Joseph Clement Coll

Early life Joseph Clement Coll was born on July 2, 1881, in Philadelphia to an Irish immigrant family. Both his father and his brothers worked as book binders. As a child, Coll read many illustrated books and magazines. He graduated Central High School, where he took basic art courses, and started work without any academic art training.

Coll was also a painter and he often did paintings for the cover or frontispiece of books which were reproduced in color and then pen & inks to illustrate the text. He was considered an ideal illustrator for authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and other adventure writers. His illustrations for books such as Talbot Mundy's King of the Khyber Rifles and Sax Rohmer's The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu were widely reprinted for many years. Coll died in 1921 of appendicitis, aged 40. He would do the same earlier in his career but used his inner vision instead of model. He then would start the final ink drawing, for which he used fountain pens.

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