Lionel Coventry prolific caricaturist of South Australian identities, especially in sport, through 20th Century
Lionel Coventry in self caricature at right and some of the 20th Century South Australian football/cricket champions he featured including (from left, clockwise) Victor Richardson, Len Fitzgerald, Gil Langley and Bob Hank.
Lionel Coventry sketched about 30,000 figures as caricatures, mostly for newspapers and magazines in Adelaide and around Australia between the 1920s and 1970s.
Born in Broken Hill in 1906, Coventry moved to Adelaide with his family at a young age. He taught himself to draw and, in 1928, working as a young journalist, he was sent by his newspaper editor to the Adelaide Oval to produce sketches of the visiting English cricket team for an Ashes tour. Coventry was on his way to becoming a household name in South Australia when the sketches of the whole team appeared on the front page of a London newspaper.
Coventry’s work attracted visiting celebrities such as Noel Coward who told him that “I want to take you back to Hollywood” where caricatures were in vogue in the 1930s. But Coventry stayed base in Adelaide. His subjects were the South Australian influencers of the day in fields from the wine industry to university graduates to the justice system.
But his sporting – and especially Australia rules footballer – sketches were particularly prominent in the weekend newspapers in South Australia. Champions in more than one sport, such as Victor Richardson (football, cricket and baseball) and Lindsay head (football and cricket) were among those featured. Coventry published a limited edition selection of his caricatures of South Australian identities, edited by N.E.J. Sewell and H. Wright Harrison, for the state’s centenary year 1936.
The venerable, the honourable, the esteemed, the lauded, the accomplished, the bumptious, the po-faced, the retiring and the conceited were all captured by Coventry. There were cases of people being disgruntled by Coventry’s version of their images, with elongated noses, big ears, bulbous chins and puffy cheeks his stock in trade. Among those who disapproved was an American military officer, who protested: "You've made me look like a bloody bullfrog!" But Coventry applied the same exaggerations to his own self portrait.
