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Exhibition reactions

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"Visited the Cartoon Art Museum and got to pick this up! So crazy to see my work in print with so many other incredible artists! The Searle show was great"- Samantha Vilfort, contributing artist


"Members of the Advanced Character Design class I am taking at the Animation Collaborative (taught by Chris Sasaki) attended "Searle in America" at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco. This show of Ronald Searle's work depicting American subjects is remarkable and a MUST for anyone breathing, let alone an interest in character or design. Matt Jones is responsible for this gem of a show and I have to say he did a perfect job bringing it all together. GO AND SEE THIS SHOW!"-Peter Emmerich,  contributing artist

Another Searle exhibition!

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Robert Forbes has one of the largest collections of original Searle artwork in the U.S. and several pieces in 'Searle In America' were generously loaned from the Forbes Gallery, NYC.  Mr Forbes collaborated with Searle on several books of poetry for children and now Forbes has 60 of the pictures on display in Palm Beach, Florida. Read this article for more details


'Searle In America' on Facebook

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I've launched an official Facebook page for updates & info on the exhibition at the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum HERE!

Seasons Greetings

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Amid Amidi at Cartoon Brew features the quirky Christmas card designs of Disney animator Ward Kimball.  Searle visited the Disney studio in 1957 and remained friendly with several of the animators including Kimball. Here is the animators' 1966 card to Ronald.



Kimball also sent this get well card to Monica Searle when he learnt of her cancer treatment.


Merry Christmas

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Here's a rare & expensive christmas present for Searle completists.  Available here

Flu season!

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A Get Well card by Searle should cheer you up!






You might even use a St Trinians hankerchief designed by Searle in 1954

The Railway Man

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Ronald's Searle wartime sketches of his POW experience  feature in the new film 'The Railway Man'- based on Eric Lomax's account of his time on the Thai-Burma 'Death Railway'.  Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky and written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the film depicts scenes  of camp internment and jungle clearing straight out of Searle's sketches.  In one scene Nicole Kidman playing Lomax's wife picks up a copy of Searle's 'To the Kwai and Back' and flicks through the pages.






(Thanks to Tony Rosenast & Uli Meyer)


"An article by John Connell in Strand Magazine for October 1947 dealing with a subject Searle was sadly well able to illustrate - he himself had been a Japanese POW in the Second World War. This shows the scene in a camp hospital."
From Mike Ashworth's Flickr set


Bohème

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When Searle first moved to Paris in the 1970s he found a local restaurant on the left bank sympathetic to struggling artists. Like the cafes that supported some of the Impressionists and later Picasso and his associates the proprietor was happy to exchange food and wine for artwork. The suitably titled 'Restaurant des Beaux Arts' became the regular meeting place for Searle, his second wife Monica and a group of French cartoonists/satirists. Searle even hand lettered the canopy outside and embellished menus and business cards.









(Thanks to Nancy Beiman)

Animation

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London based animator Uli Meyer has been looking to animate a Searle project for several years now.  He completed an impressive test based on the St Trinians girls a couple of years ago, which Searle himself loved when we presented it to him.



 He pitched a potential Searle-esque opening for the Simpsons TV show-it's creator, Matt Groening, is a huge Searle fan.


And now Uli has announced his latest animated project in the Searle style- an adaptation of Searle and Geoffrey Willans''Molesworth'.  Please check out the Facebook page and support the project by liking it or suggesting it to friends.
If anyone can draw like Ronald Searle Uli can.  Help make it happen!

'Searle In America' lecture this saturday

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 I'll be giving a talk at San Francisco's Cartoon Art Museum this Saturday, 22nd February on Searle's career.  I'll be focusing on his work in America with a slideshow of rare material and photos that will appear in my upcoming book 'Searle In America'- an expanded version of the exhibition catalogue containing ALL the Searle pictures I have in my database plus the research I've done over the years.

More details here



The Wildcats of St.Trinians

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Ronald Searle tried to distance himself from the film adaptations of his St. Trinians, but remained appreciative for the extra income it brought. The last two films made by the modern incarnation of Ealing Films saw Searle benefit with a hefty check that kept him in champagne he said!

'The Wildcats of St. Trinians' was released in 1979 and even then bore little resemblance to Searle's creation, geared towards kids and Dads as Frank 'one take' Launder admits in the video below.   Searle isn't mentioned once either, perhaps thankfully?

I think everyone may have been doing this for the money, including the aging Launder and some of Britain's best known actors of the era. Searle agreed to do the poster art but it looks like it was massacred by an art director with other ideas.

Searle's Dogs

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Searle was, of course, famous for his cat drawings but he told me he was never particularly fond of cats they were just "what sold".  His various depictions of dogs over the years are just as funny and he produced a whole book on the canine personality "With four lugubrious verses" in 1958.
Searle lived in Paris for the best part of the sixties. A city of dog lovers, it commissioned Searle in the eighties to illustrate a campaign to keep its sidewalks clean!






'Particularly revolting dog glowing under the impression that it is man's best friend'





Searle's covers for the New Yorker usually featured his famously laconic felines but this one, published Sept 19, 1970, depicts a site often observed in the richer parts of large cities.




Early examples from the 1950s published in News Chronicle





'Stately homes' NY Times


'Palm Springs' feature HOLIDAY magazine February 1965









Mr Punch had a curious canine companion decades before Wallace & Gromit.  His dog was called Toby. 














Birthday

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Ronald Searle born March 3rd, 1920

Italy, Max Beerbohm & Exhibitions

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Ronald Searle first visited Italy in 1949 with his wife Kaye. They explored Portofino and Rapallo where they looked up humourist and caricaturist Max Beerbohm.
'In October, the Searles visited Italy and stayed with their friend Jennie Nicholson (daughter of Robert Graves) in Portofino, and she had taken them along the coast to Rapallo to meet the venerable Max. 'I have a little talent,' he explained to Ronald, 'but I have used it well.' Ronald was hardly neglecting his own; in Portofino he completed no fewer than ten paintings that were exhibited at Wolf Mankowitz's Little Gallery immediately on his return'  (Russell Davies)


In 'Conversations with Max' S. N. Behrman  (The New Yorker March 12, 1960) relates finding a Searle portrait of Beerbohm. 
 ". . . She put the great book on a table beside me. "I thought you might want to look at this—the Festschrift volume of tributes given to Max by his friends and admirers to commemorate his eightieth birthday. I think you will enjoy it. But first you must take a nap. First you must rest."
 I said I would try. "I'll call you for tea," she said. Miss Jungmann was gone. I was tired. I stretched out on the sofa, but I found I couldn't sleep. I opened the great Festschrift volume. The first thing that greeted my eye was a superb full-page colored drawing of Max by Ronald Searle, the Punch cartoonist. It shows Max in a toga, with a laurel wreath on his head, at a rakish angle—the same angle at which he habitually set his straw hat. 




Max was the only man in the world, I thought, who could look rakish in a laurel wreath, and Ronald Searle perhaps the only man who could make him do it. Max's arms are bare, and, anachronistically, he is smoking a cigarette in a long holder. He looks infinitely bored, presumably at the echoing plaudits that, around the civilized world, greeted his eightieth birthday. The caption beneath the drawing reads, "Max Accepts with Resignation His Place Among the Classics."
The Searle's charm won Beerbohm over and he was persuaded to pen the preface to Ronald's second book of collected cartoons 'The Female Approach'.


In 1953 Searle revisited Italy to recharge his creative batteries. He wanted to see Renaissance artworks and sketch the people and countryside. He actually made two trips that year travelling the length of the country from Milan to Sicily. The resulting drawings show a different, surprising side to the artist and were exhibited and sold at the Leicester Galleries, London the next year.  In his biography of Searle Russell Davies writes:





'A pleasant consequence of his high professional standing was that Searle could now award himself the occasional break from his pattern of work. Already widely travelled in places where few tourists would be terribly eager to go, he had so far never had the chance to immerse himself, alone, in the splendours of Renaissance art. In 1953 he put this right. His first trip, in midsummer, was devoted to resting and looking. . . In Milan, the itinerary began propitiously with time spent in the company of Giacomo Manzu, the sculptor and lithographer. . . Rome, Naples, Capri and Pompeii followed; Sienna, in time for the Palio; and the great binge of Florence, taken far too quickly, of course, but as an investment of information for the return visit. Searle enjoyed his solitary wandering, though it left him open to rather haunting experiences like the one that occurred in the Grand Hotel in Milan. He made an immediate note of it:

"The little waiter who brings me my breakfast - a sad, grey, little man with sunken cheeks and pink rims to his eyes - just brought in some coffee 'for a nightcap'. He hesitated a moment and, slightly embarassed, said: "Scuse medonta mind, but why do you use your left hand to write? I saw for the furst time this morning that you usa left hand and I look to see whata wrong with the other, but it looka alright to me. I never see it before, except once with a soldier who had the other one offa here' - sawing at his shoulder. I told him I was born left-handed and it was fairly commonplace in England. 'Well,' he said, 'I never see it before.' (He must be 50.) Surely left-handedness can't be so rare in Italy - or peculiar to England. Anyway I seem to recall that Leonardo was left-handed. The waiter went out quite convinced that it was rare and strange - still puzzled that it should happen."
 
It was the waiter who now seemed rare and strange: was this some complicated defence on his part against the superstitions that still attached to the left-hander, or mancino, in Italy? Happily, Leonardo's 'Last Supper' was close by for reassurance. . .

'Milan'
 '. . . the second Italian trip came round. This time the whole of October and November were allotted to the journey, which took Searle from Milan right down, through a month's discouragingly awful weather, to Taormina in Sicily, where his 'enormous sketch-block' finally came into its own. At one point Ronald's activities became so intimately intertwined with those of the local fisherman that he used 'the fresh black ink of a newly-caught cuttlefish to sketch the head of one of the men who caight it'. To return to such basics of existence, and to the improvisatory methods of his imprisonment, must have reminded him of the dangers of an over-civilization of his talent. He was entering again intot the spirit of exile. His many paintings of Sicily, mostly sold at the Leicester Galleries in 1954 in an exhibition with the no-nonsense title of 'London, Taormina - and the last of the schoolgirls', were watercolours and gouaches; it would take ten years, Searle said, to master oils, and no time would be left for anything else.' (Russell Davies)


'The look of these paintings was quite 'hot': complex and jungly lines made legible with bold colour. Sometimes one misses the human figure; a preparation seems to have been made for a foreground actionthat does not occur. Perhaps the artist felt this too; it is certainly a problem he could have wrestled with. As his friends have said of him, it was 'another way he could have gone'. But instead, in December, he went home to his contracts and agreements and responsibilities.' (Russell Davies)




A contemporary review of the exhibition in the Spectator (15 Oct 1954) by M. H. Middleton critiqued Searle's new direction:

'I HAVE been wondering this week whether Ronald Searle is not the best comic draughts- man we have had in this country since Rowlandson. I dismiss from this context the Keenes and the Mays, and all those forced by their period to work within a literary framework in which the savagery of the caricature tradition is relaxed to a point where it practically ceases to exist. Who else is there? Searle's wit, as Rowlandson's, is in his line. -Rowlandson's typical line is the half-ellipse, and it conveys a fat, eighteenth- century chuckle; Searle's is the sharp, angular arrow-head, and it conveys a note of twentieth-century cruelty and hysteria. Ho is completely of our day. The pin-stripe trousers of his business men taper as ele- gantly as the legs of any contemporary chair; their triangular noses are as abstract as the tree-forms of Alan Reynolds or the metal sculptures of Lynn Chadwick; the phenomenal world is dislocated as surely as by any surrealist.
Here the ridiculous shades into the sinister. This is a world in which fairies get stuck to the flypaper; in which bearded myopics pay court to seductive female masks; in which eyes come of with the spectacles in front of them and feet are put outside the hotel bedroom to be cleaned. Herein perhaps lies a danger. If the comic draughts- man's particular brand of expressionism is not to degenerate into a habit, his characters into types, he must constantly be replenishing his stock by fresh observation. Ronald Searle's new exhibition at the Leicester Galleries shows him moving away from a central position, on the one hand to topo-graphical and portrait records, on the other to the invented visual fantasy largely created by Steinberg. When Steinberg's Italian in front of San Marco waves his hands in the air to describe the female form divine, and leaves her curves there in dotted line, he seems to be opening up a new dimension in comic drawing—but it is still one based, in the last analysis, upon observation. I hope Searle never strays too far from the real world, because I suspect that the quickness of his eye and the easy facility of his pen may in fact outlast his invention, and it will be a pity if their marriage should break up.'

CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY AND LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LATE SIR MAX BEERBOHM.

(Beerbohm, Max).

  • London: Messrs. Sotheby & Co. 1960.
- See more at: http://www.oakknoll.com/pages/books/15210/catalogue-of-the-library-and-literary-manuscripts-of-the-late-sir-max-beerbohm#sthash.voRD0IsA.dpuf

CATALOGUE OF THE LIBRARY AND LITERARY MANUSCRIPTS OF THE LATE SIR MAX BEERBOHM.

(Beerbohm, Max).

  • London: Messrs. Sotheby & Co. 1960.
- See more at: http://www.oakknoll.com/pages/books/15210/catalogue-of-the-library-and-literary-manuscripts-of-the-late-sir-max-beerbohm#sthash.voRD0IsA.dpuf

In an article entitled 'Strictly Not St. Trinian's' The Sketch magazine was more complimentary: 'The pictures on this page . . . were painted in the autumn of last year during a holiday in Taormina, with the exception of the clerical gentlemen, which was made in Rome. . . This last painting holiday in Italy is typical of his method of work. The experience comes first. In June and July, he painted nothing, but soaked in the sun, and visited museums and art galleries; his taste is catholic. Then he returned to Italy in September, spent a month dismally in bad weather, and began, in November, to wander about the place with an enormous sketch-block. . . he works in water-colour, gouache - in anything but oils.'



Searle later drew the Duomo in Milan for Fortune magazine 1962


Sources:

As always Russell Davies' invaluable Searle biography

Max Beerbohm's Mischievous Wit: A Literary Entertainment By Jacobus Gerhardus Riewald
The Sketch magazine 1954
The Searle Archive, Museum of Karikatur, Hanover, Germany 

In 'Conversations with Max' S. N. Behrman (The New Yorker March 12, 1960)

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 London based animator Uli Meyer is hard at work on a proof of concept test for his animated Molesworth film. Uli has scrutinized the Searle line and relates the benefit of his study:


"In order to create the backgrounds for Molesworth I have been studying Ronald Searle's drawings up close. The first image you can see here is a close up detail of an engine block (full image in the second picture). Ronald Searle drew many of his illustrations with a fountain pen and when you look at the originals up close, you will find that he did very little underdrawing. He used a pencil only sometimes, to very lightly block in a composition and then literally 'wrote' down the drawing as he saw it in his mind's eye. This must have happened very quickly. Many of the lines are not opaque because the ink flow of his pen wouldn't catch up with the speed he was throwing down the lines. He would then scribble over some of the lines again and again to darken them. Some people have described Ronald's drawing style as nervous and hesitant but it is quite the opposite. His drawings are so assured and confident, there is no sign of struggle or doubt. He had an incredible memory of what things looked like and rarely used any reference. His output was so prolific, he would create several illustrations of this kind every day. Ronald was left-handed and was lucky that he wasn't forced to write with his right hand when he was a child. When you learn to write you practise precision by crafting the alphabet with your pen and that precision is apparent in Ronald's every drawing. He drew like others would write letters, directly from his mind down to his hand and onto the paper. Marvellous!"



Young Elizabethan

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When Searle's first wife, Kaye Webb, took over as editor of (Collins) Young Elizabethan magazine she enlisted her husband to provide artwork.  Searle designed covers and Nigel Molesworth debuted in the magazine.

This must be the finest designed magazine for children ever published.  Does anybody remember it or have any copies? It's incredibly hard to find these days.








Thanks to Merfyn O. Jones for the scans
Searle would later rework this snoozing reindeer for a Marcus Neiman Christmas catalogue cover.





'I must be a brave little boy.
 I mustn't be afraid to go
 down.  It's only for a year.
 I must be brave . . . '


 Some of the illustrations, such as that above, were much more naturalistic, demonstarting Searle's incredible range.  Note the scratching into the ink on the wall behind the boy.














'Thoughts by Nigel M./Ye English (Well, some ready to be stuffed)./Young Elizabethan Magazine.'






Nigel Molesworth: Young Elizabethan, "You wouldn't hav thort a pair of bloomers would make all that difference."
signed, dated and inscribed as title 'Nigel/Molesworth/Young Elizabethan/Ronald Searle 1956.'
pen and black ink.

An original illustration for Molesworth: Whizz for Atomms, page 11. Published by Max Parrish, London, 1956; and Molesworth, page 215, Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics, London, 1999









Molesworth: How to be a young Elizabethan...Come here bend over
signed and dated 'Ronald Searle 1956' (lower right) and inscribed 'Molesworth/How to be a young Elizabethan./...Come here bend over.' (lower left)
pencil and pen and black ink, 10¾ x 13¼in. 

An original illustration for Whizz for Atomms, London 1956, p.15.





An Act of Charitee signed and dated 'Ronald Searle-/1956' (lower left) and inscribed 'Page 17/Nigel/Molesworth/Young Elizabethan? An Act of Charitee' (upper left), further inscribed 'Inspiration'/'The Gift'/'Doubt'/'Exploration'/'Despair'
pencil and pen and ink, 15½ x 10¾in.

An original illustration for Whizz for Atomms, Max Parrish, London, 1956, p.17.

The Saturday Book

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'The Saturday Book was an annual miscellany, published from 1941 to 1975, reaching 34 volumes. It was edited initially by Leonard Russell and from 1952 by John Hadfield. A final compilation, The Best of the Saturday Book, was published in 1981. The publisher throughout was Hutchinson's.

The Saturday Book provided literary and artistic commentary about life in Britain during the Second World War and the ensuing decades. It covered a range of arts, including ballet and music. Many writers contributed poems as well as essays.
The very first volume totalled 444 pages, but, with paper in short supply, the length of the second was slashed to 274 pages. From the third to the 24th volumes the number fluctuated between 288 and 304 pages, but the remaining ten ran to no more than 256 pages each, with the last one dropping to 240 pages.
In 2002 Nekta Publications published What’s Where in The Saturday Books: A Comprehensive Guide and Index by Peter Rowland, 154 pages long, which provides an index and guide to the whole series.'
- Wikipedia




The Inconstant Moon

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In 1949 Searle illustrated Noel Langley's 'The Inconstant Moon', again in a classical style.  A retelling of the story of Dante and Beatrice.














Scans from the always excellent illustration resource  FULL TABLE website

The Strand

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The Strand magazine, founded in 1891, was a monthly, pocket sized edition by the late forties in a similar format to Lilliput magazine.  It featured many of the same illustrators and cartoonists but Searle's work for the magazine was more realistic than the cartoonier Lilliput work (e.g.. St. Trinians, Patrick Campbell's stories).
Again this shows  the range of Searle's work. Post war he was hungry for any editorial assignments he could find and was proud of his versatility. The work for 'The Strand' demonstrates an avenue that Searle could have pursued had the St. Trinians cartoons not made his cartoon style define him.  He also employed this style for other magazine work of the period including London Opinion and John Bull magazines.


'The Fourth Patient'
A Short Story by John Connell
The Strand magazine, October 1947





'Third Wife Lucky'
A Short Story by Alan Wykes
The Strand magazine, March 1948






'North of Bombay'
A Short Story by Bernard Fergusson
The Strand magazine, April1948









'Not In The Log'
A Short Story by A.E.W. Mason
The Strand magazine, May 1948





'Chang's Great moment'
A Short Story by A.H. Rasmussen
The Strand magazine, October 1948



'An Honest Day's Work'
A Short Story by David Cargill
The Strand magazine, November 1948


'The Cigarette Case'
A Short Story by Eugene Miller Campbell
The Strand magazine, April 1949







London Opinion

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'London Opinion magazine gave Searle some of his earliest commissions after returning from the war. In this May 1946 issue we see how comparitively crude Searle's cartoon style was (these cartoons may well have been based on sketches he made as a POW).  By October 1950 we see his style has become more sophisticated and an early incarnation of the 'thin man' appears- the typical character Searle would later evolve into the Patrick Campbell stories and then Mr. Lemonhart.
The St. Trinians girls too make an early appearance.









Scans from ECC blog

April 1947 (found here)

From the May 1948 issue of London Opinion and The Humorist (source)

 October 1950 (Cover by Bruce Angrave)





The following, from 1953, are from the Full Table site 



For more early Searle work see also The Strand magazine, Liliput, Men Only and John Bull sections.
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