Edmund Blampied - Blampied As Humorist

Blampied As Humorist

When the market for etchings collapsed during the great depression in the early 1930s, Blampied reinvented himself as a cartoonist and caricaturist at an exhibition in 1931 called “Blampied’s Nonsense Show”. This brought out his love of the absurd and led to his only book, obscurely entitled Bottled Trout and Polo. In this period Blampied also published more than 30 humorous lithographs, many of dogs, that are not recorded in either of the catalogues raisonné (see Bibliography).

After illustrating a new edition of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson, Blampied returned to work for magazines in 1933 with a weekly series of illustrations of British life in ink and sepia wash for The Illustrated London News. Blampied’s few published portraits are known from this time, although he did not particularly enjoy doing them. From photographs he drew small pencil portraits of authors and actors for a magazine called The Queen and an oil of Queen Mary (Mary of Teck) for the Christmas issue in 1934; he collaborated with his great friend and benefactor John St Helier Lander, a noted portrait artist and fellow-Jerseyman, on a picture of King George V; and he did an etching of the Jersey-born politician, Lord Portsea (Bertram Falle), which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1934. After finishing his work for the Illustrated London News in 1935 he continue to work for magazines until 1939, mainly doing occasional cartoons for The Sketch, often featuring two tramps called Horace and George.