George Morrow

Who was George Morrow?

George Morrow was a cartoonist and book illustrator. He was the son of a painter and decorator from Clifton Street in west Belfast. Of his seven brothers, four, Albert, Jack, Edwin and Norman, were also illustrators and cartoonists.

Educated at the Model School and the Government School of Art, he was apprenticed as a signwriter. He contributed to an exhibition by the Belfast Ramblers' Sketching Club in 1888, and later studied in Paris. In the mid to late 1890s he lived in Chelsea, London, where he made the acquaintance of Mark Twain. In 1896 he contributed illustrations to Pick-Me-Up and Mary Russell Mitford's County Stories.

He contributed to Ulad, a magazine associated with the Ulster Literary Theatre, in 1905. In 1906 he sat on the committee of the first Oireachtas Art Exhibition with Jack Butler Yeats and Sarah Purser, contributed cartoons to The Shanachie and Bulmer Hobson's separatist magazine The Republic, and began his long association with Punch. Over the years he contributed 2,704 cartoons, including 22 full-page political cartoons. He joined the staff of the magazine in 1924, and was art editor from 1932 to 1937. For many years, Morrow produced "Royal Academy Depressions", a series of comic parodies of Royal Academy pictures. Other publications he contributed to included the Bystander, The Pall Mall Magazine, Sphere, Strand Magazine, Tatler and Windsor Magazine.