The Art of Arthur Watts

Arthur Watts was a well-known illustrator and artist whose life was tragically cut short by a plane crash over the Swiss Alps in 1935. His first drawing for Punch, the English humour magazine, was published in 1912 but his work continued to appear regularly right up until his death. He also did four drawings a week for the Radio Times, illustrated a dozen or so books, including E.M. Delafields "Diary of a Provincial Lady", designed travel posters for the railways and the London Underground as well as editing and illustrating one book, "A Painter's Anthology".

Class distinctions were social fault-lines that ran right through the Britain of the nineteen-twenties and thirties. Many of my father's cartoons show an acute observation of differences in accent, vocabulary, dress, drinking habits and even table manners. Some of his sharpest barbs are aimed at the 'modern' art of the period. His contorted figures in paint, plaster and stone are clever caricatures of what he saw around him.

The humour in my father's drawings is never spiteful or cruel. The figures he pokes fun at - the social climbers, the nouveau riche, the day trippers, the hen-pecked husbands and the affected young men - are still with us today. This is why so many of Arthur Watts' drawings are just as funny now as when first published.