Edward Ardizzone is remembered as an illustrator and as an author whose work was rooted in the English tradition of satirical drawing. He was born in Haiphong, Vietnam, the eldest child of Auguste Ardizzone, a French-Italian telegraph engineer and Margaret Irving, who was of Scottish descent. Once an artist herself, she encouraged her son to take an interest in art. A quiet and withdrawn child, frequently bullied at his early schools, Ardizzone devoted himself to drawing. Later, in 1918 after having left boarding school, he began working as a city clerk in London, while taking evening classes at the Westminster School of Art under the artist, Bernard Meninsky. By 1927 he took the plunge and abandoned his city career to dedicate himself to life as an artist (much against his father’s will). His early commissions for book illustrations were slow to come, while his first exhibition held in London in 1930 resulted in no sales at all. However, a chance meeting with an old school friend who was art editor of the Radio Times, eventually led to a constant stream of commissions for the periodical. By the mid-1930s Ardizzone had established a successful career, holding regular exhibitions in London and designing book illustrations. During the Second World War Ardizzone worked as an Official War Artist in France, North Africa and Italy, recording his experiences and impressions in two published diaries and in a large corpus of watercolours now in the Imperial War Museum. After the War, he returned to London and continued illustrating for nearly 200 books, including several titles of his own.
