Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator

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The Belle Adventure itself, fishing for cod, crossed the Atlantic bound for the Grand Banks off Newfoundland, and several of Wallis’s later pictures record this voyage (e. By this time, the WAAC had collected almost 400 of his works, a number exceeded by only one other artist, Anthony Gross.

Edward Jeffrey Irving Ardizzone, (16 October 1900 – 8 November 1979), who sometimes signed his work " DIZ", was a British painter, printmaker and war artist, and the author and illustrator of books, many of them for children. In 1943 they devoted an entire wall to Ardizzone’s pictures, including many from his time in North Africa. and these whirlwind-rendered watercolours - that look careless to the dull-minded - are some of his finest. Takashashi references the Grosvenor School in her linocuts (Cyril Power, Sybil Andrews; Lill Tschudi, see Artists). After the War, Ardizzone resumed his freelance career and received commissions from The Strand Magazine for cover artwork, from the Ealing film studios for promotional material and from the Guinness company for adverts.

But whilst firmly within this tradition, these artists were also modernisers, especially in the adoption of new subject matter. There’s a gentle and quirky wit to his pictures: the policeman twirls his truncheon much as a child might twirl an imaginary wand; the string of helium balloons sold in the park, an outsized illustration which seems to capture the way a child might prioritize its visual scene, reaches higher than the tallest of palm trees. He was born in Cleckheaton, Yorkshire, the only son of Fred Wadsworth, a worsted-spinning industrialist who established both Broomfield Mill and the firm E. Ardizzone’s intimate, gently humorous drawing style made him able to humanise the events of the war through his work.

Attached to the Eighth Army, he adapted extremely well to military life and made many friends especially among war correspondents, enabling him access to transport and networks that he required. Kennington was employed by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC), the body that oversaw the British official war art scheme, from December 1939 and produced over a hundred RAF portraits before resigning his commission in September 1942. He also illustrated a re-telling of the Don Quixote story for children by James Reeves and his illustrations for The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley are regarded as classics in their own right. For illustrating Titus in Trouble, written by James Reeves, Ardizzone was a commended runner-up for the 1959 Greenaway Medal. However, during the Second World War he travelled more widely in Britain and Europe than any other war artist, documenting his experiences in both drawings and diaries which today are kept by IWM.Their shared grandmother had told the stories to both cousins and she had learned them from her father. From 1931-33 Tschudi lived in Paris and studied with the Cubist artist André Lhote, then with the Futurist Gino Severini at the Academie Ronson, and finally under Fernand Léger at the Academie Moderne. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, retold by Eleanor Graham, and A Ring of Bells (1962), John Betjeman's abridged version for children of his autobiographical poem Summoned by Bells (1960). Ardizzone and other war artists such as Anthony Gross, Edward Bawden, Thomas Hennell, Carel Weight and Leslie Cole gave home audiences a sense of what life was like for British troops overseas.

Though his mother was English, his father (who was of Italian descent) was born in Algeria, and so a French national, and worked abroad for the French civil service in the colonies.As a student he visited Fry’s (1910) Post-Impressionist exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, and whilst he was enthralled by the use of colour, he judged the work neglectful of content. The commission was to become the first of the many illustrated texts for which he would be best known, excitedly completed after having lived and dreamt that book for three whole months. When Ardizzone was just four or five years old his mother brought him and two siblings to Suffolk to be looked after by their grandmother so that she and her husband could remain in the Far East. Ardizzone died in 1979, not long after providing his famous illustrations to Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales.