Jaro Hess (born Jaroslav Hes; March 27, 1889 – 1979) was a painter and landscape designer who spent much of his career in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
While Hess never achieved great fame for his painting during his life, prints of The Land of Make Believe remain popular to this day.
In an interview given in 1923, Hess claimed that he had received a degree in metallurgical engineering in Prague and then joined the French Foreign Legion in Algiers.
[4][5] In a 1972 interview, Hess claimed the picture was shown at Chicago's 1933 Century of World Progress children's literature area.
In the 1920s, Hess was hired to do landscaping for Edmund Booth, the founding manager and editor of The Grand Rapids Press.
[1] Hess claimed to have been elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Horticultural Society of London for his hybridization of delphiniums.
He wrote many letters to Dr. Joseph Banks Rhine, a professor at Duke University and leader in the study of Extrasensory Perception (ESP).
[15] In an interview with Esquire in 2018, Simpsons creator Matt Groening cited The Land of Make Believe as a key inspiration behind his twisted fairy tale animated series Disenchantment.
Groening is quoted as saying, "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.