TWENTIETH-CENTURY Britain produced no greater nor more distinctive graphic artist than Ronald Searle. He was born 100 years ago, in March 1920, and lived to be 91, publishing to the very end of his long life and leaving behind a body of work astonishing in its richness and variety. Even people who don’t know his name would probably recognise his style—its combination of comic exuberance and rococo, quasi-gothic seediness—and may well have bought some of it in greeting-card form.
In 1939, with war looming, the teenage Searle had given up his art studies and enlisted in the Royal Engineers. Three years later he was taken prisoner in Singapore, working on the so-called “death railway” made infamous by the film “The Bridge On The River Kwai” . He drew what he saw around him, not expecting to live and hoping to leave a record.
In 1953—the same year that he tried in vain to kill off the belles of St Trinians in a nuclear conflagration—Searle launched his greatest creation: Nigel Molesworth. The “Molesworth” tetralogy was written with delicious wit and invention by Geoffrey Willans, who died in 1958, and illustrated with dazzling, macabre brio by Searle. A slovenly and baleful prep-school pupil, Molesworth’s jaundiced, semi-literate observations stand among the best in English humour.
IYHO. Except humility passed you by.
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