Life's a beach

Before the summer ends let's visit Brighton with Searle and Holiday magazine. . .

The original cropped up on eBay a few years back but it had some tear damage

I've posted these wonderful, full colour images from 'Lilliput' magazine (1947) before but they're worth looking at in this context.

This Punch cover is a decade later 14th August 1957

This was a short article in 'Holiday' magazine on Russian resort Yalta

 The Yalta image above is echoed in Searle's depiction of American beach scenes such as this Florida beach again for 'Holiday' magazine.

Searle's Hawaii beach scenes are incredible

Some just go to the beach to get away from it all

Early Searle

I'm slowly piecing together Ronald's early, post-war career after he was liberated from captivity by the Japanese and returned to England. Even in the prison camp he maintained a tiny notebook with miniscule thumbnail ideas for cartoons in the belief that survival would mean resuming his career as a cartoonist which had started  to take off just as he enlisted.

This is one of the earliest examples I've found of his cartoons published in Punch magazine. He was twenty seven years old at this point and eager to make an impression in the London magazine cartooning field.

Punch March 5 1947 Vol CCXII 5539

That same month the venerable compendium of contemporary satire published another cartoon

Punch March 26 1947 Vol CCXII 5542

In this newspaper clipping from 1948 we see Searle's early work already making an impression on the Continent.

The following I unearthed in the vaults of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

December 1947


For more early Searle also see Lilliput pt.1  and London Opinion and The Strand

Yugoslavia

In August-September 1947, Searle and four other British artists spent three weeks in Yugoslavia at the invitation of the Peoples’ Youth Railway project, linking Šamac to Sarajevo. Joining the 460-strong British brigade they drew and painted in Bosnia, Croatia, and Serbia. The groups' drawings and paintings were  exhibited the following year at the Leicester Galleries in London.  Five of Searle's drawings were published in 'The Railway: An Adventure in Construction' (1948).

Paul Hogarth writes in his autobiography:

“In the spring of 1947 I was asked to select four artists to record the building of a railway in the wilds of eastern Bosnia, then part of Yugoslavia.  At once I thought of Ronald Searle, who was becoming known through the pages of Punch and Lilliput.  His remarkable chronicle of life in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps had made a big impression on the public, and had he not helped to build another railway, a railway of death?  Still gaunt from the experience, he looked like a Grunewald Christ.  The other members of the group were Laurence Scarfe, who represented the English pastoral tradition of topographical watercolour painting; Percy Horton, the distinguished tutor of drawing at the RCA; the art historian Francis Klingender; and myself.

We departed in high spirits and, after an arduous train journey, finally arrived at Llubljana, the Slovene capital, in the sweltering heat of August.  The next day we began a demanding week drawing in the souks of Sarajevo and Zenica, before continuing to the construction sites of the 'Youth Railway', where we drew brawny, sun-bronzed students, wizened peasants and smooth-talking officials. . . 

". . . Inspiration on the trip did not come from our subject matter, but from Ronald Searle himself. His appetite for drawing was prodigious and totally undiminished by travel or fatigue. He would produce three or four large ink and wash drawings of construction scenes each day, plus numerous figure studies in pencil or conte. At night he would update his journal. It was the first time I had become acquainted with a working artist of my own generation and we became good friends. The business of getting to grips with the reality in front of you was not something that had been taught at art school,and seeing Searle work, I realised that this was something I had to master."

'BRITANSKA BRIGADA CAMP NEMILA YUGOSLAVIA (BOSNIA VALLEY) AND DATED 'DRAWN AUG 22 1947'
PEN INK AND MONOCHROME WATERCOLOUR 9 3/4 X 13 1/2 INCHES

 

'Yugoslav Miner'

'Peasant Boy, Yranduk' 

'Study of a boy, Vvduduk'

In a review of the exhibition dated February 20th, 1948 the 'Spectator' remarks on the drawings "by Ronald Searle, whose impressive graphic facility sometimes recalls the early John" - Augustus John I presume.

Sources:

ECC

'Passport to Peking' by Patrick Wright

Our Time Volumes 7-8

Studio International Volume 137

The Spectator Volume 180