Ronald Searle, CBE, RDI (1920 – 2011, British) at The Great Cat

Ronald Searle, CBE, RDI (1920 – 2011, British) was a satirical cartoonist who is known for his amusing cartoons of cats. Born in Cambridge, his father was a postal worker. Searle started drawing at the age of 5 and attended Cambridge College of Arts and Technology.

At the beginning of WWII, Searle enlisted in the Royal Engineers and was stationed in Singapore. While fighting in Malaysia, he was taken as a prisoner of war by the Japanese. He spent the entire war as a prisoner enduring beatings, starvation, beriberi, and malaria. He was freed in 1945 after the surrender of the Japanese. Searle documented his incarceration with a series of 300 drawings that he hid under the mattresses of those dying. Most of these drawings are included in his book, Ronald Searle: To the Kwai and Back, War Drawings 1939-1945. The Imperial War Museum in London holds most of these drawings today. After his release, Searle then served as a courtroom artist at the German Nuremberg trials.

Searle was a prolific artist especially during the 1950’s, working on books and publishing in magazines. In 1961, Searle moved to Paris where he married and divorced and then married again and finally ended up living in the mountains of Haute Provence. He worked on both Life and Holiday magazines during this time. Searle did numerous covers for The New Yorker which feature cats, and he published many books including Ronald Searle’s Big Fat Cat Book and Ronald Searle’s Cats.

Searle influenced many American cartoonists such as Hilary Knight, Pat Oliphant, and Matt Groening, who frequently uses cats in his works and is a cat lover himself. Throughout Searle’s life, he received numerous awards, including the 1959 and 1965 National Cartoonists Society’s Advertising and Illustration Award, and the appointment of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2004.

His wife Monica died in July 2011, and Searle died on 30 December 2011, aged 91. Today, many of Searle’s works can be found in the collection of the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany.

Black Cat

Blond Cat

Cat Bathing

Cat in a Cone

Cat on a Pillar

Cat on Top of the World

Cat with Snail Shell

Catahari

Cats and Moon

Cats Regretting Puberty

Cats Relaxing

Cats, 1967

Dancing Cat

Family Portrait

Frightened Cat

Happy Cat

Illiterate Cat

Lounging Cat

Puffy Cat

Retarded Cat

Cat of a Thousand Disguises concealing itself as a Rug

Ronald Searle’s Cats, 1967

White Puffy Cat

The Cat’s Bed

The Coming of the Great Cat God, 1968

Timid Cat

Two Cats Quite Calmly Making Beasts of Themselves

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