Quentin Blake’s long history with The Spectator

The Christmas present that comes with this article is an original artwork by Britain’s greatest living illustrator, Quentin Blake. By happy chance, this Friday – 16 December – is also his 90th birthday. Hip hip hooray!

It is not the first illustration he has drawn for this magazine, which is why it’s very apt that he depicts an old Quentin speaking to a younger version of himself. From 1959, when he created one of the first illustrated Spectator front pages, through the 1960s, and occasionally after that, he has produced enticing Spectator covers to illustrate either the content or the season, including eight Christmas issues.

His first Spectator cover was the issue of 29 May 1959. It was a seasonal cover, not related to a specific article, and featured two lovely plump Scottish grouse. He followed it up with the cover for the autumn issue of the same year, featuring a Tudor couple picking grapes. Illustrations of the seasons were what every artist used to do. That autumn issue was quite something; it also featured Ian Fleming and Robert Graves.

Blake doesn’t really give interviews these days, but he recalls to me over email that he ‘was introduced to The Spectator by a Cambridge contemporary who knew the editor of the time. This was Rory McEwen, who himself produced a number of covers. However, his style was mainly decorative and so not necessarily appropriate to the variety of subject matter that featured in the paper; so he asked me if I would do some. At the time I was known only as a Punch cartoonist and so it was a godsend for me – even more of one than I probably realised at the time – to be asked to work in a variety of styles and techniques.

‘It was also exciting that I wouldn’t know what the next week would bring and in fact it was rather like performing in a repertory company – each week a different playwright and a different character to be portrayed. During the time that I did The Spectator covers I did manage to work through a very wide variety of techniques and approaches; a special book number, for instance, would be a special treat but it was also good to be given specific demands. Politicians were a rather special one as likenesses are not the thing I do best but I was happy with the drawing that I did of De Gaulle.

‘At this time, we did not have the benefits of more recent technology, so in fact I think – and I hope I remember this correctly but it was a long time ago – I went before the weekend to see what the editor thought was the most important feature of that week and returned with my drawing after the weekend. For a long time I was paid £8 for each cover – not a great sum even for that time – which eventually went up to £10.

‘I think that it was when it went down again to £8 that I decided I was ready to give up something that had been a long and stimulating experience.’

Which just goes to show that sometimes, saving on contributors’ pay can be a false economy. After Blake left, The Spectator went through a three-year period when illustrated covers were jettisoned completely, replaced by large, dull, unaccompanied text. Nigel Lawson, the editor at the time, denies that he made a policy decision to replace Blake with wordy covers: ‘The change to text for the front cover was partly because this was (and is) The Spectator’s stock in trade and partly to differentiate us from other magazines.’

Either way, Blake moved on from the magazine but returned for guest appearances, such as the Christmas cover for 2005 (Boris Johnson’s final Christmas issue as editor). The illustration shows a large tipsy lady holding up a glass while being borne aloft by several small men; it can surely only be a coincidence that the issue’s contributors included Jackie Collins.

Christmas isn’t a particular thing with Blake. I have beseeched him to draw an actual nativity scene but he demurred, saying modestly that the subject had been done already. But his festive covers for The Spectator are rather splendid; sometimes the Christmas number was followed by an issue of the magazine on or around Christmas Day, which gave him two goes at the season. In 1959, the cover was a dignified turkey led on a ribbon by a little boy, with the feathers featuring the contributors, including John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh and Angus Wilson.

Blake’s Christmas number for 1960 was a take on Henry Raeburn’s ‘The Skating Minister’, though this skater was an old, beaming, fat gentleman. The New Year’s Eve issue for 1960 had a picture of Old Father Time, with his scythe, holding up the baby New Year, 1961, on a platter. He loves France, and The Spectator’s Holidays &Travel issue for 1961 featured Frenchmen in berets sitting round a café devouring brochures on Skegness and Swanage.

Some of his old covers feature the books pages: in November 1959 the main piece was Kingsley Amis on Lolita, which Blake illustrated with an apparently innocent picture of a little girl with a big smile and pigtails. Blake’s early work involved a lot of book illustration. He did the covers for all Evelyn Waugh’s novels, starting with The Loved One.

But then, he read English at Cambridge when F.R. and Queenie Leavis held sway in the English faculty, and one of the illustrators he most admires is Dickens’s Cruikshank. He wears his learning lightly, but it’s there.

And for all the apparent ease of his unmistakeable scratchy and mildly anarchic style, he’s grounded in the disciplines of drawing. He did life drawing at the start of his career, first when he was at Cambridge, then at the Chelsea School of Art. ‘It was terribly important to me,’ he told me once. ‘You notice without noticing you noticed.’

Happy birthday, Quentin Blake. And thank you.