By Elizabeth Wright, the Knoxville Voice

In 1948, Esquire magazine called John Alan Maxwell “one of today’s brightest lights in the illustrative field [of] times past, places forgotten, worlds most imaginary.” Sixty years later, details of the East Tennessee native’s career as an illustrator are unveiled in an ongoing treasure hunt that has led Maxwell’s great nephew, Knoxville resident Doug McDaniel, through the literary worlds of Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

The 22-year quest undertaken by McDaniel, a writer, software developer and sometime-publisher, began with stories he heard as a child from his grandmother, Maxwell’s sister, and he says they “captured [his] fascination both as a writer and a bookish person.”

“My grandmother and her sister were his biggest fans — they would say, ‘Oh, John, he illustrated for Saturday Evening Post and all these magazines and in 1936 he was named one of the top 10 illustrators in the country,’ but although they had some of his paintings, that’s kind of all they knew.”

His interest piqued, McDaniel as a teenager began researching his great uncle’s life, a task he says was difficult in pre-Internet days, but one that eventually uncovered his uncle’s work gracing the covers of Buck’s China Sky, Nobel Prize-winning novels The Exile and Fighting Angel, as well as accompanying Steinbeck’s The Pearl of the World and Conan Doyle short stories in magazines like Woman’s Home Companion and Golden Book.

John Alan Maxwell at work at the Tenth Street Studio, c. 1930s.

Maxwell’s illustrations are overwhelmingly romantic, depicting historic events and nostalgic settings. His work led to collaborations not only with Buck, but prominent writers Christopher Morley, Edna Ferber, Allan Eckart and Thomas Costain, among others. But the artist is also known for macabre pen and ink drawings such as those accompanying Conan Doyle’s stories in a 1930 Golden Book Magazine and for his renderings of luscious nudes. “Now there were those in the family that didn’t like John’s nudes, in fact his brother, Clifford Maxwell, a noted photographer in Johnson City, tried to hide these, so we’re sneaking them back out through our research, but Cliff was thoroughly embarrassed,” McDaniel says, displaying Maxwell illustrations that accompanied New York Bibliophile Society reprints of Daniel Defoe’s works from the 18th century. “I think they’re classic in their composition, their quality — I’m not an art critic, and I’m also not trying to be his biggest fan, but I’m trying to objectively present his work and be rational about it and let people judge for themselves.”

Prominently displayed in McDaniel’s Fourth and Gill home is an original of the China Sky cover, one piece of the puzzle that took him 15 years to piece together. He says the family knew it was from a Buck novel, but didn’t know which one.

“It wasn’t just finding it on the Internet, it was a lot of phone calls to various libraries, going through the archives at Princeton University, I’ve gone through publisher’s letters, all the book contracts from the Pearl Buck archives that deal with these various works, I did a lot of research through the Pearl Buck library in West Virginia, and at first, all the answers were, ‘We don’t know,’” McDaniel says. “And through persistence, I found a senior researcher who was semi-retired who remembered the book and when I sent the jpeg he recognized that it wasn’t something in a collection. Funnily enough, just three or four months after that, I found China Sky for sale on Ebay and ordered several copies, so a lot of time it’s just luck.”

McDaniel’s search has intensified in the past five years, as more documentation and research has become available, and he says the hunt has turned into a hobby for him and his wife Faith. He points to an antique bookcase filled with copies of various books illustrated by Maxwell

“Faith and I will go in little book shops and antique shops where they have old books and we’ll have a race: who can find the John Alan Maxwell illustration first? It’s really silly, but it’s a neat thing,” he says.

McDaniel has also recruited friend Tony Long, proprietor of digital imaging company Tweek, to contribute to various Maxwell-related projects.

Some of the prints created for Buck will be re-released in limited edition and available for sale at a First Friday event at Unarmed Merchants in November, along with a partial exhibition of McDaniel’s collection. The works will also be displayed in a traveling exhibit in early 2009, beginning at East Tennessee State University’s Reece Museum that houses a permanent collection of Maxwell’s work. The traveling exhibit will also include previously unseen pieces unearthed in McDaniel’s research. Along with maintaining a Web site on Maxwell’s work, McDaniel is also penning a “romantic realist novel” about Maxwell’s life with the working title South of Bohemia: An Appalachian Illustrator in Greenwich Village.

The romanticism of Maxwell’s work is deeply connected to his East Tennessee home, McDaniel says, although the artist left Johnson City as a teen, moving to New York at the age of 17 to attend the Art Students League in the tutelage of George Luks and Frank Vincent Dumond, professor to Georgia O’Keefe and Norman Rockwell.

McDaniel describes Maxwell as a “bohemian carouser,” but says, “He really was Appalachian, an East Tennessee boy through and through. I found Willa Gray Martin Pierce, who happens to be Barbara Bush’s stepmother, but I found out just through various investigative techniques that she knew John. I interviewed her, and it’s funny because it keeps coming back to these Southern roots - what struck me about it was, she said he was a striking man, reminded you of a young J.E.B. Stuart, and all this kind of Civil War nostalgia and schmaltz keeps coming back.”

Pointing to his prized China Sky original, McDaniel says, “You kind of get a feel for his style of composition, with the two central figures of the narrative - you can tell romantically how connected the two characters are through the illustration. I’m a total romantic — not a bohemian, but a romantic. This has all been a fun caper, but for me, it’s the romantic relationship between art and literature that has kind of become my fascination.”