English Heritage Blue Plaque for Artist and Illustrator Edward Ardizzone

Edward Ardizzone (1900 – 1979), artist and illustrator, was commemorated with an English Heritage Blue Plaque at 11.30am on 3 May 2007, at 130 Elgin Avenue, Maida Vale, London, W9, where he lived and worked from 1920 to 1972. Many of his drawings captured life as seen from the window on the first floor at the front of the house and his sketchbooks are full of affectionate portraits of the characters he encountered in Maida Vale.  The Blue Plaque will be unveiled by Sir Christopher Frayling, Rector of the Royal College of Art and Chairman of the Arts Council.

Edward Ardizzone was born in Haiphong, French Indo-China (now Vietnam) in 1900.  Brought to England in 1905, he spent his childhood in East Anglia and exhibited an early interest in drawing and painting. After leaving school in 1918, Ardizzone took up work as a clerk, first in Warminster, then in London. However, he found office work mundane and was forever doodling at his desk. From 1920 to 1926, he attended evening classes given by Bernard Meninsky three times a week at the Westminster School of Art. When in 1926 his father shared out a bonus among his children, Ardizzone took advantage of his windfall of £500 and made the decision to abandon his job to concentrate upon a career as a professional artist.

Fortunately for Ardizzone, the gamble paid off.  His earliest work was inspired by the area in which he lived, Maida Vale, and in 1930 he had his first one-man exhibition at the Bloomsbury Gallery. It was there that he made an important contact – Maurice Gorham, then art editor of the Radio Times, who commissioned him to draw regularly for the paper. In 1940, Ardizzone was appointed Official War Artist and for some years was never far behind battle, producing drawings and paintings of Britain, France, North Africa, Italy, Normandy and Germany.

After the War, Ardizzone’s subject matter diversified and he became a particularly active book illustrator, working on Walter de la Mare’s Peacock Pie (1946), and Anthony Trollope’s The Warden (1952) and Barchester Towers (1953). The modern author with whom he is most associated is Eleanor Farjeon and his drawings for her The Little Bookworm (1955) were particularly well received. Ardizzone also wrote his own, very successful, illustrated children’s tales which began with Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain (1936) and ended with The Last Voyage (1972). His Tim All Alone (1956) was awarded the British Library Association’s Kate Greenaway Medal for ‘the most distinguished work in the illustration of children’s books’. In 1972, Ardizzone left Maida Vale for Kent, where he died 1979, five years after the Victoria and Albert had staged a major retrospective exhibition of his work.

Ardizzone’s daughter, Christianna Clemence, who will be attending the unveiling of the Blue Plaque, said:  “130 Elgin Avenue really was a family house – children playing, visitors coming and going, the usual distractions of domestic life, certainly never boring – all of which my father managed to studiously ‘rise above’ and work with enormous concentration and dedication.”

Ardizzone’s reputation as an artist and illustrator endures, and this status was reinforced by an immensely popular centenary exhibition held at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford in 2000.