Among his students was now-renowned children’s book illustrator and political cartoonist Chris Riddel.

It was so well received that it earned Raymond Briggs his second Kate Greenaway Medal – a British literary award for children’s book illustration (his first award was in 1966 for illustrating Hamilton’s The Mother Goose Treasury).Īs well as an illustrator, between 1961 to 1986 he worked as a part time instructor at the Brighton School of Art. His first big original solo success was Father Christmas (1973) which depicted Santa Claus as a grumpy, working-class delivery man. “He went purple in the face and said, ‘Good God, is that all you want!’ It really was the lowest of the low and so I started to paint because when you’re only 15 and the big man with a beard tells you what to do, you generally do it.”Īs a commercial illustrator Briggs for much of the ’60s was often paired with writers to illustrate but in the 1970s he managed to make a name for himself as a solo writer-artist. I went there wanting to do cartoons.” Briggs remembers the interviewer at Wimbledon College of Art nearly exploding when he expressed this ambition.

“I never thought about being a gold-framed gallery artist and was only pushed into painting when I went to art school. Raymond Briggs related an early experience of academy snobbery in a 2004 Guardian interview: His interest in commercial art was reportedly met with disdain by his instructors. At the age of 15, young Raymond decided to leave school and join the local Wimbledon Art College and later London’s Slade School of Fine Art. Born January 18, 1934, in Wimbledon Park, Surrey (now part of London), Briggs knew fairly early in life that art would be his vocation.

When the Wind Blows by Raymond Briggs