PAPAS, William (1927 – 2000)
Northwards
year unknown
watercolour on paper
51 x 41 cm
BIOGRAPHY
William ‘Bill’ Papas was a political cartoonist and caricaturist, book author and illustrator, and watercolourist. In the 1960s and 1970s he worked for The Guardian, The Sunday Times and Punch.
Papas was born in Ermelo in the Union of South Africa (the historical predecessor to the present-day Republic of South Africa) and was educated at Pretoria Boys’ High School. His father, Kostas Papas, was a Greek immigrant.
At the age of 15, he ran away from home to join the South African Air Force, and flew coastal missions as a tail gunner during the Second World War. He later studied art at Johannesburg Art School, then at Beckenham School of Art in Kent and at St Martin’s in London.
His first published cartoon appeared in the Cape Times in 1951, and his first illustrated book, Under the Table Cloth, was published in 1952. He later freelanced in Johannesburg as artist-cum-reporter, notably covering Nelson Mandela’s treason trial in 1958.
In 1959, he returned to Britain with his family and joined the staff of The Guardian as a political cartoonist. He also drew comic strips and produced pictorial reports, covering, for example, Cyprus in 1965 and the Six-Day War (also known as the Third Arab-Israeli War) in 1967. Between 1964 and 1972, he also produced cartoons for the Sunday Times and Punch.
In this period, he also began illustrating books for both children and adults in association with Oxford University Press. As an illustrator, he worked mostly in pen and ink.
He later lived in Greece, Geneva and Oregon, where he also ran his own art gallery and drew an evocative series of pen-and-ink watercolour pictures of American cities, later published as Papas’ America and Papas’ Portland, among others.
Papas died at Hotnarko Lake, British Columbia, following a flying accident.
Examples of his work are held in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Centre for the Study of Cartoons at Charicature at the University of Kent, the Vorres Museum (Athens), and the Old City Museum (Jerusalem), among others.