Harold Hoar [Acanthus]

About

Frank Hoar was born in India in 1909. He attended Plymouth College, Devon, and, at the age of fifteen, won a scholarship to the Bartlett College of Architecture, London University, where he trained under Sir Albert Richardson. While he was learning life drawing at the Slade School of Fine Art his caricatures attracted the attention of the head, Professor Tonks, who encouraged him to draw the entire tutorial staff. In 1933 Hoar won a Royal Institute of British Architects studentship, and in 1936 he was joint winner of an architectural competition for developing Gatwick Airport. He became a greatly respected town-planning consultant, and a Fellow of the RIBA.

Hoar's cartoons were published first in London Opinion, then in Punch. During the Second World War he worked in the Rescue Service during the Blitz. Some of his best cartoon work was for Building (from 1960), and for the Sunday Telegraph (to which he contributed pocket cartoons), but he also drew for Men Only, Builder and other publications. An accomplished draughtsman who worked mostly in black and white using Perry 606 or Gillott 303 nibs, Price wrote of his work for Punch that "he could make a building funny in itself, and his precision made a point of rest in the paper when other drawings were less determinate in outline." Hoar died after a long illness on 3 October 1976. His obituary in The Times recalled his "clarity of line, superb perspective and a puckish sense of fun."

• The Times, 7 October 1976; p.21, "Dr H. Frank Hoar."
• Mark Bryant Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Cartoonists and Caricaturists (Ashgate, Aldershot, 2000), p.112.

Holdings

Description

1 unaccessioned Punch original
Prism: BBC cuttings

Date range

60s

Number

1

Publication

Punch, Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph