cartoonist and illustrator, was born in Sydney on 15 March 1879 (according to David Cook: Alec C. Chisholm says he was a New Zealander). Later he moved to Perth and did cartoons and illustrations for a number of local journals, including Clare’s Weekly , the Argonaut , the Western Mail and the Sunday Times (c.1899-1908). A Federation cartoon published in the Western Argus on 26 July 1900 (FA slide library University of Sydney) is presumably that in NLA neg. of an allegorical female tied to a tree ('Isolation’) being cut free with a sword ('Federation’) wielded by a knight with mining tools ('W.A. Miner’) dated 1900 – a parody of J.G. Millais’s Andromache recorded as by Fred 'Boote’.
In 1901-3 Booty was political cartoonist on the Spectator {WA?}. By 1906 he was in Melbourne, where he became part owner of a lithographic plant while also doing comic drawings for the Adelaide Gadfly . A.H. Chisholm (p.28) tells the story of 'a New Zealand artist named Fred Booty’ flipping a sovereign to editor C.J. Dennis – who had a reputation for standoffishness – at the Gadfly office (c.1906-7) with the comment: 'Would this suffice to gain speech with thee?’
Booty drew many comic postcards (see Cook reference) and bookplates (Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia, has a collection of his bookplates, donated 2000). He contributed to the Sydney Bulletin from c.1900. He left for the USA in about 1909 and remained there until he died, in Boston in 1913.
- Writers:
- Kerr, Joan
- Date written:
- 1996
- Last updated:
- 2007
