Photo album

More here in Searle: a Photographic Portrait

Eamonn McCabe

Photographer and picture editor Eamonn McCabe passed away last week. He was friends with Searle and photographed him around the time of his 90th birthday. The pictures were also published not long after with Searle's obituary.

 “It’s brilliant, but I do worry that the ease of working with digital means that you tend to just keep shooting away for the sake of it. Too easy isn’t always good for photographers. I’m great friends with the cartoonist Ronald Searle, who’s now in his nineties. He told me that when things get too comfortable, too easy, he’ll put a sticking plaster or something on his little finger – almost like a means of giving himself a kind of deliberate handicap.”

McCabe's book on Artists and their studios has page on Searle 

Remembering Ronald Searle

 

Remembering Ronald ten years after his death on December 30th, 2011 at 91 years old. View photos of him throughout his life here

France...

Burnt out after a dozen years of fierce productivity across several mediums Searle left everything behind in London and fled to Paris. Journalist and author Martin Amis caught up with him in the French capital for this profile of the artist in the Telegraph magazine on 1978. Ronald was by then settled in the south of France with his second wife Monica.

 The article states Searle earned 25,000 pounds annually throughout the fifties (equivalent to 800,000 today) and bought 'a mansion' which must mean the house at 32A Newton Road. Read more on Searle's modern home studio here

Here he is photographed for Marseille magazine in 1963. Again the article displays a preoccupation with the sum of money he commands for a drawing.

Read my original Marseille post here