Biography

Prussian immigrant Charles A.A. Dellschau spent most of his life in Houston working as a butcher; when he retired in 1899 at the age of 68, he turned his attention skywards and devoted himself to an entirely different endeavor: designing airships and charting the development of flight. For 23 years, he fervently produced almost 2,500 drawings of detailed, fantastical contraptions he compiled in at least 12 large, hand-bound manuscripts that remained in his family home for decades following his death in 1923. Today, the works are scattered between museums and private collections. Considered an outsider artist, the self-taught Dellschau focused solely on mechanics in his early works — hot air balloon-like vessels with quirky accoutrements like paddles, wheels, and pulleys are shown with great detail, at times with lengthy explanatory annotations. Overtime, though, his works incorporated more decoration such as striped borders and also gradually became more free-form and gestural. Many of his later, busier illustrations combine on butcher paper vivid watercolors of wondrous airships with cryptic symbols and collaged newspapers and magazines clippings he called “Press Blooms.” Fusing fancy with the reality of news stories and developments in politics and technology alike, his images captured the thrill surrounding the burgeoning age of experimental aviation at the time.