Claud Lovat Fraser

Claud Lovat Fraser (1890-1921) was an active artist in the fields of illustration and theater design. He was born in London on May 15, 1890 to Florence Margaret Fraser, an amateur artist, and Claud Fraser, a city solicitor. Fraser and his brother Alan were educated at various English boarding schools, including the prestigious Charterhouse School in Surrey, from which Fraser graduated in 1907. He then began a course of legal study, entered into articles of clerkship in his father's law firm, and joined a group of critics and artists who regularly congregated at Dan Rider's Den, a printer's shop. Fraser produced many caricatures of contemporary literary and theatric figures, and in 1910, he produced a privately printed edition of ten of these caricatures. In 1911, Fraser left his father's firm to seriously pursue art. He spent a brief period under the tutelage of Walter Sickert at Westminster Technical Institute. In 1912, Fraser executed decorations for Haldane Macfall's essay on art and aesthetics, The Splendid Wayfaring, and for Macfall's play The Three Students, considered but ultimately rejected for production by Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Fraser was also interested in producing affordable, quality toys, and some of his designs were executed. These and the illustrations for The Splendid Wayfaring and The Three Students were among the objects shown at his first solo exhibition, i…