CURIOSITIES:EDWARD ARDIZZONE'S was a life of illustration. His gently comic drawings appeared in more than 200 books in the 50 years from 1929, and in magazines, and for advertising, and for all the magpie demands of work in commercial art.
He drew all the time: at his desk at home in Maida Vale, London, with his family noisily around him; in the evenings on any scrap of paper that came to hand; on his travels in sketch books galore. His daughter Christianna wrote of her childhood: "I assumed that drawing was just something that fathers did. All letters were illustrated, stories were made up just for us, and copiously illustrated if that is what we wanted."
He illustrated Mary Lavin's The Second-Best Children in the Worldin 1972, and he turned his hand to Christmas themes many's the time. He illustrated Christmas Eveby C Day Lewis in Faber's Ariel Poemsseries in 1954; Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Walesin 1978; and Edward Booth-Clibborn wrote the charming, anecdotal My Father and Edward Ardizzone: A Lasting Friendshipin 1983, showing more than 30 Christmas cards.
All the books I've mentioned are available at Abebooks, Alibris or Amazon.
In Sketches for Friends(2000), Judy Taylor collected many of those abundantly decorated letters. He was a genial fellow, was Ted, avuncular, bibulous, much loved by his acquaintances, and very fond of snuff. One sketch is of him in a cafe in Dieppe, with the note "The [proprietor's] wife told me with such assurance that my snuff would collect in a ball behind my forehead and destroy my wits, that I felt quite alarmed . . .".
Ardizzone's Christmas cards were of two kinds: one printed for the many, and those especially drawn and painted for particular friends. The card above left was sent in 1967 to the banker Michael Behrens and his wife Felicity. "Michael and Ted shared a love of fine wine," wrote son Nicholas Ardizzone in the notes to a Centenary Celebrationat the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. "A gift of wine from the former to the latter would ensure an illustrated letter in return. This was an arrangement that suited both friends admirably."
"Ours was a good house for parties," wrote Christianna Ardizzone, "[but] every so often gloom would descend in the shape of enormous bills. Once, in an effort to save simply masses of money, my parents bought a whole barrel of wine - with a special device to go on top of it to keep out the air, so it would last for ever and ever and be a really good investment. We had a very merry three days." Merry Christmas, Ted!