Issued in the midst of the Great Depression, Hess’s map offered a consoling retreat into storybook wonder, where the weak triumph over the strong and quests end in success. Grandfather Know All presides from his tree house, while familiar tales play out across the terrain: the Glass Mountain of Polish legend, the Emerald City of Oz, Old King Cole’s castle, and the ominous ‘Path that Leads to No Place Eventually’.
The first edition bore Hess’s imprint and date beneath his signature; a revised 1958 edition renamed ‘The Wandering Jew’ as ‘The Wanderer.’ The map blends the familiar with the fanciful: ‘The Round Table,’ ‘The Castle of Glass,’ and ‘Where Jack Climbed the Beanstalk’ intermingle with surreal inventions such as the forbidding pit labelled ‘Do Not Go In Here.’ Hess’s style – part folkloric, part proto-surreal – has ensured the map’s lasting influence. As Simpsons and Disenchantment creator Matt Groening (1954–) recalls:
There was a very spooky poster from 1930 that hung in the den of my parents’ house called “The Land of Make Believe,” by an artist named Jaro Hess. It scared the hell out of me, but I loved it. I actually tracked it down and hung it in my kitchen to scare my children. But it’s always been an inspiration to me.

Ex Carta

This pictorial map gathers nursery-rhyme and fairy-tale locales into a single panorama. Crowded with familiar characters and scenes, it creates a playful geography of childhood for early twentieth-century readers.

Ex Carta diligently but unsuccessfully attempted to contact the copyright owner of this work. This content is shared strictly for non-commercial educational, or analytical review use under a good-faith belief of fair use. Rightful owners should 

An imaginative fantasy panorama by Czech-American artist Jaro Hess (1889–1979), weaving together a wide array of nursery rhymes, folktales, and literary allusions into a single enchanted landscape. Born in Prague, Hess emigrated to the US with his family in 1910, at the age of twenty-one. He had an uneven career, dabbling in ‘jobs and hobbies as diverse as horticulture and parapsychology, engineering and surveying’, before his horticultural interests took him to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he worked in landscaping. Alongside these endeavours, Hess painted, and at some point in the early 1930s – the dates are disputed – produced by far his most famous work, the watercolour titled The Land of Make Believe. The exact publication details of the resulting posters are unclear, but what is certain is that it was immediately popular, ‘decorating many childhood bedrooms and schoolrooms across the country’.127 Although the work did not make him rich, Hess continued to pursue his many and varied interests long after retirement, ‘producing hundreds of paintings and drawings marked by whimsy and experimental playfulness over the next several decades.’128 His life was described by his friend, the artist Armand Merizon (1920–2010) as ‘vibrant’ and ‘truly free’.

Issued in the midst of the Great Depression, Hess’s map offered a consoling retreat into storybook wonder, where the weak triumph over the strong and quests end in success. Grandfather Know All presides from his tree house, while familiar tales play out across the terrain: the Glass Mountain of Polish legend, the Emerald City of Oz, Old King Cole’s castle, and the ominous ‘Path that Leads to No Place Eventually’.

The first edition bore Hess’s imprint and date beneath his signature; a revised 1958 edition renamed ‘The Wandering Jew’ as ‘The Wanderer.’ The map blends the familiar with the fanciful: ‘The Round Table,’ ‘The Castle of Glass,’ and ‘Where Jack Climbed the Beanstalk’ intermingle with surreal inventions such as the forbidding pit labelled ‘Do Not Go In Here.’ Hess’s style – part folkloric, part proto-surreal – has ensured the map’s lasting influence. As Simpsons and Disenchantment creator Matt Groening (1954–) recalls:

There was a very spooky poster from 1930 that hung in the den of my parents’ house called “The Land of Make Believe,” by an artist named Jaro Hess. It scared the hell out of me, but I loved it. I actually tracked it down and hung it in my kitchen to scare my children. But it’s always been an inspiration to me.