Arpad Schmidhammer

 

Arpad Schmidhammer, actually Arpath Emil Schmidhammer, (born February 12, 1857 in St. Joachimsthal; † May 13, 1921 in Munich) was a German book illustrator and caricaturist.

He was born on February 12, 1857 as the son of the art master Josef Schmidhammer and Carolina née Lechner in house number 10 in Sankt Joachimsthal and two days later was baptized as a Roman Catholic with the name Arpath Emil Schmidhammer. His grandfather was the school teacher Jakob Schmidhammer in Hardenberg.

Arpad Schmidhammer worked i.a. for the magazine Jugend as one of the first illustrators, also for the anthology Knecht Ruprecht (1900) and the youth country. In addition to numerous contributions as a children's book illustrator, he also wrote his own children's books. Many of the books he illustrated were published by Jos. Scholz in Mainz, mostly in the series Scholz' Artist's Picture Books, Scholz' Artistic Coloring Books and Scholz' Artistic People's Picture Books. Schmidhammer also worked several times for Ensslin & Laiblin, the large Reutlingen book and games publishers, and Schaffstein in Cologne (Schaffstein's blue volumes), and sporadically he worked for a whole range of other publishers. During the First World War he published propagandistic "war picture books", but also made a name for himself as a sharp political, particularly anti-clerical caricaturist of his time. Starting in 1896, together with Hans Thoma, Schmidhammer designed costumes for the production of the Ring of the Nibelung at the Bayreuth Festiva l.