Lewis Baumer

Baumer was a caricaturist who worked for more than 50 years for the British magazine Punch, but also worked for the London Magazine, The Tatler, The Idler, The Bystander, and The Strand Magazine, among others. Beside this he was known as a book illustrator. Baumer worked in oils, watercolors, pen and ink, was an accomplished etcher, and in later life concentrated on painting and portraiture, especially of children. A fellow student at St John’s Wood Art School was Reginald Higgins, a fellow competitor in the Painting, Drawings And Water Colors section at the 1928 Olympics.

Only two of Baumer’s nine submitted drawings or caricatures could be verified. These are The Novice and The Girl who Skated on the Curling Rink, both for the 1932 art competitions. The former is originally captioned The novice who thought she could slacken her speed with her skiing sticks and found it was possible, drawn in ink measuring 33 x 33 cm. This title is an exhaustive description of this cartoon. The Girl Who Skated on the Curling Rink, actually entitled The Girl Who Was Torn to Pieces by Wild Scotsmen, was an illustration for a poem by Reginald Arkell published in 1929 in his book “Winter Sportings”.