Joseph Clement Coll was perhaps the finest commercial artist of the first quarter of the twentieth century, a pen-and-ink virtuoso whose sophisticated artwork enthralled readers of the magazines publishing the serializations of best-selling authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Talbot Mundy, Sax Rohmer, and Edgar Wallace. Coll only occasionally moved beyond illustrating for magazines, and he died young without ever having achieved his full potential as a creative artist, but he was nevertheless remarkably prolific and popular during his lifetime, and later artists of lesser ability were directly influenced by his style. Coll firmly broke with the traditional nineteenth-century photorealistic, tableau- style illustrations used by such contemporary artists as J. Allen St. John; his illustrations blend the ornamented lines and sinuosities associated with the Art Nouveau movement of the late nineteenth century with the simplification of form in the Expressionist movement of the early twentieth century. In...