Artist Spotlight — William M. Timlin

The Ship That Sailed To Mars… “is today one of the rarest, most original and beautiful children’s books of the twentieth century. It was the only book that [William M. Timlin] would ever publish.”¹

William M. Timlin (1892-1943) is the first in my wonder-filled artist series.

He was born in Northumberland and his family moved to South Africa in the first years of the 1900’s. He grew to be an artist-architect known (amongst other things) for the interiors of Art Deco-style movie palaces such as the Colosseum Theater in Johannesburg. Clive Chipkin writes of Timlin, “The Gothic fantasy of the interior was the work of architect-artist William M. Timlin, whose sensibilities to a dream world of his own creation were so pronounced that we may regard them as a distinct form of disengagement from the world of monetary and political crisis outside.”²

Interior of the Colosseum Theater in Johannesburg

 Timlin regularly exhibited his watercolors, pastels and oil paintings, as well as writing stories, composing and teaching music. (He won a bronze medal in a nationwide competition for musical compositions.) He was also a member of the South African Academy [of Art] where he exhibited at the Annual Salon from 1919 until his death in 1943. He illustrated travel books, and designed seals and theater programs.

And then there was the bedtime story for his son, Billy, the story that would later become The Ship That Sailed To Mars (1923). The book is a romantic fantasy, an impossible adventure in space that we’d not dare call, science fiction. The term science fiction wouldn’t be invented until 1926 anyway³. In the early years of the twentieth century space travel is described as a remarkable journey by either supernatural means or extraordinary transportation, such as a sailing ship in space. These were not vessels of war (those would come later in the space operas of the 1930’s) but mere transportation. And the beings met along the way were more mythological than alien, at least in the modern sense. It was an age of wonder, where creative minds stretched, reaching through the ordinary and into the extraordinary. Such was Timlin’s work, The Ship That Sailed To Mars.

Hand drawn calligraphy page and watercolor
illustration from The Ship That Sailed To Mars 

The book’s text is hand-drawn and begins, “Although it was difficult to believe, the Old Man had not always been old, and in his dim, forgotten youth, he had said, ‘I will go to Mars; sailing by way of the Moon, and the more friendly planets.’ But those around him, Scientists and Astronomers some cried out in scorn, ‘Have we not taught you that Mars is thirty thousand thousand miles away, and nothing could ever live on a journey there?’ Then he asked them quickly, ‘Could a Fairy go?’ And they left him, muttering in their beards as they went, for they had no Faith, nor any belief in Fairies.”

"The Ship," illustration from The Ship That Sailed To Mars

The man works on his plans throughout his long life. Eventually, because of his Faith, the Faeries decide to help him as it’s their kin on Mars anyway. Timlin’s watercolor illustrations are compared favorably to Dulac and Rackham, which is in itself remarkable as this is his only children’s book.   

Dragons are commonplace transportation on Mars

The journey to Mars is filled with amazing sights and not an insignificant amount of danger to the Old Man and his Fairie crew. On Mars they meet the Fairies that long ago left the Earth and the Old Man saves a Fairie Prince from despair using some human ingenuity. It’s a lovely story and Timlin intended a sequel called, The Building of the Fairie City, which was not completed before his death. This was partly because his artwork was in demand and he sold several originals from the new book on the promise of their return for the printing. Some where not returned, others he lost track of. He was not able to replace the lost paintings before his death by pneumonia, after fracturing his arm in a fall. He was 51. 

Today you can sometimes find these lost paintings for sale at auction, as well as his sketchbooks for both books — The Ship That Sailed To Mars and The Building of the Fairie City. Prices are high as you’d expect.

In John Howe’s introduction to the Calla Edition (Dover Publications, 2011) of The Ship That Sailed To Mars he explains that Timlin’s “Old Man is “old” in being out-of-step with current ideology, still clinging to his dream of wonder…Timlin’s now vanished fairy turrets and dragons in the Colosseum clearly show his desire to help people rediscover the enchantment of childhood, which he assumed they had lost but still needed somewhere in their lives.”

Timlin was a bright light who understood that wonder should not be demoted to childhood dreams. His visions for space travel are pure fantasy but they take you out there and into a land of imagination that stretches your mind into impossible new spaces. Imagine for a second that NASA is wrong and Timlin’s view of space is correct. Please, don’t fly off the handle at that suggestion. Yes, it is scientifically impious but that’s not the point. Today, we always refer back to what we think we know through authorities at NASA or some other official place. What if we learn that NASA lied, or that we’ve had colonies on the Moon and Mars for decades, or that the Earth is really flat. If any of these things are true then there might as well be a sailing ship made of lighter-than-air (anti-gravity) materials. If we only believe the narrative that we are given, we can never create something extraordinary. The controllers want to channel our creativity into conduits for their own purposes. Let us reclaim our ability to dream, for in our dreams are miracles truly built.

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¹Howe, John, Introduction to the Calla Edition of The Ship that Sailed to Mars, by William Timlin, Dover Publications Inc, 2011.

²Chipkin, Clive, Johannesburg Style: Architecture and Society 1880’s – 1960’s, David Phillip, Publishers, 1933.

³Hugo Gernsback coined the term — Scientification — in the premier issue of Amazing Stories in April of 1926.