A study into the life and practice of Mervyn Peake.
[The Illustrator is like] ‘a
Prince who with a line of Kings for lineage can make no gesture that does not
recall some royal ancestor.’- Mervyn
Peake (1)
On the 9th of July
1911, in Kuling, a small hill town in the Kiang-Hsi Province of China, Mervyn
Peake was born to Congregationalist Missionary parents, and spent most of his
first eleven years in Tientsin, south east of Peking (Beijing). The family
moved back to England in 1923, and settled in Wallington, Surrey.
He started studying at the
Croydon School of Art before enrolling at the Royal Academy of Art in 1929,
where he primarily focused on painting, one of which was chosen for the Royal
Academy Summer Exhibition in 1931. In 1933 Peake moved to the Channel Island of
Sark, following the suggestion of one of his former teachers and spent the next
two years there. He exhibited work with the Sark Group in galleries in London
and Paris, but in 1935 moved back to London and took up a teaching position at
the Westminster School of Art.
In 1936 he met Maeve Gilmore when
she started her first day at the Art school and they married on the 1st
December 1937. Peake had his first one-man show at the Calmann gallery in
London during the following year, and his first book Captain Slaughterboard was published by Country Life in 1939.
In 1940 he moved to Sussex and
his first child, Sebastian, was born. In the same year he began writing Titus Groan, had Ride a cock-horse and other Nursery Rhymes published, and joined
the Royal Artillery. His second son, Fabian, was born in 1942 and Peake left
the army that year.
He was commissioned by ‘The
Leader’ magazine as a war Artist in 1945 and visited the Bergen-Belsen
concentration camp where he compiled several drawings of the dying inmates, and
gathered ideas for a future collection of poems.
Titus Groan was published in 1946 by Eyre and Spottiswoode, and he
moved the family to Sark where he rented a large house previously used by the
commanding officer of the German Occupation Force. In 1949 his daughter, Clare,
was born.
In 1950 Gormenghast was published, for which he won the Heinemann Prize for
Literature in 1951 along with The
Glassblowers. He was consequently elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society
of Literature. The family moved back to Wallington, Surrey, in 1952.
Titus Groan was adapted for BBC Radio in 1956, and Peake wrote a
play, The Wit to Woo, that was
performed at the Arts Theatre in London in 1957. The play received poor reviews
and Peake suffered a nervous breakdown.
In 1959 Titus Alone was published. Mervyn Peake died on the 17th
November 1968 having suffered the debilitating effects of Parkinson’s disease
for many years.(2)
His affinity for Illustration was
present throughout his childhood; many of his first drawings were completed in
the margins of his school exercise books. His love of novels such as ‘Treasure
Island’ and ‘Under the Serpent’s Fang’ exposed him to such Illustrators as
Stanley L Wood, whose work Peake greatly admired.(3) One can
see similarities in the use of line, mark-making, composition and humour that
are continually evident in much of his work.
As a sixteen year old (1927)
Peake produced a 27 page series of illustrations for poems by Walter De La
Mare. These use clean and confident lines, and many of the characters are
expressive in their movements. Some consider these early examples to resemble
the style of E H Shepard, Illustrator of Winnie the Pooh.(4)
