A selection of postcards showing cartoons by Edmund Fuller.
Edmund G Fuller (1858-1940) was a British artist and illustrator. On his death in 1940, Fuller was described as “painter, architect, comic artist and metal worker” and he distinguished himself in all these disciplines, but it was as a marine artist and member of the St Ives Arts Club that he achieved the highest renown.
The son of a military father, Fuller was born in Brompton, London and educated at Sandhurst. He married Emma Wing, a Suffolk girl, in 1882 and they lived initially in London. He first started exhibiting in 1888. He and his wife moved to St Ives in 1892, where they took part in the Carnival Masquerade held that March. He took a studio on the harbour beach, which was to be his workplace throughout his time in St Ives. This was a large space, which enabled him to have a fine lathe and carpenter’s bench at one end, where he did his metal working, and his easels, paints and canvases by the window overlooking the harbour at the other.
Fuller was one of the first St Ives artists to exhibit pure seascapes at the Royal Academy. As early as 1894, a work simply called Surf was illustrated as a Picture of the Year and a number of Fuller’s RA exhibits later in the decade, such as Sun-Kissed Foam (RA 1899) were pure seascapes of huge dimensions.
Fuller is always mentioned as being a dapper little man of distinguished appearance, invariably wearing riding breeches, a corduroy coat and a Stetson hat - see PC_Comic_EGFuller02 below. In 1913, he decided to move back into central St Ives. During the War, he worked in munitions and his paintings are rarely mentioned after the War, although he was represented in the Plymouth exhibitions of 1917 and 1922 and was a founder member of the New Print Society which had its inaugural exhibition at Lanham’s Galleries in 1923. In 1920, he was said to be busy illustrating a book on the Union Castle Line and its work during the war, but this does not appear to have come to fruition. He seems to have left St Ives in the mid-1920s and he spent his last years at Portishead, near Bristol.
[For a fuller version of this biography see Messum’s Fine Art website.]
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