Life and work in Chicago during the early days of the 20th century meant a day to day adventure through a wild and wooly metropolis. Surrounded by the din and dust of industrial factories, streets crowded by thousands of workers, and a spider web of electrical wires that tended to inspire a weekly barrage of…

When it comes to ‘lost art,’ the hope is always the same. That somebody out there somewhere will come across something long forgotten in an attic that turns out to be missing gold. It can be a pipe dream wish, but sometimes –  just sometimes – as if from the Land of Oz itself, a…

As originally printed in 1904, two John R. Neill illustrations for The Marvelous Land of Oz On the quest to uncover the surviving original artwork drawn for the Oz book series, The Marvelous Land of Oz remains tantalizing.  Published four years after The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, this first Oz sequel was an enormous success in 1904.  Surviving photographs…

The following story was first published in the Spring 2020 edition of The Baum Bugle, the journal of the International Wizard of Oz Club. If you aren’t yet a member, what are you waiting for? When I launched the “Lost Art of Oz” project in the fall of 2018, my first goal was to make a list of all the…

The Palos Verdes Verdes Pulse has published a new article about “The Lost Art of Oz” and founder, Brady Schwind’s ongoing search.  Full text below!  For over a century, The Wizard of Oz has been America’s best loved fairy tale, and from almost the very beginning, Los Angeles has played an indelible part in the story’s enduring legacy. Oz’s Chicago…

The International Wizard of Oz Club is featuring a recurring column contributed by ‘The Lost Art of Oz.’ in their publication, The Baum Bugle.  The following first appeared in the Winter 2019 edition. Roughly 4,000 illustrations were created for the canonical “Famous Forty” Oz books, perhaps the most popular and best-selling American children’s series of the early 20th century. By…

Summer of 2019 saw the largest gathering of original artwork created for the Oz book series in well over a decade. The occasion was “Experience 41: Oz,” an immersive gallery experience hosted by the El Segundo Museum of Art (ESMoA) in Los Angeles, celebrating L Frank Baum’s THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ and its phenomenal pop culture impact. Boasting over 80…

Of the nearly 4,000 finished illustrations John R. Neill drew for the Oz book series, less than 10 percent are known to survive. Perhaps surprisingly, most of what does survive is from Neill’s earliest work on the series. Of the 13 novels Neill illustrated for original Oz book author L. Frank Baum, at least one…