Percy Venner Bradshaw (27 November 1877 – 13 October 1965), who often signed PVB, was a British illustrator who also created the Press Art School, a correspondence course for drawing.
[2]: 34 Bradshaw had his first drawing published in The Boy's Own Paper when he was 15 years old, and moved to the art department of the advertising agency.
[2]: 34 Bradshaw so closely resembled the Prime Minister, Asquith, that people would doff their hats to him when he went for walks in the park.
[3]: 22 Bradshaw married Mabel Alice Bennett (6 January 1881 – 17 February 1966)[4] [5], the daughter of the late Edmund Hellyer Bennett (1841–1883)[6] and Mary Anne Gardner (1841–1904),[7] at St Peter's Church in Brockley, Lewisham on 27 July 1910.
[note 2] The couple had one child, Denise M. He also wrote articles on drawing, appearing in the Daily Graphic and in The Boy's Own Paper, where his series Black and White Drawing as a Profession was so successful that he decided to create his own art correspondence course, the Press Art School, in 1905.
[10][note 6] Thus Bradshaw helped Leo Cheyney to sell drawings to The Boys' Own Paper, Bystander and other publications.
After the first war, he created hundreds of illustrated postcards for specialized companies like Raphael Tuck & Sons, worked again for an advertising agency, and for Sun Enravings from Watford.
During the Second World War, he wrote articles about cartoonists for the London Opinion, and published humorous poetry.
[12] Mabel Alice survived him by less than six months, dying at Levisham Hospital, London on 17 February 1966.
This makes sense as some illustrators were bound to take longer to complete their commissions and it took Bradshaw, who was dealing with a huge surge in enrolments, time to write the descriptions.
A review in The Connoisseur: An Illustrated Magazine for Collectors in August 1918 gives the cost of the set of twenty portfolios as £7.