Gordon Crosby Art

Gordon Crosby was a prolific illustrator and held in wide regard but little had been recorded of his life. Some 350–400 pieces of Crosby’s art are known and even though it does not often come to market there certainly is unabated interest in it. Living and working in England probably hampered his visibility when compared to his contemporaries, say, a Peter Helck in the US, an artist of similar skill and with a known opus of over 600 pieces. Helck, it should be noted, said in Crosby’s obituary that “in his sphere, Crosby was the greatest artist there had ever been.” Much of Crosby’s for-hire work was done for the Autocar magazine and saw its greatest heights in the 1920s and 30s. Crosby had not gone to art school or received any sort of formal art training, but instead started his career as an engineering draftsman at Daimler (famously calling his colleagues “draughts worms”). This facility for technically accurate renderings and an eye for proportion stood him in good stead later on in his paintings of machinery but failed him in his attempts at showing the people populating his pictures in an animated, lifelike manner. He was much more at ease planting people into his cartoons where their sketchy, wooden features did not seem a deficiency. From among Crosby’s early acquaintances would come lifelong friends and professional collaborators such as S.C.H Davis, Monty Tombs, W.F. Bradley, M.A. Millar, to name but a few. Little is said about his family and private life. Crosby died of his own hand at the age of 58, devastated by the loss in combat of his oldest son, Peter, a WWII RAF flyer who had begun to make his own name in motoring art. He exhibited four works at the Royal Academy.