ART & ARTISTS: Ronald Searle

Monday 13 February 2023

Ronald Searle - part 14

The son of a railwayman, Ronald Searle was born in Cambridge on 3 March 1920, and educated in the town at the Boys' Central School. He started work as a solicitor's clerk, and then joined the hire purchase department of the co-operative Society, studying in the evenings and later full-time at the Cambridge Daily News from the age of fifteen.

Enlisting in the Royal Engineers at the outbreak of the Second World War, he spent time in Kirkcudbright, where he encountered evacuees from St. Trinian's, a progressive girls' school situated in Edinburgh.

This resulted in his first cartoon for Lilliput, published in October 1941, and later developed into one of his most famous creations, through a series of books and their cinematic spin-offs. Remarkably, he survived the horrific experiences of the Changi Camp, Singapore as a Japanese prisoner-of-war and managed to produce a visual record of life in a prison camp.

On his return to England in 1945, he exhibited the surviving pictures at the Cambridge School of Art, and published Forty Drawings. The exhibition and volume together established his reputation as one of Britain's most powerful draughtsmen, and led to several opportunities to record the atmosphere of post-war Europe. He contributed to Punch and these drawings crystallised in, The Female Approach (1949). Throughout the fifties, he produced a large variety of illustrations, which together seemed present a guide to life in Britain in the 1950's.

Such was his success that his rejection of family and country in a move to Paris in 1961 came as a great surprise. However, it offered a fresh start, resulting in several solo shows, including a major exhibitions at the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Berlin-Dahlem Museum and the Wilhelm-Busch-Museum, Hanover. He also reached a new audience with his contributions to film and television, most notably The Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines (1965).

Note: Searle did too many works to post in one series, so I am posting them in two separate series: 1940-1960, and 1961-2007.

For a more detailed biography see part 1, and for earlier works, see parts 1 - 13 also. (Series 1)

This is part 14 of a 26-part series on the works of Ronald Searle:

1961 A Christmas Carol:

1961 Adolf Eichmann trial :

Searle (right) sketching at the Adolf Eicmann Trial

Judges Moshe Landau, Benjamin Halevi and Yitzhak Raveh Wilhelm Busch
Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst
© The Ronalad Searle Cultural Trust

Robert Servatius

1961 Which Way Did He Go?

1961-77 Paris sketches:

1 Ah oui, Je m'en souviens très bien…
Paris 1961-1975
Front Cover

1977 Paris! Paris!
by Irwin Shaw and Ronald Searle

1961 "Are you sure this is Chris Barber’s place?"
Punch, July 1961
Wilhelm Busch – Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst
©The Ronalad Searle Cultural Trust

1961 All my own work
Punch magazine cover

1961 Ban the Bomb
Punch magazine

1961 Destined Meeting by Leslie Bell
published by Panther Books

1961 Great Franco-Britain
To celebrate the 21st anniversary of Churchill's proposal for a Union of France and Great Britain
Punch magazine 29 March 1961

1961 Nikita Kruschchev demolishes the Brandenburger Tor
Punch magazine 9 August 1961

1961 Ronald Searle's Golden Oldies 1941-1961

1961 The St. Trinian's Story
Penguin Books, London

c1961 Dem-paradise

1962 1962 Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
cover artwork
Wilhelm Busch – Deutsches Museum für Karikatur und Zeichenkunst
© The Ronalad Searle Cultural Trust