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George Loraine Stampa (1875-1951) Contributing to Punch from 1894, G L Stampa worked in the tradition of Charles Keene and Phil May, sharing their preference for the London streets, and making his name with cartoons and illustrations of urchins and their animal counterparts, mongrel dogs.
G L Stampa was born in Constantinople on 29 November 1875. His father, of Franco-Italian descent, was architect to the Sultan Abdul Hamid, and he was forced into leaving Turkey with his family by the political uprising of 1878. As a result, Stampa grew up at his mother’s former family home at Battlebarrow House, Appleby, in Westmoreland. He was educated at the local grammar school and, from the age of 11, at Bedford Modern School. He studied art at Heatherley’s (1892-93) and, as a contemporary of Heath Robinson and Lewis Baumer, at the Royal Academy Schools (1893-95).
He then shared a studio with Savile Lumley. Contributing to Punch from 1894, he worked in the tradition of Keene and May, and made his name with cartoons and illustrations of urchins. Equally important, if less well chronicled, was his role as illustrator to the Punch theatre column, ‘At the Play’, which he passed to Ronald Searle only in 1949. A versatile artist, who used a wide variety of media, he exhibited at the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours and the Royal Academy, and was a member of both the Savage Club and the Langham Sketching Club (being Chairman of the latter in 1914). (Sketches of members of the Langham Sketching Club are included here. He died on 26 May 1951.
