Biographies

Walford Graham Robertson (1867 – 1948) He was educated at Slough and Eton before studying art at South Kensington with Albert Moore. He was perhaps best known as an illustrator, though he also painted portraits and landscapes. He was one of a number of artists advised by Anthony Ludovici in for April 10, 1913 to stop painting, but there is no indication that he even slowed up. He was perceived as an eccentric young man in the nineties, when painted him. He wrote plays, including at least one for Children. He was also a serious collector of art, including that of . And he illustrated G. K. Chesterton’s political satire, . A description of a photograph which we wish we could find had this to say about him: The New Age (NA 12.23:563) Sargent William Blake The Napoleon of Notting Hill For Graham Robertson, who was both a serious portrait painter (his early sitters included actresses such as Aubrey Beardsley’s sister, Mabel, and Ellen Terry) and a man with a whimsical bent, it was inevitable that the same impulse that made him fill sketchbooks with comic drawings and self-caricatures would also lead him to record for posterity the hilarious gatherings he enjoyed with friends. In this photograph, the woodland spirits crowned with flowers are members of the circle that Robertson dubbed the with himself as President–a group that included the illustrator Henry Justice Ford, the literary scholar J. W. Mackail, and Mackail’s wife, Margaret, the daughter of Edward Burne-Jones. Loony Club, We suspect that Ludovici did him an injustice (not the only one he perpetrated, either).