Sue Macartney-Snape
Sue Macartney-Snape is a Tanzanian-born caricaturist who emigrated to the United Kingdom via Australia. She is best known for her illustrations for The Telegraph's Social Stereotypes column, written by Victoria Mather, which ran for fourteen years. Macartney-Snape's works have been compared by Nicholas Foulkes to P G Wodehouse, Beryl Cook, Henry Mayo Bateman and Osbert Lancaster. She was the recipient of the Pont Award in 2004.
Early life
Her father was born in 1896, and fought in the First World War. He met Macartney-Snape's much younger mother due to a shared interest in hay; he left his then wife and the new couple travelled to Tanzania to establish a family there. Her mother was a florist who supplied arrangements to hotels in Daar-es-Salaam, and her younger brother Tim Macartney-Snape was the first Australian to summit Everest. After independence, the family moved to Australia.Career
Initially trained as a botanical artist, Macartney-Snape's first exhibition of caricatures was held in Melbourne; she subsequently emigrated to the United Kingdom. An early venture was The Upper Crust Calendar, which was a calendar featuring Macartney-Snape's caricatures which was popular with the British upper-classes and sold in Harrods and at the General Trading Company in 1985. In 1993 several of her works were used by English author Jilly Cooper to structure the novella Araminta's Wedding, which satirised upper-class life and inheritance. She has also created new cover illustrations for the novels of Anthony Powell.Best known for her illustrations for The Telegraph's Social Stereotypes column, written by Victoria Mather, which ran for fourteen years. Several volumes of collated columns were published as stand alone volumes, the first of which was 1996's Absolutely Typical. Ben Dowell, reviewing the volume for the Manchester Evening News, described the illustrations as "cruel" and criticised how the writing "perpetuated social divisions". This was followed by Absolutely Typical Too in 1997, which The Independent reviewed as "unfunny". In contrast The Grimsby Evening Telegraph reviewed the volume as one "that turns character assassination into an art form".