Linley
Sambourne was born in London in 1844. At
the age of sixteen he was apprenticed as a draughtsman in a marine
engineering works in Greenwich. Sambourne did not enjoy the work and
whenever he had a spare moment he would draw pictures of famous people.
In 1867 a sketch that Sambourne had done of John
Bright was passed by Alfred Reed, a fellow office worker, to his
father, who was a friend of Mark Lemon. When
the editor of Punch saw the drawing
he announced that the young man had "a great future ahead of
him" and offered him a job on the magazine.
In his early days Linley Sambourne was heavily influenced by two of
the artists employed by Punch, John
Leech and Charles Keene. After a time
he developed his own unique style. Sambourne's drawings were full
of detail and to help with his accuracy, he had a collection of 10,000
catalogued photographs. This included portraits of every important
person in Britain.
As a young man Sambourne had been a supporter of the Liberal
Party but as he grew older he moved to the right. By the time
he was in his fifties, Sambourne was described as more "conservative
than the Conservative Party.
As well as working on Punch, Sambourne
worked as a book illustrator. He is best known for the illustrations
that he did for Charles Kingsley's Water
Babies and Hans Christian Andersen's Fairly
Tales. Linley Sambourne worked for Punch
for forty-three years and was still employed by the magazine when
he died in 1910.
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