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Phil May

1864-1903

Phil May was born in Leeds on 22 April 1864. His father, an unsuccessful brass founder from landowning stock, died when May was only nine years old. Left to struggle for survival, he had to quit school at the age of thirteen to take various jobs, eventually becoming an assistant scene painter at the city's Grand Theatre. At the same time, he made his first periodical contributions to the Yorkshire Gossip, a newspaper which lasted just a month. Then, from 1879, he spent three years playing small parts with a touring theatrical company. During this stint, he made caricatures of his fellow actors, adapting some for use as advertising posters and selling others at a shilling each. This work bears the influence of Linley Sambourne, Caran d'Ache and Carlo Pellegrini (Ape). May moved to London at the age of seventeen and after months of hardship found work as an illustrator. While deputising for Matt Morgan, the political cartoonist of the St Setephen's Review, he was spotted by an Australian talent scout and offered a contract with the Sydney Bulletin. He sailed in November 1885, and so entered the period in which he developed his professionalism; he completed nearly nine hundred drawings, cartoons, caricatures and joke illustrations while working on the newspaper.

May returned to England in 1888 by way of Europe, visiting Naples and Rome and studying briefly in Paris. There he met with Charles Conder, whom he had known in Australia, and shared a studio with William Rothenstein. He arrived in London, penniless and in need of work, at an opportune moment. In his absence the majority of British magazines had begun to make use of photomechanical methods of reproduction and were able to include an increased number of drawn illustrations. He was immediately employed by the newly founded Daily Graphic and in 1895 he joined th staff of Punch. May greatly admired the Punch artist Charles Keene whom he dubbed 'the daddy of the lot of us!', but even in his captionless drawings, May was intrinsically the funnier of the two. In turn, he himself was sometimes called 'the grandfather of British illustration' and was very influential upon the next generation of draughtsmen.

Genial and generous to both friends and spongers, May was also an alcoholic, and he died of cirrhosis of the liver and tuberculosis on the 5 August 1903 at the age of thirty-nine. The Leicester Galleries held a memorial show of his work in October 1903 as its opening exhibition.