Design and Art Australia Online

cartoonist, caricaturist, printmaker, illustrator, commercial artist, publisher and company director, was born in Sydney on 15 November 1885. According to Rafty & Mack, he served in the Boer War as a bugler then studied at Julian Ashton 's (called the Sydney Art School from 1906). In 1906, with Sydney Ure Smith , he founded Smith & Julius, perhaps the first advertising agency in Australia to feature outstanding colour printing states Nancy Underhill (in her biography of Smith, ADB 11); 'they set new standards for Australian advertising and provided work for artists including J. Muir Auld , Percy Leason , Roland Wakelin , Lloyd Rees and, later, Adrian Feint and John Passmore. Ure Smith remained active in Smith & Julius until 1923.’

In 1907 Will Dyson , Norman Lindsay and Julius had caricatures in Room 2 of the annual NSW Society of Artists Exhibition; Julius’s drawing of J.J. Hilder (with enormous feet) is reproduced in the catalogue (p.24). In 1907 the NSW Bookstall Co. commissioned Smith & Julius to illustrate Poor Parson by Steele Rudd (Mills, p.35) and Julius subsequently did a lot of work for the NSW Bookstall Company as well as being a director of Art in Australia. He contributed to the Evening News (pre-1906?), drawing caricatures and sketches of Sydney street characters (Syd Ure Smith, quoted Caban, 53). He also published joke drawings in colour and black and white in the weekly Comic Australian (Sydney 1911-13) (Lindesay 1979), eg (b/w) A Mighty Pestilence. 'Budgeree Billy: “By cripes, you pfellers, look out, here comes a big pfella mosquito”’ (plane flying overhead) 17 February 1912, 12, and Literature, the Drama, and Art (on poets, actors and painters) 18 November 1911, last page.

Julius specialised in caricatures of theatrical personalities at the Bulletin ; select examples were published in his book, Theatrical Caricatures 1912, e.g. Harry Lauder (ill. Caban, 55) and Bert Bailey, maker and producer of Australian plays c.1910 (brush and ink original NLA). BFAG has the original caricature of 'Alex [sic] Sass who is making pictures… of New York’, published Bulletin 12 July 1917 (gift of Les Tanner 1971). Other original caricatures are in the ML Bulletin collection, which comprises one cartoon of 1920 and 27 caricatures of 1916-17 and 1921-29; they include Jim Bancks , Cruickshank (pseud. Alex Laing ), Martin Stainforth, artist, and a good large original Bulletin caricature by Julius of Annette Kellerman shown performing in the glass tank at the Sydney Tivoli, published 16 June 1921 (ML Px*D471, f.62, included in SLNSW b/w exhibition 1999). Josef Lebovic Gallery Collectors’ List 62A , Paddington 1997, cat. 26, advertised a Julius pen-and-ink drawing of a pantomime male character (actor?) holding a programme 'The Modern Cinderella’ n.d. (1920s?), 23.2 × 14 cm, signed l.l., for sale at $390.

Julius wrote and illustrated articles for Lone Hand , e.g. illustrations to a story by Lyn Ridge, 'Wiggs and the Baby’, 1 February 1910, 418-421. His article 'Clothes and the man’ 12 (April 1913), 502-507 complements his cartoon 'Clothes make the man’, 12 (November 1912), 13. In 1911 he wrote 'About artists’ models’, giving it an excellent comic heading of four types of models (ill. Caban, p. 59). His newspaper illustrations include a drawing of The Hold-Up: Labour’s awful responsibility (50,000 thrown out of employment in the 1916 miners’ strike), Sydney Mail 29 November 1916 (ill. Harris, 233), and The Weaker Sex Grows Stronger , a sympathetic then-and-now portrayal of women published in the Wentworth Magazine (October 1925, 26).

He drew at least one propagandist cartoon for an ALP election broadside, Ned Kelly Up to date! ('If the Tories win they will extend the Income Tax so that it will include as many low incomes as possible./ Watch your Pockets! Vote Against this!’), for the 1929 Federal Election Campaign. It shows the capitalist Fatman, labelled 'Country-Progressive Party’, in a Ned Kelly mask holding up a terrified, pleading little John Citizen with a briefcase labelled 'Queensland’s Weekly Wage’ (NLA ephemera; published in Sally Young’s article on ephemera in NLA News June 2002, p.9).

Julius was interested in comic strips and drew them for the Sunday Times before Jim Bancks’s Ginger Meggs appeared. Eventually, he went to New York to work in an animated art studio (Caban, 53). Moore claims he was the first Australian artist to do animated cartoons for the cinema and that he secured a patent for them. In America, he drew a caricature of “Cruikshank” (Laing) as an animated filmmaker (original ML: in SLNSW b/w exhibition 1999) so presumably had an antipodean colleague in this pioneering enterprise. His daughter, Ruth Julius, has an entry in Germaine, while Roger Butler’s NGA www.australianprints.gov.au website records him as making monotypes in NSW. Filmer and Butler both state that he died in Sydney in 1938.

Writers:

Kerr, Joan

Date written:

1996

Last updated:

2007