Eric C. Wilder on Designing Ruth Scurr's Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows
Eric C. Wilder is a graphic designer with over 20 years experience. He is one half of design studio Chapman & Wilder, former publisher of Spine Magazine and producer of Spine Podcast. Here he talks us through his process for designing the striking cover for Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows.
To be published by Liveright on the 200th anniversary of Napoleon’s death (June 15, 2021,) Ruth Scurr’s Napoleon: A Life Told in Gardens and Shadows is an unprecedented portrait of the Emperor seen through his engagement with the natural world.
Along with the brief for this project, Design Director Steve Attardo had given me a number of interesting images with which to play around and draw inspiration. One of them was this great image of Napoleon resting after working in the garden. I made a design around it. I decided to recolor the garden in blues reds and whites to have the garden symbolize France. I also thought the shot of blue would retail well. You’ll notice at this point of the process we had a different subtitle.
Something we also took a look at was taking the image of Napoleon in the garden and setting that with a number of the subjects in the book that are discussed in terms of their perspective of the Emperor.
We had another nice image of Napoleon strolling through the French countryside perusing the gardens. I cleaned it up a bit and tried to keep the type in a classical countryside-esque format to compliment.
There was this really neat Magic Lantern image published by William Spooner (Spooner’s Protean Views, No. 10: Napoleon Powerful and Napoleon Powerless, circa 1840.) You have Napoleon in retirement contemplating the ocean. When you project the image through a Magic Lantern (or hold the drawing up to the light,) it reveals an image of his troops, as if he’s about to give command. We wanted to see if we could play these images on the cover recto/verso. Cool but, ultimately not the direction we wanted.
I started playing with the classical image of Napoleon Crossing the Alps, painted by Jacques-Louis David. It’s pretty iconic, nearly everyone recognizes it. We needed to find a way to give it a twist an make it our own. At first I tinkered with adding flowers that were from paintings of Antoine Berjon (professor of flower design at École des Beaux-Arts from 1810 though 1823.) Interesting. Different, but … not there.
Again, the image of Napoleon-on-horseback is so iconic. You only need a little bit of that in order for people to get it. So Steve was wondering if we just took a silhouette of that and somehow married it with a garden image, what would that look like? Very loosely I took our blue garden cover, and basically outlined it with a trace of the horseback image. Immediately there were some pretty exciting things going on! For one, you had this great word/image play having both now shadows and gardens. The type now moved in between the shadow/garden figure ground. Both Garden Napoleon and Shadow Napoleon in alignment, leaning in the same direction, bearing the same weight. It was all very cool … but still in need of some refinement.
Here we have more definition in the silhouette and a tighter alignment of Garden and Shadow Napoleon. The red of the cape both serving to better define the background image and make the overall cover more eye-catching.
We had also gotten feedback telling us about Napoleon’s affinity for the color green. Scheele’s Green to be specific. Arsenic was originally used in the manufacturing of the pigment. It was quite toxic. It’s a fascinating color to read up on if you have the time. I added green to the shadow-garden based on the CMYK break of Scheele’s Green.
At this point the subtitle of the book had changed, but that didn’t affect the design.
Final cover
I’m really happy with the way this cover turned out! This was probably my favorite project to work on this year. Thank you to Steve Attardo for the opportunity, and to Ruth Scurr for the fascinating book!
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.