William Ralston (1848-1911), artist and photographer.
Born in Dumbarton, Ralston moved with his family to Glasgow at an early age. After spending three years in Australia as a young man, he returned to Glasgow to take charge of a branch of his father's photography business. He began to take an interest in art, inspired by his younger brother, and would spend many hours sketching.
Recognition came when he had a drawing accepted by the editor of Punch, and he contributed humorous drawings, often on military subjects, to the magazine for many years. Ralston also enjoyed a long association with the magazine The Graphic, abandoning his career as a photographer to live in London as an artist for fourteen years. On the death of his father, he returned to Glasgow to take over the family photography business, Ralston & Sons. He continued to contribute to The Graphic, increasingly in the form of strip cartoons, until his death in 1911.
Ralston was also credited with the illustrations in a number of published books, and he published some of his own work, the most successful being Tippoo, a tale of a tiger.
Reference: Mitchell Library, Gf 920.04 WHO
Reproduced with the permission of Glasgow City Council, Libraries Information and Learning
Keywords:
art, artists, book illustrators, cartoonists, cartoons, Graphic, photographers, photography, Punch, Ralston & Sons, Tippoo
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