British Cartoon Archive, Art museum and specialized archive in Canterbury, England
The British Cartoon Archive is a museum and specialized archive in Canterbury holding over 200,000 editorial cartoons, political artworks, and humorous comics from British newspapers and magazines. The collection includes original pencil sketches, printing plates, and published versions of individual works.
The archive was founded in 1973 at the University of Kent after receiving several tons of material containing around 20,000 original drawings from Fleet Street publications. The collection continued to grow through donations from newspapers and magazines over the following decades.
The cartoons on view reflect how British artists responded to political events and social issues through humor and satire. Visitors can see how drawing styles and messages changed across different periods of time.
Visitors can examine the collection in the Special Collections reading room at Templeman Library or search 150,000 digitized works through the online database. The digitized materials make it easy to browse many cartoons without traveling to the location.
The archive preserves multiple stages of each cartoon: from initial pencil sketches through printing plates to the final published version. This collection of different stages allows visitors to understand the entire artistic process behind each published work.
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