Bertram Prance
British artist and illustrator
Bertram Stanley Prance (5 December 1889 – 9 August 1958) was a British artist, poster artist and illustrator who worked as a cartoonist for Punch magazine among others.
Early life
Prance was born in Bideford in Devon in 1889, one of five children of Deera Lock née Hollway (1861–1952) and Captain Fredrick William Prance (1859–1939) who was the owner and skipper of the fishing trawler 'Deera' (named after his wife), which operated out of the quayside in Bideford. Prance attended Bideford Art School and was a subscriber to the Press Art School, a correspondence course for drawing founded by Percy Bradshaw. The 1911 Census for Bideford lists Prance at the family home at 66 High Street with an occupation of Art Pupil Teacher employed by Bideford Council. In 1915 in Lambeth he married Kate 'Kitty' Lily Macfarlane (1895–1979) from Barnstaple and with her had two children: Barbara Valerie Prance (1920–1982) and Christopher Paul MacFarlane Prance (1927–). From 1917 during World War I Prance served in the Royal Air Force.
Artistic career
Between the wars his works were published in such periodicals as The Humorist, London Opinion, Punch and Tatler. During this period he was in demand as a book illustrator, working for Anthony Armstrong and on the books of his friend B.C. Hilliam of the singing-duo Mr. Flotsam and Mr. Jetsam.
“Bertram Prance” enters the record as british artist and illustrator. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bertram, Prance and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21460287. VIAF identifies the subject as 311342151. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1889, 1958, 1861 and 1952.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bertram Prance” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.