George Ernest Studdy

Animator, Artist, Cartoonist, commercial artist

23/06/1878

25/07/1948

Devonport, Devon, England, UK

Biography

George Studdy is an early British print cartoonist, commercial artist, and animator known for being the creator of Bonzo the Dog series in the 1920s.

Studdy attended The Heatherley School of Fine Art to study drawing and painting (Cook 32; Fitzpatrick). He also spent one term at Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting to study animal anatomy and drawing (Fitzpatrick). Meanwhile, Studdy worked in a studio shared with his friends, where he sold drawings, including commissions by newspapers and magazines to draw the South African War (Ibid.).

A number of publications found interest in his works, including Boy’s Own in 1900, Comic Cuts, the first to buy Studdy’s work regularly; Pick-Me-Up, and The Big Budget Comic in 1902 (Ibid.). Studdy became an active member of the London Sketch Club in 1905 and went on to become its president in 1921 (Cook 32).

From that year onward until the outbreak of the First World War, Studdy was a regular contributor to The Graphic, Printer’s Pie, Winter’s Pie, The Bystander, The Tatler, and The Sketch, while serving as a tutor at Percy Bradshaw’s Press Art School at Forest Hill, London (Cook 31; Fitzpatrick). During the First World War, Studdy was commissioned to make a series of three short cartoon films named “Studdy’s War Studies,” but he soon returned to production of illustrations for magazines and newspapers after the war ended (Fitzpatrick).

Inspired by the image of a dog first proposed by Studdy himself, a new comic figure, originally the Studdy Dog but later known as Bonzo, was created in 1921. Bonzo appeared in all sorts of advertisements, including but not limited to tobacco, cars, soap, polish, confectionery, pickles, neon signs, and a total of 26 episodes in a series released by New Era Films in 1924 (Ibid.). Receiving extravagant international popularity, the animated series was produced by a group of 10 artists under the supervision of Studdy in an industrial manner as a conscious response to the dominance of American animation, most notably the cartoon character Felix the Cat (Cook 162, 212).

Following the success of Bonzo, Studdy’s later works included humorous seaside postcards (Fitzpatrick). He worked as a draughtsman at the Royal Naval Dockyards at Portsmouth during the Second World War (Ibid.). As the war ended, Studdy was diagnosed with lung cancer due to years of smoking, and he died from it soon after, in 1948 (Ibid.).

References:

Cook, Malcolm. Early British Animation : From Page and Stage to Cinema Screens. 1st ed. 2018., Springer International Publishing, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73429-3.

Fitzpatrick, Richard. “Studdy, George Ernest (1878–1948), illustrator and cartoonist.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. May 09, 2018. Oxford University Press. Date of access 27 Apr. 2025, <https://www-oxforddnb-com.myaccess.library.utoronto.ca/view/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-58892>