Hector Breeze
About
Hector Breeze was born in London on 17 November 1928, and educated at Dartford Technical College. He was first employed in a government drawing office and studied art at evening classes before selling his first drawing to Melody Maker in 1957.
Breeze has since worked in advertising and produced cartoons for Private Eye, Punch, Evening Standard, Daily Mirror, Daily Sketch and Guardian (letters page). He was appointed Pocket Cartoonist by the Daily Express in 1982. Best known for his drawings featuring impoverished gentry with characteristic chinless faces and tiny dot eyes, Ralph Steadman wrote in 1996 that Breeze’s ‘clumsy bewildered characters restore my faith in the seriously daft.’
In 2004 Breeze was voted Pocket Cartoonist of the Year in the Cartoon Art Trust awards, but six months later, in 2005,he was sacked by the Daily Express. Breeze also practises letter-carving in stone.
Hector Breeze died in December 2018.
Holdings
71 uncatalogued originals [PU0145 – 0215]
4685 uncatalogued unaccessioned originals deposited by the artist (1960s)
References used in biography
- Ralph Steadman ‘Steadman’s Eye’, Art Review,October 1996, p.55.
- Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), pp.34-5.