RAEMAKER'S NEWSPAPER CARTOONS OF WWI - vol. 1

One hundred years before WWI, Napoleon is reported to have said that the English caricaturist James Gillray "did more than all the armies in Europe to bring me down.” Likewise, during World War I, no cartoonist exercised more influence than Louis Raemaekers of Holland.

During World War I, the Germans charged Louis Raemaekers with "endangering Dutch neutrality;" he immediately fled to England. Even so, with so many atrocities committed by both sides, Raemakers was not short of material. his satirical newspaper cartoons led the German Government to offer a 12,000 guilder (±US250,000 in 2014) reward for his capture, dead or alive. A German newspaper, summarizing the terms of peace Germany would exact after it won the war, declared that “Indemnity would be demanded for every one of Raemaekers' cartoons.”

This volume contains 102 of Raemaker's cartoons published in Allied newspapers during WWI ordered as closely to a chronological order as possible. Because this volume is image rich, the file size is appropriately quite large (29.5Mb).

All too often art critics, art historians, aestheticians, and others have dismissed cartoons and caricatures as silly — not serious — trivial, and irrelevant. Yet, as you will see with the cartoons in this first volume, are cartoons and caricatures that, in retrospect, possibly had more effect on the German High Command and German populace than possibly a new Allied offensive, giving weight to the adage “The Pen is Mightier than the Sword.” - if only pen and paper could have been used to greater effect in this, the Great War.

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Louis Raemaekers (April 6, 1869 – July 26, 1956) was a Dutch painter and editorial cartoonist for the Amsterdam newspaper De Telegraaf during World War I, noted for his anti-German stance. He was born and grew up in Roermond, Netherlands during a period of political and social unrest in the city. Louis’ father published a weekly journal called De Volksvriend (Friend of the People) and was an influential man in liberal circles. His battle against the establishment set the tone for his son’s standpoint several decades later, when he fought against the unjust and horrendous occupation of neutral Belgium at the start of WWI. His mother was of German descent. He was trained as a drawing teacher and drew landscapes and illustrated children's books in his free time. In 1906 his life took a decisive turn when he accepted the invitation to draw political cartoons for leading Dutch newspapers, first from 1906 to 1909 for the Algemeen Handelsblad and from 1909 onwards for De Telegraaf. From early 1915 Raemaekers' cartoons had already appeared in British newspapers and magazines. In early 1916 he signed a contract with the Daily Mail and they appeared in this newspaper on a regular basis for the next two years.