Edward Ardizzone: Artist and Illustrator

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In the Second World War, after a short spell serving in an anti-aircraft unit, Ardizzone was assigned to the War Office by the War Artists' Advisory Committee and posted overseas as a full-time official war artist. The three elder children brought up largely by their maternal grandmother in Suffolk whilst their parents were on foreign service.

Tonk’s teaching bred a formidable tenacity in his students, and a diversity of approach which was apparent throughout Shephard’s career. His scenes of troops on manoeuvres through bombed out towns or civilians hunkered down in bomb-shelter bunkers are composed with an intimacy and softness that focuses on the characters involved rather then the shadow of the conflict. During the 1930s he was best known for his illustrations in the Radio Times and in children’s books, so was perhaps a surprising choice as official war artist. On inheriting a sum of money from his father Ardizzone left his job as clerk, got married to Catherine Anderson, and set up as a freelance artist.

The village is known for its textile heritage, and Tschudi would briefly experiment with designs for textiles when she put certain of her images onto pillow and cushion cases.

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. In 1936 he completed the first part of what would be his defining series of work, the first of the ‘Tim’ books: Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain. Here, for one year prior to the beginning of the war, Vaughan and Passmore would reside, painting, listening to music and visiting the ballet. 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.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. Their shared grandmother had told the stories to both cousins and she had learned them from her father. Born in 1890, her family also had business interests in newspaper publishing, and she grew up in the family mansion Toorak House where, subsequent to her training in art, she would set up her studio. Ardizzone’s intimate scenes of bar-room and back-stage life and street life in London are drawn with a whimsicality and charm that are inimitable and unmistakeable.

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. His drawings show the routines of army life: drills, passing time in mess rooms, eating and drinking, as well as the incongruity of the presence of British troops within the local French culture. What Vaughan saw in ballet was the groupings of people, and people in movement – aspects which would stay as preoccupations and evidence themselves in much of his later work.Leon Underwood Leon George Claude Underwood (1890-1975) worked in several media – as linocutter, painter, etcher, wood-engraver and sculptor; he also taught and wrote extensively on the philosophy and theory of art. Edward Ardizzone was born in the port city of Haiphong, then known as Tonkin, in the north of French Indo-China, a city now in Vietnam, while his father was working for the Eastern Extension Telegraph Company. Edward Wadsworth A major figure in British art of the first half of the twentieth century, Edward Wadsworth was a painter, printmaker, draughtsman and muralist.