Henry Mayo Bateman was born in Sutton Forest, New South Wales (now Australia), on 15 February 1887 and immigrated to England in 1888, when his family returned to London. He studied at Westminster School of Art and Goldsmiths' College, London. He contributed to The Tatler and Punch, created the popular cartoon series, 'The Man Who...', becoming the highest paid cartoonoist in Britain. He later devoted himself to painting and designed for the Minstry of Health. Henry Mayo Bateman died in Mġarr, Gozo, Malta on 11 February 1970.
Cartoonist and caricaturist Henry Mayo Bateman was born on 15 February 1887 in Sutton Forest, in the Colony of New South Wales (now Australia), to Henry Charles Bateman, a farmer turned export packager, and Rose Mayo. In 1888 the family returned to England and settled in Lambeth, London. Educated at Forest Hill House, Bateman was drawing for publication by his early teens. Encouraged by the cartoonist Phil May, he left school at 16 to study at Westminster School of Art and then at Goldsmiths' College, New Cross and, on the advice of John Hassall, he worked from 1904-07 in the Kensington studio of Charles van Havermaet. He contributed to The Tatler magazine from 1904. In 1911 he held his first solo exhibition, Original Drawings: Satires and Caricatures, at the Brook Street Art Gallery, London.
In 1908 Bateman suffered a nervous breakdown, linked to his choosing between cartooning and a career as a 'serious' painter. He emerged with a new style, drawing people as they felt rather than as they looked. In his words, he 'went mad on paper'. His early theatrical caricatures for The Bystander and The Sketch show the influence of Sidney Sime and Henry Ospovat. During the First World War Bateman enlisted in the London Regiment, but was discharged in 1915 with rheumatic fever. Withdrawing to a remote inn on Dartmoor, he began publishing wordless strip cartoons in 1916. Their model was Caran d'Ache, whom he later called 'the most trenchant and illustrious' of comic strip designers (Bateman, 1933 hmbateman.com). The first of these strips, The Boy Who Breathed on the Glass in the British Museum, appeared in the satirical magazine Punch in October 1916. RGG Price argued that Bateman 'probably did more than anyone' to show how expressive individual pen and ink lines could be (Price, 1957, quoted in Spartacus Educational), while the author, GK Chesterton, called him 'the Master of Wild Exactitude' (D. Willis, 2007). The contemporary art critic Tom Lubbock identified in The New Word in Golf dynamic forms 'borrowed from Futurism and Vorticism' (Lubbock, 2010). A 1930 newspaper profile listed him among Australian-born black-and-white artists (Nottingham Evening Post, 1930).
Postwar Bateman held solo exhibitions at the prestigous Leicester Galleries, London, in 1919 and 1921. In the same year The Tatler published The Guardsman Who Dropped It, launching his celebrated series The Man Who..., in which a social gaffe provokes outrage, as in The Man Who Lit His Cigar Before the Royal Toast. In 1925 his Colonels, satirising retired army officers, was exhibited at the Sporting Gallery, London (D. Willis, 2007); in 1926 60 drawings were shown at Worthing Public Art Gallery. That year he married Brenda Mary Collison Weir, with whom he had two daughters, Diana and Monica; the family lived at Reigate Heath, Surrey.
Bateman became the highest paid cartoonist in Britain and also produced advertising for notable clients, including Guinness, Shell, Lucky Strike and Moss Bros. At the London Sketch Club his circle included W. Heath Robinson and Fougasse. During the 1930s he increasingly turned from humorous work to painting, exhibiting Paintings of Spain at the Leicester Galleries in 1936. During the Second World War he designed posters for the Ministry of Health campaign Coughs and Sneezes Spread Diseases (1942). Bateman separated from his wife in 1947 and in 1953 moved to Brook Cottage, Sampford Courtenay, Devon. A retrospective was held at the Fine Art Society, London, in 1962 and he first visited the Maltese islands in 1965; from 1966 lived at the Royal Lady Hotel in Għajnsielem, Gozo, overlooking Mġarr harbour, painting local scenes (Sagona, 2019). Writing in The Artist in his eighties, he remarked that 'it is always better to travel hopefully than to arrive' (Willis, The Artist, 2012).
Henry Mayo Bateman died in Mġarr, Gozo, Malta, on 11 February 1970, aged 82. His works are held in UK public collections including the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the London Transport Museum, the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Portrait Gallery, the Science Museum Group, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Wellcome Collection. His published books include Burlesques (1916), A Book of Drawings (1921), More Drawings (1922), Suburbia (1922), Adventures at Golf (1923), A Mixture (1924), Colonels (1925), The Art of Drawing (1926), Rebound (1927), Brought Forward (1931), The Possibilities of a Vacuum Cleaner (1931), Considered Trifles (1934), the autobiography H.M. Bateman by Himself (1937) and the fishing memoir The Evening Rise (1960). Posthumous exhibitions include Caricatures by H.M. Bateman at the Leicester Galleries (1974), centenary exhibitions at the Royal Festival Hall and the National Theatre (1987), H.M. Bateman: The Man Who Went Mad on Paper at the Cartoon Museum and H.M. Bateman: The Malta Years at Abbott and Holder (both 2012), and H.M. Bateman: The Man Who... at Chris Beetles Gallery (2023-24), all in London.
Michal Mel