cartoonist, worked in the South Australian Colonial Architect’s Office as a young man, William Moore states. He was the cartoonist “Leo” on the Port Adelaide News (1877?), according to Mahood (and McCulloch). “Leo” was also the outstanding figure on the South Australian Lantern (1874-90), notes Moore (ii, 121): 'His chalk drawings on stone aroused considerable comment, particularly his cartoons pillorying certain directors of banks which closed their doors during the financial crisis of forty odd years ago’, i.e. 1890s. Other artists who worked on the Lantern were A.S. Broad , J. H. Chinner , Alfred Clint (at its inception), H. J. Woodhouse , James Ashton and John Hood ('a fine draughtsman who made most of his income out of photo enlargements at Glenelg’, says Moore).

Moore states that Leonard later went to Sydney, where he did not succeed and his subsequent career is a mystery. In fact, he went to Melbourne. In 1888 the Melbourne cartoonist J.H. Leonard satirised the Centenary of NSW celebrations by depicting Henry Parkes as King Lear crowned with a deficit and tormented by the signs of protectionist Victoria’s success (in National Archives of Australia’s Victorian copyight files) posed in front of Parkes’s proposed 'Centennial Dead House’ with the dying Cordelia (NSW) in his arms.

He must therefore have been the “Leo” who worked on Melbourne’s ( Australian ) Life (Tit-Bits) in 1890. Life was published from the late 1880s to the early 1890s, according to Juliet Peers, who inspected it in 1996 when many volumes were not accessible due to their poor condition. She reported that it had good cartoons, many unsigned and some signed only with initials: '“Leo” was a most prolific cartoonist, drawing very fine portraits of celebrities, theatrical scenes and vignettes. His political cartoons were usually large double-page spreads depicting wild and woolly anti-capitalist, anti-land boom profiteering, anti-federation (with federal congress imaged as a raucous procession complete with drunken Aborigines and self-righteous kangaroo and emu in bourgeois dress). Quite radical’. “Leo” also signed cartoons in the 1891 Melbourne Punch Almanac .

In 1906 the cartoonist John Leonard, signing himself 'J.L.’, was drawing for the Brisbane Worker , e.g. He Got 'Em Again (Dunstan, cat. 14, not ill.). There is some speculation that this might be the same John H. “Leo” Leonard.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007