In a 1996 Ronald Searle ink and watercolor drawing, we see a beefeater in a restaurant being served dinner by a bull. The meal is not very filling and not very beefy and he is not very happy. A pencil notation on the front of the artwork indicate that it is one of two drawings made for a Town and Country article on London restaurants. It was sold last month at Heritage Auctions in the Illustration Art sale.
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| Ronald Searle Heritage Auctions listing accessed sixteen hours before the sale |
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| Ronald Searle Heritage Auctions item description |
December 28, 2025 Update: These two drawings share some details of costume but are otherwise almost certainly unrelated save for the presence of books and Searle's exaggerated style. It strains credulity to suggest that a rough variant for a 1989 book illustration would be on the back of a 1996 finished drawing.
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| Numerous critical marginal notes in a contemporary hand Ronald Searle Slightly Foxed—but Still Desirable: Ronald Searle's Wicked World of Book Collecting (Souvenir Press, 1989) |
Note: Was this beefeater illustration actually published? Was the drawing of the dandy attacked by books ever finished? If you have access to print images of either of these, please get in touch.
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