Sergei Pavlovich Lodygin

If you had asked me ten or fifteen years ago if I knew who all the great and wonderful illustrators of the past century or so were, I would have guffawed and said, "Of course!" Oh, the arrogance of ignorance!

The more I look in various corners of the internet, the more I realize how many delightful illustrators and artists there are of whose existence I was completely unaware. I feel at this point I'll never get to the end of them.

See below some examples of some truly lovely work by Sergei Pavlovich Lodygin. I think. All sites with examples of his work are in Russian, and the translating engines don't do very well with complicated Russian names. So I think all the examples in this post are by Lodygin. But I can't swear to it. Googling in Russian if one doesn't read the language is extremely difficult, compounded of course by my equal ignorance of the cyrillic alphabet.

To me, his work looks awfully decadent for post-Revolutionary Soviet tastes, but according to one of the websites I managed to pick through he continued his illustration career into the Twenties and beyond.