Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator

Product Information

Ardizzone also illustrated several telegrams for the Post Office in the 1950s and 1960s, many of which are considered collectors' items. Ardizzone’s intimate scenes of bar-room and back-stage life and street life in London are drawn with a whimsicality and charm that are inimitable and unmistakeable.

In 1936 he completed the first part of what would be his defining series of work, the first of the ‘Tim’ books: Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain. What Vaughan saw in ballet was the groupings of people, and people in movement – aspects which would stay as preoccupations and evidence themselves in much of his later work.After working as a clerk, he decided in 1926 to pursue art full-time; five years later he had his first one-man show at the Leger Galleries. During the war Ardizzone was appointed Official War Artist by Sir Kenneth Clark (of ‘Civilization’ fame – an admirer and collector of Ardizzone’s work).

In 1936 he inaugurated his best-known work, the Tim series of books, featuring the maritime adventures of its eponymous young hero, which he both wrote and illustrated.Miroslav Sasek This is Sasek: Miroslav Sasek (1916-1980) (or Meer-oh-slahf Sah-sek as pronounced, and written Ŝaŝek, but best known by his drawn signature: ‘M. In 1951 Trevelyan married Mary Fedden (see artists) and the couple travelled widely, in Europe, Africa, India and the USA, before settling in London, Durham Wharf, on the banks of the River Thames, where he set up his etching studio. In the foreground, two women in factory overalls give a friendly acknowledgement to a passing man, exemplifying a common theme of Ardizzone’s work - his observations of relations between men and women.

At Ipswich the young Ardizzone explored the docks, met the sailors and established the memories which would later form the basis for the famous Little Tim books. These everyday scenes of shelter life in London became the most well-known of Ardizzone’s wartime output.The series’ progress was halted, however, with the start of the Second World War and his appointment as an Official War Artist a year later, from whose commission he was eventually released in September 1945. The cheery tone shows great affection for the elder men: here their gaze towards the younger woman passer-by is intended as a reassuring sign that all is at it should be.