John Glashan - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born in Glasgow and the son of a portrait painter, McGlashan studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art after national service in the army. He moved to London with the intention of making a living from painting portraits, but was unable to do so. After switching to cartooning and illustrating he curtailed his name to "Glashan".

Glashan's cartoons appeared in Lilliput, Harpers & Queen, Private Eye, Punch, and various London newspapers, as well as Holiday and the New Yorker.

A series of humorous guidebooks created with Jonathan Routh in the late 1960s allowed extensive expression of Glashan's graffiti-like style, combining small figures (often bearded men) with scrawled text - but, even here, often with elaborate backdrops.

The "Genius" cartoons, which allowed Glashan to use colour and a great expanse of space, ran in the Observer Magazine from 1978 to 1983, whereupon he concentrated on landscape painting. His cartoons reappeared from 1988 in the Spectator.

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