Virgil Reilly
Virgil Reilly, was an Australian cartoonist, comic book artist and illustrator. In a long and varied career, he was one of Australia's most famous newspaper and magazine artists and a prolific comic-book illustrator. He was known as 'Virgil', the name he signed on his work. While working for Smith's Weekly during the inter-war years he became well known for his cartoons of glamorous and seductive young women that became known as 'Virgil's girls'. During World War II he continued to draw cartoons featuring sensual and assertive young women for the Sunday Telegraph and contributed cover art, patriotic cartoons and paintings for the Australian Women's Weekly. In the late-1940s and 1950s Reilly was a prolific and successful comic-book artist, known for his fictional creations such as 'Silver Flash' and the 'Rocket Squadron', as well as his depictions of actual naval battles.
Biography
Early life
Virgil Gavan Reilly was born on 29 November 1892 at Charlton in the mallee country of north-west Victoria, the son of John Gavan Reilly and Mayne, the second-born of five children in the family. His father was the local postmaster who also wrote poetry. In July 1895 John Reilly, by then living at Creswick in central Victoria, was declared to be insolvent, caused by the "continued illness of wife, illness and death in family, and pressure of creditors". By 1904 Virgil was being educated at South Melbourne College. Virgil's father later found work as a journalist.Virgil Reilly began to develop his artistic skills after he fractured his back. He "took up drawing" to relieve the boredom while he was recuperating in bed.
Staff and freelance jobs
Virgil Reilly's first staff position was with the Truth newspaper in Melbourne, owned and edited by John Norton. He answered the newspaper's advertisement "for an artist who could do likenesses", which essentially involved court work, sketching defendants and witnesses. Reilly worked for Truth for about two years, but he "eventually got sacked" because his drawings were "too refined" for Norton.From about 1910 Reilly worked as a commercial artist for a motion picture advertising firm in Melbourne. During that period he was a participant in the creation of cinema advertisements, featuring a combination of live-action and drawn animation. The animated sequences were some of the earliest examples of Australian animation films, producing "lightning sketches" by means of a stop-motion animation process. One surviving example from 1910 was an advertisement for the Collins Street draper, George's Fine Furs; live-action sequences showed models wearing the fur coats and hats, followed by animated sequences of the artist's hand creating, at speed, intricate drawings of women wearing the fashionable apparel.
Reilly contributed images to a short story entitled 'Good Doctor Haman', written by J. H. Monk, published on 1 July 1913 in the Sydney-based literary magazine, The Lone Hand. By 1914 Reilly was a member of the Victorian Artists' Society. At the Society's annual masquerade "revel" in June 1914, he attended in the costume of a "Futurist Pierrot".
A painting by Virgil Reilly was used for the cover of the 14 July 1915 "war issue" of The Sydney Mail. The image featured a cowering woman and a small child covered by the menacing shadow of an armed German officer wearing a spiked helmet. Another patriotic image by Reilly, of a soldier comforting a weeping woman, was published on the October 1915 cover of The Lone Hand.
In September 1915 the Alexandra Club in Melbourne, a private members club for women, launched a patriotic campaign to send twenty thousand billycans filled with donated gifts to the Australian troops serving overseas during World War I. The idea behind the 'Christmas billies' scheme was that the contents of each billy would be surprise Christmas gifts for the recipients at the front. The billycans were sold for sixpence, to be packed with gifts and returned to the Alexandra Club for despatch to the soldiers. Each of the billycans had a khaki label on which was printed a cartoon by the "young Melbourne artist named Virgil". The cartoon depicted a kangaroo striking a Turkish soldier with its tail, on a background of a map of the Gallipoli peninsula, with text reading "This bit of the world belongs to us!". Reilly also contributed drawings for the printed programs of charity events in Melbourne during the war-years.
From early in his career Reilly signed his artworks with a distinctive signature, 'Virgil'. The artist was a man of short stature; in later life he referred to himself as "one of Sydney’s oldest leprechauns".
To Sydney
In about 1917 Reilly was persuaded to relocate to Sydney by the journalist Roy Evans, who at that time was working for the theatrical firm of J. and N. Tait. In Sydney Reilly was engaged by Fordyce Wheeler, the advertising manager of Sun Newspapers Ltd. Wheeler took an innovative approach to his role and actively encouraged "pictorial and black and white work" in advertisements. Wheeler offered Reilly a job "doing moving picture work"; during the period from about 1918 to 1920 Reilly was employed to draw advertising graphics for motion picture releases. His images advertising feature films were published in both The Sun newspaper in Sydney and The Herald in Melbourne.While he was working for Wheeler, Reilly met a photographer named Hugh Williamson. Williamson invited Reilly to his home at Richmond, west of Sydney at the foot of the Blue Mountains, where Reilly met Williamson's younger sister, Dorothy. Reilly and Dorothy Josephine Williamson, aged 17 years, were married in April 1918 in Sydney. It was remarked in a report of the marriage that "the bridegroom is well known in Sydney as a cartoonist and an exponent of black and white work". The couple had four children, all boys, born between 1920 and 1926.
During the period working for The Sun, Reilly received a salary of £5 a week. At this time he also rented a studio in Burdekin House in Macquarie Street for the purpose of doing commissioned portraits.
In December 1924 Reilly lodged a patent in the United States Patent Office for an "optical apparatus for use in the hand reproduction of drawings, photographs, and other illustrations or designs".
''Smith's Weekly''
From about January 1924 Reilly began to contribute drawings to Smith's Weekly, the independent Sydney tabloid newspaper which gave prominence to cartoons and illustrations in its pages. During most of 1924 his contributions consisted of drawings to illustrate articles, often with dramatic themes with similarities to his motion picture advertising work. Reilly was also creating illustrations for advertisements during this period.From the beginning of 1925 Reilly's contributions to Smith's Weekly began to increase in both the number and variety of his drawings, an indication he had been employed as a staff artist by that stage. In the first edition of Smith's Weekly for 1925, four of his drawings were published, including two article illustrations and a Dad and Dave cartoon. The fourth drawing to be included in the issue of 3 January 1925 was an early example of what was to become Reilly's trademark style for the next eighteen years. The drawing is a cartoon depicting a boss and stylish young woman, newly employed as a typist: "Boss : 'Am I too fast for you?'; New Typiste: 'Good heavens, no! My last employer used to dictate with me sitting on his knee'".
In a 1972 interview Reilly spoke of Smith's Weekly as "the great newspaper university" where he "learned about life". During 1925 Virgil Reilly's drawings published in Smith's Weekly included illustrations for articles, as well as portraits and cartoons on a number of subjects. Increasingly interspersed amongst his contributions were cartoons featuring young women, a theme that progressively predominated in his illustrations for Smith's.
With his drawings of sultry young women, Reilly had found his niche. By 1926 they represented the majority of his contributions. By the late 1920s Reilly's series of erotically-charged cartoons of confident and sensual young women in Smith's Weekly began to be known as 'Virgil's girls'. Reilly's work in this mode has been described as "brisk, detailed pen drawings that included one or two of his seductive 'flappers' cheerfully flirting or discussing divorce". His popular depictions of self-assured and saucy young women were the Australian cultural parallels of the American Gibson Girls and the later Petty Girls. Reilly became one of Australia's best-known newspaper artists, due primarily to the popularity of his 'Virgil girl' images. In 1933, during divorce proceedings, Reilly stated that his wife Dorothy had been the inspiration for his drawings and "almost invariably was his model".
From February 1928 Reilly began a collaboration with poet and journalist Kenneth Slessor, who also worked for Smith's Weekly, with Reilly's drawings presented alongside Slessor's poetry. The partnership between Slessor and Reilly was maintained on a semi-regular basis until November 1933. Many of Slessor's poems were social observations with a focus on women, which was a perfect fit with Reilly's preferred output during that period. The poem 'The Green Rolls Royce', published in August 1928, was the first in a series under the title of 'Darlinghurst Nights'. The series' title was discontinued after October 1928, though two poems during October 1930 bore the collective title of 'New Darlinghurst Nights'. Forty-one of Slessor's poems, previously published in Smith's Weekly between 1928 and 1931, each with Reilly's original illustrations, were collected in a single volume called Darlinghurst Nights, published in 1931 by Frank C. Johnson.
Reilly also occasionally drew cartoons of political and social criticism for Smith's. In July 1931, at the height of the Great Depression, he drew a cartoon critical of Jack Lang, Premier of New South Wales. An article in March 1933 reporting on the persecution of Jews in the early months of Nazi Germany incorporated an illustration by Reilly, depicting a German soldier seated on a large helmet, with crushed Jewish corpses beneath. In May 1934 Reilly drew a cartoon satirising the British Royal family.
In January 1931 Virgil Reilly, of 66 Boronia Road, Bellevue Hill, initiated bankruptcy proceedings and all persons having claims against him were required to provide proof of the debt. Dividends of one shilling in the pound were declared at various intervals over the next several years, payable through an appointed Trustee's office. It was asserted in 1933 that Reilly's financial problems had arisen from his purchase of a total of nine motor vehicles in the space of ten years. By about 1933 Reilly was receiving a salary of £26 a week from Smith's Weekly, but at that time he had debts amounting to £3,600 "due to bad investments" and his salary "was taken and instalments paid each week off his debts". He claimed that sometimes all that remained of his wages was nine shillings a week. In addition to his salaried work with Smith's Weekly, Reilly also occasionally took on freelance work such as advertising; under the deed of arrangement his creditors had claims to a substantial proportion of his salary, but "they had agreed not to take any outside money that he earns".
In late 1933 Virgil and Dorothy Reilly went through divorce proceedings, the details of which were published in various newspapers. In about May 1933 Dorothy had formed a relationship with Fordyce Wheeler, the 64-year-old advertising manager and a director of Sun Newspapers Ltd. Dorothy had met Wheeler through her husband. On July 7, after the affair had become known to him, Reilly followed his wife to Wheeler's home in Edgecliffe and in company with three other persons, watched the house all night until they saw Mrs. Reilly emerge at eight o'clock the next morning. Reilly petitioned for divorce on the ground of adultery, with Wheeler named as the co-respondent, and the matter came before the Divorce Court on 19 December 1933. Justice Boyce accepted the evidence that adultery had occurred and dismissed Dorothy's cross-petition alleging her husband's "cruelty and habitual drunkenness". Boyce granted a decree nisi and ordered the co-respondent Wheeler to pay the costs of the petition. By consent between the parties, guardians were appointed for the four children of the marriage, with "the parents to have reasonable equal access, to be arranged by the guardians". The counsel for Mrs. Reilly requested that the period for making the divorce absolute be shortened to three months, stating "that Wheeler desired to marry" his client, but the judge refused the request.
In September 1934 Reilly became engaged to Ruth 'Petah' King, a business-woman with a hosiery and lingerie shop in the Imperial Arcade. The couple married in January 1935 in Sydney.
In December 1934 Reilly participated in the inaugural exhibition by the Painter-Etchers and Graphic Art Society.
In September 1936 a film featuring Virgil Reilly at work, called 'How Virgil Draws Those Girls', was shown at the Sydney State Theatrette. The short feature, which included live-action and animated sequences, showed Reilly at his drawing-board, "sketching several of the types of Australian girls that made him famous"; the subject of his drawing "springs miraculously to life" and the girl, in human form, walks across the screen.