Lilliput June 1939 p631
This interesting piece is drawn by Victoria. An article appeared in Picture Post, of all magazines, explaining her story.
Victoria and her cat
“You’ve smiled at Victoria’s illustrations of Readers’ Letters. Have you wondered, like many others, what she’s like and how she works? Our letter-editor’s call often catches her on the point of leaving for her week-end in the country. The same evening the drawings are in the post.
You can’t get mad at Victoria. If you try she just wrinkles her forehead – and smiles out of bright yellow gremlin eyes. She’s an artist without temperament: a woman with a tremendous capacity for lightning work. And she needs it. Her drawings to Readers’ Letters have to be posted a few hours after they’re commissioned. Sometimes, she says – in emergencies – its’ like a stage-trick performance.
Victoria’s father is a serious painter of the academic school, and she herself began drawing at the age of three. But there were always other things which interested her as much.
She loved dancing: and might still be doing it to-day had not an illness prevented her. As a child Victoria was a born athlete. She swam, sailed, climbed trees. At her co-educational school in the Bavarian Alps she even kept goal for the football team.
When she was 15 Victoria set out for Berlin alone. She went to art school there and was quick to show a flair for design and colour. Her first job was as artist-assistant editor to a fashion magazine at a salary of five pounds a month. A year later she was earning around fifty – and working too hard.
When she came to England she had to begin all over again. She started drawing for Picture Post in our first year, and for Lilliput form the third issue- and has never stopped.”
Lilliput 1939 June Issue 24 p551
I could have scanned hundreds of examples, but Chris Mullen has far more than I would have scanned and he has a better biography too.
Visual Rants 