Graham Percy was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 7 June 1938. Trained initially at Elam School of Fine Arts, Auckland and at the Royal College of Art, London, following his migration to England, he became a distinguished designer and children’s book illustrator. His more than 100 illustrated books included classics such as The Wind in the Willows, Aesop’s Fables, Arabian Nights and Alison Uttley’s Sam Pig stories. Graham Percy died in Sutton, Surrey, England on 4 January 2008.
Illustrator Graham Percy was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on 7 June 1938. He grew up in Taranaki, Warkworth, and Auckland, where he later studied at Elam School of Fine Arts. He graduated in 1959 and began his career in New Zealand as an illustrator, designer and artist during a strong period in the history of the New Zealand Journal. Percy contributed important work to the magazine in the early 1960s, and also designed New Zealand book covers and award-winning Crown Lynn crockery. These early commissions suggest the range that would mark his later career: fluent drawing, graphic clarity, a feeling for object and page design, and an ability to adapt imagery to different audiences and formats.
In 1964 Percy won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London, England where he studied graphics. The move proved decisive. After completing his studies, he established himself in London as a graphic designer, freelance artist and illustrator. Although he became best known for children’s books, his training as a typographer remained visible in his early British work, notably his lively design for Stanley Morison’s Splendour of Ornament, issued by the Royal College of Art’s Lion and Unicorn Press in 1968. During these years he also worked for advertising agencies and magazines, including producing regular small drawings for Queen. He was represented by Artist Partners and gradually moved towards the field in which he would make his reputation: illustrated books for children. In the early 1970s he spent much of his time in Hungary working on the design of Hugo the Hippo, a full-length animated film with a soundtrack by the Osmonds. While in Hungary he met the photographer Mari Mahr, whom he married in 1977. Percy lived in London from the early 1960s, first in a shared household in Wimbledon and later, with Mahr, near Wimbledon Common.
As an illustrator, Percy was admired for the intellectual discipline behind his apparently accessible images. Peter Campbell described him as a ‘cerebral illustrator’, meaning that his pictures were planned and resolved rather than simply dashed off (Campbell 2008). His mature work, often made in coloured pencil, combined precision with humour and warmth. Reviewers repeatedly noticed his talent for animal characters. In Captain Cat and the Carol Singers (1986), his pastel drawings were praised for their liveliness and comic character; in Selina Hastings’s Reynard the Fox (1993), his animals were considered almost human in their expressiveness. Brian Alderson also singled out Percy’s control of pacing and visual sequence in his retellings of fables, observing that the pictures could become almost cinematic when Percy was responsible for both text and image (Alderson 1993, p. 68). Percy illustrated more than 100 books, including board books, pop-up books and pull-tab books. His best-known children’s projects included Gerald Durrell’s The Fantastic Flying Journey (1987), Jeremy Lloyd’s The Woodland Gospels (1984) and Captain Cat and the Carol Singers (1986), editions of Aesop’s Fables, Tales from the Arabian Nights (1994), Alison Uttley’s Sam Pig stories (1988–89), and Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows (1991). His Wind in the Willows inevitably invited comparison with E. H. Shepard’s canonical illustrations, but Alderson described Percy’s pastoral images as attractive, warm and simple, and considered them in keeping with the demands of Grahame’s story (Alderson 1992, p. 91). His work on the Sam Pig books was also notable for its care: the publishers stressed the time he spent making Sam, Brock the Badger and their world consistent with Uttley’s original creation.
Children’s publishing, however, was only one part of Percy’s practice. His adult picture book, Arthouse (1994) used the format of room interiors to parody, celebrate and test the visual languages of artists he admired. In his later private drawings he often returned to black and white, producing intricate works that explored artistic identity, memory and New Zealand-ness from the position of an expatriate. Imagined Histories, prompted by time spent at the Scottish arts centre, Crear, placed composers associated with the centre into improbable encounters with the surrounding landscape. Other late drawings included anthropomorphic kiwis moving through different places and periods, and the darker series The Alchemical Allotment (2005).
Graham Percy died in Sutton, Surrey, England on 4 January 2008. After his death, his work was reassessed in New Zealand in 2011 through A Micronaut in the Wide World: The Imaginative Life and Times of Graham Percy, curated by Gregory O’Brien, in association with City Gallery Wellington and Gus Fisher Gallery. The exhibition toured widely, bringing together more than 60 works, including original book illustrations and large drawings. His work is not currently represented in UK public collections.
Irene Iacono
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Graham Percy]
Publications related to [Graham Percy] in the Ben Uri Library