30 November 1935, Rome — 10 February 2017, London
Gino D’Achille
For half a century his brush defined the shelf: the Ballantine John Carter of Mars covers, Flashman’s every swaggering escapade, Sherlock Holmes, and decades of book and magazine illustration across science fiction, history, myth and the natural world.
Gino D’Achille was born in Rome in 1935 and showed a precocious talent from a very young age — at eleven he was invited to present a portrait he had made of Pope Pius XII to the pontiff himself. From thirteen he studied at Rome’s Liceo Artistico, going on to the University of Architecture at nineteen. By then he was already drawn to commercial art, producing advertising illustrations for the prestigious agency Studio Favalli in his spare time.
That led him to a full-time career in Milan, where he gained the attention of British scouts, and in 1964 he was persuaded to move to London. He established his credentials immediately with illustrations for David Kossoff’s popular Bible Stories, commissioned by WM Collins.
His international reputation took hold with his 1973 paintings for the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and he went on to create over a hundred cover paintings for other science fiction titles published by DAW Books, Ace, Ballantine and others.
He illustrated Sherlock Holmes stories, The Jungle Book, the Fu Manchu stories, Arthurian legends and Jack Vance’s science fantasy series, as well as work by Daphne du Maurier and Mary Stewart. He is equally well known for his covers for the much-loved Flashman novels of George MacDonald Fraser, alongside countless westerns, crime thrillers, war stories, romances and children’s books.
Gino lived in London and Corsica with his wife, the painter Mim Hain.
