Early Searle

 

'Self Portrait' 1949 (Tate museum)

Photograph by Wolfgang Suschitzky, 1946

I'd love to identify the artwork on the easel; looks like a depiction of horses.

Italia

An interesting oddity from Italy with a great self portrait I hadn't seen before. I don't know much more about this publication.

Mirror & Echo

The UK National Archives online database has some early Searle cartoons here. The drawings are credited as having been published in the 'Mirror & Echo' and 'Blick in die Welt'. They are particularly interesting for their relevance to Searle's wartime experience and the culture he returned to after surviving incarceration as a POW of the Japanese.

The 'General Collapse' series would most certainly have been based on Searle's wartime experience. His POW 'gag' sketchbooks contain many sketches poking at the officer class and the clueless privates.

'Not having the tourist mind' is a light-hearted, series of tableau on a theme that Searle explored on other occasions throughout his career- the hapless tourist - most notably the 'Mrs. Dyson' series for Punch magazine in the late 1950s.

'German soldier and French couple in farmyard.'

Without his signature I struggle to authenticate this as Searle although it does bear some similarities to the style he employed for illustrations made for the Radio Times in the late forties.

'Do you hate the people you draw '

An early self caricature reflecting on the savagery of his cartooning.

 'Family bugbear'

This appears to be another self-caricature and, I would say, a representation of Searle's first wife Kaye Webb. Out of context it seems to depict domestic tension of some kind but it's hard to say without the accompanying article. To continue the self referential symbolism are the slanted eyes of the male figure a racist remark? Is it the smoking? Are those unpaid bills on the table?

Two pictures follow of certain dubious racial stereotypes and again it's hard to decipher the 'oriental man' leaving the house without his trousers!

'Oriental man leaving house Artist'

'Oriental man using chopsticks'

 'Mord in der Stube'

Illustration for Joyce Carey's Bush River

Summer Exhibition of self-portraits

I wish I could make it to haute-Provence for this summer show of Ronald's self-portraits in the village where he lived. The town also unveiled a memorial plaque above the front (back? -I was never sure!) door of his home.  His daughter Kate was there to represent the Searle family.

It looks like the exhibition has self-portraits from across Ronald's whole life-a testament to how long he lived! I've gathered many of them in this section.

The Penguin Ronald Searle

Searle had a long-standing association with UK publishers Penguin Books. They commissioned him to illustrate a collection of paperback editions (some of which he had illustrated the hardback editions-see Book Covers section).

'The Painted Veil' looks like a re-use of a portrait of W. Somerset Maugham originally published in Punch magazine.

The next one was also published in Radio Times illustrating Steinbeck's 'Of Mice and Men'

Of course Penguin also reprinted the essential collections of Searle's cartoons and St Trinians

Also a fine collection not published in the USA (reprinting some images made for American periodical Holiday magazine)

Searle finalized the 'penguin self-portrait' gag as a Searle-mask wearing bird!

(Thanks to Stephen Nadler for the above image)

Penguin also published the Molesworth books and Refugees

Auto-portrait

The artist described this medal as a 'Medal in Commemoration of a Mini-drama. No. 1 in a series of Great Classical trivialities', and added 'I feel that it is rather appropriate that there can be an occasion when a satirist can deflate himself publicly and take a little of what he likes to deal out to others!' The snake around Laocošn forms the figures '7' and '0'.

As a POW, 1943

Perhaps a self-portrait from Searle's variation on Hogarth's 'The Rake's Progress', originally published in PUNCH magazine.


Searle did not study at the Royal College of Art but this must have been based on his art school days in Cambridge.


Searle did indeed design the Chelsea Arts Club Ball.





Searle appears in the The Great Fur Opera: Annals of the Hudson's Bay Company 1670-1970

Searle & co. entering the hallowed Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

'Portrait of the artist painting his own foot'.

One of Searle's final self portraits as he reached his 90th birthday