Charles A. A. Dellschau

1830-1923 · Houston, Texas, USA

A retired Houston saddlery clerk who spent two decades painting the flying machines of a secret club of aeronauts that may never have existed. He kept the biggest secret of all: the notebooks themselves.

The life

Dellschau was born in Prussia in 1830 and emigrated to Texas around 1850, working as a butcher and later as a clerk in his in-laws’ saddle shop in Houston. After retiring around 1899, he began filling notebooks in a family attic with painted airships and coded texts, chronicling the Sonora Aero Club, a band of mid-century California inventors he claimed had flown ships powered by a mysterious lifting gas. He completed at least a dozen volumes before his death in 1923. The notebooks were nearly thrown out, and only surfaced in the late 1960s, when an art student named Mary Jane Victor helped bring them to collectors’ attention.

The work

Double-sided manuscript pages in watercolour and collage: airships with striped balloons and rigging, framed in decorative borders, annotated in code and pasted with newspaper clippings about the new age of flight. Whether memoir or magnificent hoax, the work is now held by the Menil Collection in Houston, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the Witte Museum in San Antonio.

Why we love them

He watched real aeroplanes arrive and kept faith with his impossible ones. The best flight log ever kept for machines that never left the ground.

Go deeper

• Charles A. A. Dellschau at the Outsider Art Fair
• Charles A. A. Dellschau on Wikipedia
• Where to see outsider art, our full list of museums and collections.
• The glossary, if any of the terms here are new.

Kindred spirits

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