George Morrow

George Morrow (5 September 1869 – 18 January 1955) was an Irish cartoonist and book illustrator.

Early life and education George Morrow was born in Belfast. He was the son of George Morrow, a painter and decorator from Clifton Street in west Belfast, and his wife Catherine. George was the fifth of 8 children, with five of his siblings, Albert, Jack, George, Edwin and Norman also working as artists. In April 1905 Morrow married a Dublin nurse, Mary Matilda McCracken at Ballyclare Presbyterian Church.

Life and works Morrow contributed one work to an exhibition with the Belfast Rambler's Sketching Club in 1888 and four paintings to the Belfast Art Society exhibition in 1893. From the mid to late 1890s he lived at 324 King's Road in Chelsea, In the same year he was published in Pick-Me-Up and Mary Russell Mitford's Country Stories. Both showed with three other brothers in the club's first exhibition alongside John Lavery, Hans Iten and FW Hull, at Fisherwick Place Belfast in November 1903. George Morrow exhibited three oil paintings, Donaghadee, Flaxpool, and The Geraldine's Daughter. Morrow exhibited one oil painting entitled The Saint of the Island at the Royal Academy of Arts summer exhibition of 1904.

In 1905 he contributed to the Ulster Literary Theatre's short-lived Ulad magazine and in the following year was published in the first edition of the equally short-lived Shanachie. In 1906 he sat on the committee of the first Oireachtas Art Exhibition with Jack Butler Yeats and Sarah Purser,

More significantly the year 1906 marked the beginning of Morrow's long association with Punch. In 50 years Morrow was to contribute 2,704 cartoons to the publication, of which 22 were full-page political cartoons. Other publications he contributed to included the Bystander, The Pall Mall Magazine, Sphere, Strand Magazine, Tatler, Windsor Magazine and the Radio Times. Snoddy speculates that this was at the launch of the business.

Morrow was a founder of the Society of Humorous Art and was represented at the inaugural exhibition in 1912, alongside W Heath Robinson. By 1917 George Morrow was a household name when he joined his brother Albert, and 150 artists and writers, in petitioning the British Prime Minister Lloyd George to find a way of enacting the unsigned codicil to Hugh Lane's will and establish a gallery to house Lane's art collection in Dublin. Amongst the 32 notable artists who signed this petition were Jack B Yeats, Sir William Orpen, Sir John Lavery, and Augustus John.

Morrow also designed posters for London Underground between the years 1918 to 1931. Morrow donated a picture of a mounted knight confronting a cheerful dragon upon an invitation from the Ulster Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals for inclusion in their centenary publication. The volume is a virtual who's-who of Ulster artists, writers and musicians of the time. Morrow's work was later displayed in 1945 in a solo exhibition of 100 Punch drawings at the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery.

For many years Morrow produced Royal Academy Depressions, a series of comic parodies of Royal Academy pictures. Several collections of his cartoons were published including An Alphabet of the War (1915) which reprinted cartoons from Punch Almanack. He also illustrated more than 70 books by other authors for adults and children. Morrow lived most of his adult life in London, although he spent many summers painting watercolours in Ireland, mainly in County Donegal.

Death and legacy Morrow had no children and died at his home in Thaxted, Essex on 18 January 1955 aged 85, one month after his last cartoon appeared in Punch.

His work is to be found in the collections of the Ulster Museum, Linen Hall Library, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Manchester City Art Gallery, the Science Museum, the Wellcome Collection, London Transport Museum, and the British Museum.

Partial bibliography Change for a Halfpenny (1905) (online version) The Game of Ju-Jitsu (1906), by Taro Miyake and Yukio Tani What a Life! (1911, with E. V. Lucas) The House of the Ogress (1921), by W. E. Cule Elnovia (1925) Cinderella's Garden (1927) Chuckles (1927) The Marvellous Land of Snergs (1927) Simple People (1928), by Archibald Marshall Here Be Dragons (1930) Light Articles Only (1939), by A. P. Herbert The Birdikin Family (1932), by Archibald Marshall