Gustave Verbeek

Who was Gustave Verbeek?

Gustave Verbeek was an illustrator and cartoonist, best known for his newspaper cartoons in the early 1900s featuring an inventive use of word play and visual storytelling tricks.

Verbeek was of Dutch ancestry, but was born in Nagasaki, Japan, the son of Reformed Church in America missionary Guido Verbeck. He grew up in Japan, but went to Paris to study art, and worked for several European newspapers, creating illustrations and cartoons. In 1900 he moved to the United States, where he did illustrations for magazines such as Harper's, and produced a series of weekly comic strips for newspapers. In the 1910s he abandoned cartooning and became a fine artist. He was noted for his expressionist monotypes, which were the subject of an article in The Century Magazine in June 1916. He died in 1937 in New York City, New York.