Robin Jacques was born in Chelsea, London on 27 March 1920 and educated at the Royal Masonic Schools, Bushey, Hertfordshire. Self-taught as an artist, he worked as an apprentice to a firm of commercial artists before serving in Second World War, first as a gunner in the Royal Engineers, and later as a cartographer. In quiet moments, he began to combine his love of literature with his artistic talents by attempting to illustrate the books he carried with him and, on leave in London in 1944, he offered his services to the Editor of the Radio Times. Regular contributions followed over many years to both the Radio Times and the Listener, establishing him as a distinct talent and the heir to Eric Fraser. Jacques also lectured at Brighton School of Art (1947-8) and acted as art editor for the Strand magazine.
He proved an ideal illustrator of both nineteenth-century fiction and modern classics, such as Joyce’s Dubliners (1954), but worked more extensively on children’s books in a long collaboration with Ruth Manning-Sanders (1962-84).
Jacques communicated some of his knowledge and experience of illustration in Illustrators at Work (1963) and later returned to teach at Harrow School of Art (1977-9) and Canterbury College of Art (1979). Though he found the new generation of students to be ‘friendly’ and ‘open-hearted’, he felt that it did not share the love of literature and care for ‘painstaking craftsmanship' which were so vital to his form of illustration. The collapse of the Listener and the ruin of the Radio Times further indicated declining standards.
Though Jacques abandoned wood-engraving early in his studies, his meticulous pen work continued to betray the influence of a tradition of 'cut' illustration. Shading was accomplished by means of parallel lines or strict, stylised cross-hatching; outlines had an unburdensome presence; elegance and decorum inhabited the most grotesque of subjects; colour enlivened without intrusion. And like many of the best of the Victorian illustrators, he worked from memory. In the words of Rufus Segar, 'all the imagery is internal, knowledge stored, no resource to reference or direct observation.’
