Monika Beisner
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Monika Beisner is a German artist and book illustrator, born in 1942 in Hamburg, Germany. She studied painting at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig before continuing her education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, and Berlin University of Arts, and between 1968 and 1970, received a Fulbright Scholarship which allowed her to continue her studies in New York. She has since divided her time between London, Germany, and Malta, working as a freelance artist and illustrator for over five decades.
Beisner is internationally recognized for her meticulously detailed, jewel-toned illustration style, which she has applied both to her own books and to major literary classics. She embarked on a career as an illustrator of books and has published 16 books in multiple languages between 1971 and 1994 which earned her an international reputation and exhibitions worldwide. In the 1970s and 1980s, already a renowned illustrator of leading children's authors, she began to write and illustrate her own children's books, several of which, including Book of Riddles, Secret Spells, Topsy Turvy and Catch the Cat, became international best sellers.
Her later career saw her take on ambitious, painstaking projects rendered in traditional media: works completed over the course of seven years using egg-tempera, the same medium used in medieval book illustrations, for a celebrated illustrated edition of Dante's Divine Comedy, followed by a portfolio of prints for Ovid's Metamorphoses and a series of paintings inspired by the epic of Gilgamesh. This combination of a devoted following among collectors of children's book illustration and a parallel reputation for finely crafted fine-art editions makes original works and first editions bearing her illustrations especially sought after.
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