I went there wanting to do cartoons.” Briggs remembers the interviewer at Wimbledon College of Art nearly exploding when he expressed this ambition. “I never thought about being a gold-framed gallery artist and was only pushed into painting when I went to art school.
Raymond Briggs related an early experience of academy snobbery in a 2004 Guardian interview:
His interest in commercial art was reportedly met with disdain by his instructors. At the age of 15, young Raymond decided to leave school and join the local Wimbledon Art College and later London’s Slade School of Fine Art. His final book, Time for Lights Out, is a collection of poems, sketches and observations about old age and death, and was published in 2019.Born January 18, 1934, in Wimbledon Park, Surrey (now part of London), Briggs knew fairly early in life that art would be his vocation. The producer John Coates turned his most famous work, The Snowman, into a much-loved animation which was first broadcast by Channel 4 on Boxing Day 1982 and has been screened by the broadcaster every Christmas since.Ĭoates also produced the 1986 feature film adaptation of When The Wind Blows, directed by Jimmy Murakami, about a rural English couple’s attempt to survive a nearby nuclear attack.īriggs’ 1998 graphic novel Ethel & Ernest, based on the real experiences of his milkman father and lady’s maid mother, was also adapted by Coates into an animated feature film in 2016.
Many of his works, which were largely based on themes of love and loss, have been adapted into films, plays and TV animations. The author and illustrator Raymond Briggs, best known for his 1978 work The Snowman, passed away yesterday, August 9, aged 88.īriggs produced a wealth of books including an illustrated book of nursery rhymes, The Mother Goose Treasury (1966), Father Christmas (1973), Father Christmas Goes on Holiday (1975), Fungus the Bogeyman (1977), When the Wind Blows (1982) and The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman (1984).
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