Clifford Webb

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Clifford Webb RBA 1936, RE 1948 (14 March 1894 – 29 July 1972) was an English artist, illustrator and writer. He specialised in animal drawings.

He was apprenticed as a lithographer, but served in the British Army (Wiltshire Regiment) during World War I and then studied at the Westminster School of Art. He fought at Mons, Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. He was wounded four times, the most serious of which was a shot to the left side of his jaw, and mentioned in despatches. From 1917 to 1919, he served as a captain in the Indian Army.

From 1919 to 1922, he studied at the Westminster School of Art under Walter Bayes and Bernard Meninsky and then from 1923 to 1926 he was a part-time lecturer at Central School of Art in Birmingham. His remaining family still reside centrally in the UK and the United States.

Webb produced illustrations for the first two books of the Swallows and Amazons series by Arthur Ransome, which were used in some 1930s editions. Because Ransome did not like those produced by Steven Spurrier for the first book, Swallows and Amazons, those were not used in its first edition (1930), apart from the endpaper map and dust jacket. In 1931 the second edition contained Webb's illustrations, as did the first edition of the sequel, Swallowdale. (Ransome himself was the original illustrator of the third story, Peter Duck, and all that followed. Further, in 1938 he produced illustrations for Swallows and Amazons and Swallowdale, replacing Webb's drawings.^[1])

Issue 67 of The Imaginative Book Illustration Society's Studies in Illustration contains a short biography & full bibliography by Martin Steenson.