London Sketch Club 125th Anniversary: A Visual Celebration of Illustrative History

LONDON SKETCH CLUB
1898-2023
A Visual Celebration
Compiled by Anthony Cohen

What meeting in history would you want to have been a fly on the wall for? Antony and Cleopatra? Laurel and Hardy? Churchill and Roosevelt? Gilbert and Sullivan?

For me, it would be a 1930s gathering of illustrators such as H. M. Bateman, W. Heath Robinson, and Edmund Dulac. Well, more than a meeting, of course. These fellows – and they were all fellows then – knew how to make a meeting: anarchic, zany, emblazoned with colour, and sometimes so lavish they had to be held in collaboration with the neighbouring Chelsea Arts Club, famous then for its Royal Albert Hall balls.

Founded on April Fool’s Day in 1898, the London Sketch Club was set up by some of the leading commercial artists of the end of the 19th century, led by the illustrator, wit, and dandy Phil May. Its members were poster designers and comic artists, but serious painters and designers too. When the club signed an early lease on its clubhouse, Phil May would only add his signature if it was done in a ceremony modelled on King John signing the Magna Carta.

They would meet in their clubhouse – there were various locations, from Bond Street to Wells Street to Marylebone Road (subsequently the headquarters for Woolworths) to its present home – for drawing sessions, during which members would often draw each other for a priceless archive, followed by food, drink, jokes, and hearty conversation. Meetings would end with a rousing chorus of the club anthem, “Say, Watchman, What of the Night?”, a lugubrious Sullivan dirge that challenged participants to transform it into comic joy. It was a habit of members to gleefully draw portraits of each other on each other’s boiled stiff shirtfronts.

The entrance to its Marylebone premises used to be through a door acquired from the Old Bailey, later replaced by an even more sinister portal from Newgate Jail (now hung in the club’s studio). To cheer up the new premises, founder member (and incorrigible shirt illustrator) John Hassall lit a bonfire  to give the walls a more mellow look. Hassell, it should be added, was the creator of probably the most famous holiday poster in history, showing an ancient fisherman skipping along a beach with the legend “SKEGNESS is so bracing”.

Run entirely by its members, with no staffed office or even a phone, the club survives in Dilke Street near the Thames at Chelsea, where it has been since 1957, in the former studio of the Victorian portrait painter John Collier. Its story is recorded in a commemorative book, The London Sketch Club 1898-2023: A Visual Celebration, compiled by Tony Cohen, the club’s current president.

The 1920s were a high point of the zanier mood of the club. Activities included Smoking Conversaziones, or “Smokers”, where members and their friends could let their hair down, often dressing out of character, popularly as tramps – a young Charlie Chaplin performed at a club Smoker. Club balls were the real corset-looseners, when members and their partners dressed up to and beyond the nines with their identities hidden, the events often ending, inexplicably, with blow football matches.

However, serious professional matters were also engaged with in the sketching sessions. “The Friday Sketch was a two-hour session of communal, intense drawing of a simple subject, previously announced,” writes Cohen. “Drawing under pressure to a deadline, at which point all the drawings were pinned up and discussed, was a craft-based exercise, one chosen to hone the craft of drawing ‘in action’. The only distinction the club maintains within its membership is between those who make a living from drawing and those who draw solely for pleasure”. In the 20s, too, Tuesday evening life classes were introduced.

The London Sketch Club thrived through the Second World War, during which members were asked to bring their own food although the bar was open. It survived the Punch cartoonist David Ghilchik being put on Hitler’s blacklist, as well as the death of Heath Robinson (after whom the Royal Navy had christened a new cocktail in recognition of some of the impossible weaponry his drawings had suggested). The club joyously celebrated its golden anniversary in 1948 with a revival of a Tramps Night, at which the president, the silhouettist Harry Oakley, appeared anomalously as a vicar.

The London Sketch Club is very much thriving still in its Chelsea home with special “evenings of informal dress” and competitions, with serious drawings and life sessions to which non-members are welcome if there is room, in the interests of promoting drawing. There are also musical Sunday afternoons. But as Tony Cohen writes, the mainstays of the club are still “drawing, music, drinking, dressing up, stories and bad jokes”.

The comprehensively illustrated book, marking the club’s 125th anniversary – celebrated with an anniversary dinner – is a conduit between now, when sketching is still the bottom line for most professional artists, and a century during which the term “commercial artist” described a lucrative profession that attracted respect and admiration, and still does.

For art enthusiasts, historians, or anyone curious about these exceptional artists, this book is an invaluable addition to your collection.

Review by Simon Tait

You can purchase The London Sketch Club 1898-2023: A Visual Celebration here.