid military service, and from there took ship to England. Equipped with a copious portfolio of paintings and sketches, he soon found work with the publishers Smythe and Smythe, of Paternoster Row, London. They had a line of leadenly dull children's books, illustrated by third-rate artists, amongst whom Vonner shone out.
After a year or so illustrating the poorly-written work of others, Vonner realized that he could do better, and wrote and illustrated the short children's book Miss Flufftail's Day Out; a twee and saccharine work even by the standards of the time, but one which appealed to Smythe and Smythe's more upmarket competitor, Culshaw & Son, who knew what the market wanted and made Vonner a lucrative offer to work exclusively for them. Miss Flufftail ended up selling a record 7,000 copies, and further adventures of the eponymous rabbit appeared at regular intervals, along with those of an entire menagerie of anthropomorphic woodland creatures created by Vonner. An attempt to mine the folktales of his homeland for inspiration did not fare so well; his The Bear and the Wedding Dress, which was based on a Silesian folktale, left his publishers confused and distressed and wondering if Vonner was perhaps suffering from overwork.
By the start of the new century Vonner was immensely popular, even though his books had appeared under a selection of pseudonyms to counter the sadly common Germanophobia of the time. He was a wealthy man, with a villa in Hampstead, and the admiration of his peers in the small world of book illustration, but he was far from happy. The woodland world he had created he now found insufferably cute and mimsy, and he privately began plunging his cheerful, innocent characters into more... grown-up situations as a reaction against the tweeness he was obliged to create for his livelihood.
In 1902 he met, and soon became friends with, illustrator Joshua Handley whose work he very much admired. Handley eventually revealed to him that he had dallied briefly in the world of erotic art and Vonner showed him his private work which he had till then kept under lock and key. At Handley's suggestion, he assembled a complete book around a selection of his illustrations, plus some new ones created expressly, and had a small run privately printed in Paris by one of the publishers of outré material who had declined to handle Handley's own peculiar work. Miss Fawn Chastised; or, The Misadventures of a Young Deer was an overnight sensation in the world of erotic literature, and an unauthorised German edition soon followed. It was likely to have been especially appreciated by those who had been obliged to read Vonner's mundane books to their offspring and who had often wished that the dull and worthy inhabitants of the woodsy little world could suffer a little.
Miss Fawn was soon followed by a ribald version of his unpublished The Bear and the Wedding Dress, which mixed comical transvestism and corporal punishment, and the thoroughly perverse Mr. Wolf's Wedding. Vonner's secret career did not make him a great deal of money, but it did provide him much satisfaction as he sat at his desk drawing his innocent bunny rabbits.
Unfortunately, it all came to an end in 1910 when the Metropolitan Police raided the premises of notorious London bookseller Eustace de Vere Maitland and seized a large quantity of obscene literature, amongst which were several copies of Miss Fawn. An alert constable immediately recognised Vonner's inimitable style, and Culshaw & Son learned of their star artist's secret life in short order.
Dismissed and disgraced, Vonner found himself unemployable in Britain and returned to Germany, where he settled in Stettin, marrying a local woman and working as a professional painter, producing portraits and landscapes. He had four children, and his grandson, Adrian Vonner, was later to achieve some notice as an animator in East Germany, producing a series of popular short films including adaptations of The Bear and the Wedding Dress and Mr Wolf's Wedding.
Dr. Kilmarnock's Obscure World of Victorian Erotica
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