René Bull was born in Dublin on 11 December 1869, the eldest of four children of Bedford-born Cornelius Bull, owner of a firm of church furnishers, and his French wife, Gabrielle (née Joune). His younger brother was the pioneering chronophotographer, Lucien George Bull.
He was educated at Radford House, Coventry (including 1881), Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare (including 1884-85) and the Lycée Janson, Paris.
In about 1890, Bull went to Paris to study engineering, as an uncle of his was on the secretariat of the engineer, Ferdinand de Lesseps, he was offered a job on the building of the Suez Canal. However, fired by a meeting with the famous French cartoonist, Caran d'Ache, he turned this down in order to develop his own skills as a graphic draughtsman. In 1892, he produced the double-page comic, La peinture fin de siècle, while still in the French capital, and then returned home to Ireland, where he contributed to the Dublin journal, Freeman's Weekly.
Moving to London, Bull contributed to Illustrated Bits before meeting Clement Shorter, the editor of Pick-Me-Up, newly-launched in 1893; he drew wordless strip cartoons in the style of Caran d'Ache for that magazine (and so introduced the Caran d'Ache style into Britain). In the same year he married Katharine Shield in Hampstead, they had two daughters, but they divorced after three years.
Bull confirmed his talent as a comic draughtsman through a range of magazines, but especially a long series of 'inventions’, published in The Sketch between 1895 and 1918, which drew on his experience as an engineer and presaged the work of William Heath Robinson. He also drew advertisements, designed comic postcards and contributed to annuals. In 1898, he was a founder member of the London Sketch Club, where he became known as 'an inexhaustible raconteur, a musician, and wizard of ledger-de-main, especially with cards!' (David Cuppleditch, The London Sketch Club, Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1994, page 47). At this time, he was living at Sunnyside, St Mary's Grove, Gunnersbury, in west London.
In 1896, Bull began to develop a new strand to his talents by working as a 'special artist’ for Black & White. He made a name for himself by providing a visual report of several international conflicts, in photography and film as well as drawing. These conflicts include the Armenian massacres (1894-96), famine and frontier wars in India (1896-98), the Sudan campaign (1898, for which he was awarded a medal) and the Second Boer War (out of which he was invalided in 1900, and again awarded a medal).
Bull turned to book illustration for both children and adults in 1905, with La Fontaine's Fables (illustrated with C Moore Park) and Savile & Watson's Fate's Intruder. Early in the following decade, he capitalised on his first-hand knowledge of exotic settings by illustrating The Arabian Nights (1912) and The Rubdiyát of Omar Khayyám (1913). By 1908, he was living at 10 Palliser Court, Palliser Road, Baron's Court, where, as a model railway enthusiast, he had a track circuiting his dining room. By 1913, he had also acquired Darby Green Farm, Blackwater, Hampshire, and in later years this would become his home.
During the First World War, Bull served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (1916) and the Royal Flying Corps (1917). Applying his skills as an engineer, it was he who enabled machine guns to be fired through the propellers of fighter planes. His life of adventure extended into the early 1920s when he reported on the Graeco-Turkish War, and spent two nights in the hands of the Turks in Volos, before making his escape.
Between the wars, Bull continued to illustrate books with titles that include Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales (both published in 1928). In 1940, he entered service with the Air Ministry and undertook technical duties. However, two years later, on 14 March 1942, he died at home in Hampshire.
