Alastair

Hans Henning Otto Harry Baron von Voigt (20 October 1887 – 30 October 1969), best known by his nickname Alastair, was a German artist, composer, dancer, mime, poet, singer and translator.

Biography Hans Henning Baron von Voight was born of German nobility in Karlsruhe. In his youth he joined a circus and learned mime.

He died in Munich in 1969.

Art He is best known as an illustrator, under the pen name "Alastair". His career as an artist was begun in 1914, when John Lane published Forty-Three Drawings by Alastair.

His drawings, which are often decadent in spirit and have the look of Art Nouveau, are influenced somewhat by the drawings of the English artist Aubrey Beardsley, who illustrated works by Oscar Wilde, as Alastair would later do. His ‘serpentine line’ often depicts characters whose outlines are lightly drawn with the main areas filled in with ‘broken dotted lines’.

In The Blind Bow-Boy Alastair depicted the ‘androgynous male’.

Alastair had at least two public exhibitions of his works during his lifetime, at the Leicester Galleries in 1914 and at the Weyhe Gallery in New York in 1925.

During the 1930s, he stopped drawing, only to resume in 1964.