Barry Fantoni was born in London on 28 February 1940, the son of Peter Fantoni, an Italian-born painter, and Sarah Deverell, a Jewish musician of French and Dutch descent. Associated with Private Eye from 1963, he also worked for The Times, The Listener and the Radio Times</em>, wrote for television, and pursued painting, jazz, poetry, theatre and fiction. Barry Fantoni died in Turin, Italy on 20 May 2025.
Cartoonist, illustrator and writer Barry Fantoni was born in Epping, Essex, England on 28 February 1940, the son of Peter Fantoni, an Italian-born painter, and Sarah Deverell, a Jewish musician of French and Dutch descent. He grew up in south London and was educated at Archbishop Temple School, before winning a scholarship to Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts, where he enrolled shortly before his fifteenth birthday. Camberwell exposed him not only to painting, but also to jazz, theatre and film, and he formed the school’s first jazz group, a film society and a drama group. He was expelled in 1958, after a series of misdemeanours, but continued his studies at the Slade School of Fine Art, University of London, and began working as a painter.
Fantoni first came to public attention in 1963 with a provocative pop-art painting of the Duke of Edinburgh in his underwear, shown at the Woodstock Gallery in London. The large image showed the Duke as a paper-doll-like figure, surrounded by objects associated with his public roles. The attention it attracted helped bring Fantoni to the notice of Richard Ingrams, one of the founders of the satrirical publication, Private Eye. In the same year Fantoni had his first cartoon published in the magazine, beginning a long association as cartoonist, illustrator, columnist and member of the jokes team. He contributed to almost every issue over a career of nearly five decades and helped create several of the magazine’s enduring comic voices. During the 1960s Fantoni became closely associated with the culture of ‘Swinging London’. He wrote scripts for the BBC’s satirical programme, 'That Was The Week That Was', and in 1966 presented the BBC music and fashion programme, 'A Whole Scene Going On', where the model, Twiggy, made her first television appearance. The programme attracted large audiences and Fantoni was voted Television Personality of the Year. His circle included musicians and artists such as Ray Davies, Paul McCartney, Pete Townshend, Marianne Faithfull and Ralph Steadman, while his work moved easily between television, music, illustration, satire and painting. His artwork was exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts, the V&A and the National Portrait Gallery, among other venues.
As a cartoonist and illustrator, Fantoni developed a deliberately economical graphic language, using compact, rough-edged cartoons and pop-inflected caricatures that contrasted with his strong academic training as a draughtsman. His work for Private Eye combined image-making with comic invention: alongside cartoons and covers, he contributed to recurring satirical personae and formats including E. J. Thribb, Sylvie Krin, Old Jewett, Neasden FC and, later, Scenes You Seldom See. His caricatures also appeared in The Listener, Radio Times, The Sunday Times and Cosmopolitan, where he portrayed comedians, broadcasters, politicians and businessmen who had become part of Britain’s expanding media culture. The National Portrait Gallery later noted that these works reflected a moment when illustration still offered a powerful alternative to photographic portraiture: Fantoni’s caricatures subtly exaggerated facial features while keeping closely to the sitter’s appearance. Some were produced rapidly from publicity photographs, often to tight publication deadlines. He drew for The Listener (1968–89) and for Radio Times, was art critic of The Times from 1973–77, record reviewer for Punch in 1976–77, and Diary cartoonist of The Times from 1983–91.
Fantoni’s creative life extended well beyond cartooning. He was a jazz musician, poet, playwright, broadcaster, actor and novelist. He played several instruments and, in 1987, recorded The Cantor’s Crucifixion, a cantata on a Jewish theme inspired by the figure of a cantor in Auschwitz. The work reflected his complex religious and cultural inheritance, as the son of an Italian Catholic father and Jewish mother, and his attempt to reconnect with his Jewish roots. He also formed Barry Fantoni’s Jazz Circus in 1990, wrote detective novels, and created the one-man show From the Dragon’s Mouth. His first play, Modigliani, My Love, opened in Paris in 1999. Although best known publicly for Private Eye, Fantoni described poetry as central to his creative life and said that cartooning was not the work by which he most wished to be remembered (Burrell 2025).
After leaving Private Eye in 2010, he moved first to Calais, France, where he wrote Harry Lipkin, PI, a comic detective novel about an elderly Jewish private investigator, inspired partly by residents he had met at Nightingale House Jewish care home in Clapham, southwest London, where his mother spent her final months. In 2012 he founded Depechism, an art movement based on the principle of speed, in which works were completed within a strict time limit determined by the size of the canvas. In 2016 Fantoni moved to Turin, Italy, seeking a closer connection with his Italian roots. There he continued to write and paint, publishing the memoirs A Whole Scene Going On in 2019 and Breasts As Apples in 2023, as well as poems and short plays. Barry Fantoni died in Turin, Italy on 20 May 2025. In the UK public domain his work is represented in the collections of the British Cartoon Archive, British Museum, National Portrait Gallery and Victoria and Albert Museum.
Irene Iacono
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Barry Fantoni]
Publications related to [Barry Fantoni] in the Ben Uri Library