Earlier this week we ran a blog post by our cartoon editor Michael Heath, marking the death of the Ronald Searle. As an accompaniment, here’s the interview that Harry Mount conducted with Searle for The Spectator two years ago:
‘I went into the war as a student and came out as an artist’, Harry Mount, The Spectator, 13 March 2010
High in the mountains of Provence, in a low-ceilinged studio at the top of his teetering tower house, Ronald Searle is showing me the simple child’s pen he uses. As he draws the pen down the page, the ink thickens and swerves; a few sideways strokes, a little cross-hatching, and suddenly the famous Searle line comes to life: part Gothic, part anarchic, part comic. The girls of St Trinian’s, Nigel Molesworth, Adolf Eichmann, thousands of Punch caricatures, the Goya-like pictures of dying prisoners of war… all utterly different, all enclosed by that distinctive Ronald Searle line.
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