Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, illustrator and painter, was born at Bulli on the south coast of NSW on 25 March 1891, son of Rev. G.C. Percival. Educated at public schools and at Sydney High, he became a high school teacher with the NSW Education Department. (There is some speculation he may have been the 'Mr Percival’ who studied with Julian Ashton and Sydney Long at Ashton’s Sydney Art School in 1908 and won first prize at the school’s first student exhibition in December. Viola Quaife came second and Ruby Winckler third.)

Percival enlisted with the AIF in October 1915 and served with the Motor Transport Corps until 1918 when he was transferred to the Education Service and thence to War Records. He contributed cartoons to the wartime Aussie while on active service and had a cartoon published in London Punch while working as an artist in the Australian War Records Section in London under Major Treloar (subsequently director of the Australian War Memorial). Warrant Officer Percival’s colleagues in the London office included Captain Will Longstaff and Lieutenants Frank Crozier and G.C. Benson (see William Moore vol.2, p.48).

Percival took over from Norman Lindsay as principal cartoonist on the Bulletin in August 1924 (according to Who’s Who 1927-28). 119 of his original Bulletin cartoons dated 1920-31, 118 cartoons, one political cartoon and 12 caricatures of 1923-24 (including sporting figures) are in ML, e.g. Readers of the Bulletin c.1926-28, and Another Geological Wonder. Sculptor (exhibiting one of his pieces): “She was cut out of a solid piece of marble.”/ Woop: “Cripes! How did she come to get there?” published 5 April 1933. David Harris lent his “The Spring Exhibition” from the picture’s point of view (1920s) to the 1999 exhibition Artists and Cartoonists in Black and White at the National Trust S.H. Ervin Gallery.

In 1927 Percival was living at 40 Cheltenham Road, Croydon. He gave his recreations in Who’s Who in Australia as tennis and motoring. Rolfe (p.269) considers him something of a Lindsay copyist, which seems true for political cartoons like Not All Lost (9 April 1930). Other drawings are in the 'Dad and Dave or Jacky Jacky’ mould, e.g. Throwing the Responsibility on the Pudding ('Could you find a corner for another helping of pudding, Jacky?’/ 'Mine tinkit this fpeller put down 'im neck and let it take it chance, boss’ – which is more like a naturalistic Minns – published in the 'Aboriginalities’ column, 29 February 1928, 19. Most of his cartoons, however, were quite different and much more original. As Fifty years… far more aptly notes, he 'specialised in natural art with almost photographic finish; skilled in full pages of groups’. Making a virtue of necessity, chiarascuro is often intrinsic to his images, notably in his cartoon of a movie audience, Popular Education: A Picture Show Study, published in the Bulletin on 12 September 1928 (original Mitchell Library Px*D501/42).

Percival’s contemporary (predecessor?) Percy Leason was a similarly gifted draughtsman. Percival’s success depended on the audience’s recognition of the accuracy and meticulous detailing in his portraits of everyday Australian suburban types. The State Library of New South Wales holds several Bulletin originals of 'almost photographic finish’ and folksy subjects, including All cobbers at five o’clock (a bus queue), published 25 July 1928, 22; a Christmas toyshop window (At a Window in Paradise’), 1926; the Devil chatting up a feminised Death in a hospital corridor with a nurse scurrying off in the background with a caption claiming that death has lost its punch since the use of morphia; and a businessman – a war profiteer not the stereotypical 'Fat’ capitalist of the Left (naturally) – toasting a skewered ANZAC digger over his lounge-room fire.

In line with the post-1920 Bulletin's editorial stance, Percival’s political cartoons were extremely conservative and often distasteful – pro-Royal but anti-Communist, anti-semitic, anti-feminist, anti-Labor and anti-Lang, e.g. Mr Lang in his new Part of Cromwell 1929 (ill. King, 124). Some are witty, e.g. his late Depression cartoon Time somebody got to work, published 27 January 1932, with Prime Minister Lyons as a waiter repeatedly reading out the menu to an 'average’ Australian family but never bringing any food. In retrospect, Percival’s artistic eclecticism perhaps supports W.E. Pidgeon's argument (made in the 1940s) that a cartoonist must be independent of editorial intervention in order to achieve anything yet increasingly lacked this freedom in Australia.

In the 1940s Percival illustrated children’s books with rather crude drawings mainly for the Currawong Publishing Company in Sydney, e.g. Animal Life: Pictures for Little Children/ An OPC/ Untearable Book (Sydney: Offset Printing Coy, n.d. [194?] acc Muir vol.1, no.195); The Digger Hat by Tip Kellaher (Sydney: Currawong Publishing, 1942); The Comical Adventures of Osca and Olga: A Tale of Mice in Mouseland (Sydney: Currawaong Publishing Coy, n.d. [1943]), and The Remarkable Ramblings of Rupert and Rita (Sydney: Currawong Publishing Coy, n.d. [1944]) by Paul Buddee; Queer Animals 1943, Queer Birds n.d. [1943], Queer Australian Fishes 1944 and Queer Australian Insects 1944, all by J. W. Heming (Sydney: Currawong), acc. Muir; The Ducks Who Didn’t by Jill Meillon (Sydney, Currawong, n.d [1946]; Happy Holidays: Stories and Pictures for Children (Sydney: Offsett Press, 1947) according to Muir.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007