George Cooke’s Caricatures of the Great Music Hall Performers
George Cooke (1881-1950) was a commercial artist and caricaturist, originally from Yorkshire, who specialised in drawing Edwardian music hall and variety performers and creating illustrated publicity material for performers, including many postcards. He compiled his caricatures in a series of hand-assembled albums, each dedicated to a specific theatre venue. The Victoria & Albert Museum has many of the caricatures from these albums in their collection, which can also be viewed online.
George Cooke worked first in Hanley, Staffordshire (now part of Stoke-on-Trent), where he sketched performers at the Grand Theatre of Varieties. He later moved to Blackpool, where he continued his work at the Palace Theatre. By 1917, he had relocated to London, where he established Cooke’s Publicity Agency, which among other things produced posters for the Children’s Jewel Fund, a philanthropic initiative created to combat child mortality.
