George Louis Palmella Busson du Maurier (6 March 1834 – 8 October 1896) was a Franco-British cartoonist and writer known for work in Punch and a Gothic novel Trilby, featuring the character Svengali.

He was brought up to believe his aristocratic grandparents had fled from France during the Revolution, leaving vast estates behind, to live in England as émigrés.

[1] Du Maurier studied art in Paris, France, in the studio of Charles Gleyre,[2] and moved to Antwerp, Belgium, where he lost the vision in his left eye.

"[12] The gag was not original to du Maurier, however, as it had appeared in a similar cartoon a few months earlier in Judy, a less widely read competitor to Punch.

[16] Furthermore, he did illustrations for the serialisation of Charles Warren Adams's The Notting Hill Mystery, which is often seen as the first detective story of novel length to have appeared in English.

Hugely popular, it tells of a poor artist's model, Trilby O'Ferrall, transformed into a diva under the spell of an evil musical genius, Svengali.

Soap, songs, dances, toothpaste, and even the city of Trilby, Florida, were named after her, as was the variety of soft felt hat with an indented crown worn in the London stage dramatisation of the novel.