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Edward Linley Sambourne

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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EDWARD LINLEY SAMBOURNE (1844-1910), English draughtsman, illustrator and designer, was born in London, on the 4th of January 1844. He was educated at the City of London School, and also received a few months' education at the South Kensington School of Art. After a six years' "gentleman apprenticeship" with John Penn & Son, marine engineers, Greenwich, his humorous and fanciful sketches made surreptitiously in the drawing-office of that firm were shown to Mark Lemon, editor of Punch, and at once secured him an invitation to draw for that journal. In April 1867 appeared his first sketch, "Pros and Cons," and from that time his work was regularly seen, with rare exceptions, in the weekly pages of Punch. In 1871 he was called to the Punch " table." At the beginning he made his name by his "social" drawings and especially by his highly elaborated initial letters. He drew his first political cartoon, properly so-called, in 1884, and ten years later began regularly to design the weekly second cartoon, following Sir John Tenniel as chief cartoonist in 1901. Examples of his best work in book illustration are in Sir F. C. Burnand's New Sandford and Merton (1872), and in Charles Kingsley's Water Babies (1885), which contains some of his most delicate and delightful drawings. The design for the Diploma for the Fisheries Exhibition (1883) is of its kind one of the most extraordinary thingsin English art. As a political designer, while distinguished for wit and force, he was invariably refined and good-humoured to the uttermost; yet it is essentially as an artist that he takes his highest place. He died on the 3rd of August 1910.

See M. H. Spielmann, The History of Punch (London, 1895).