John Berry (illustrator)
British illustrator (1920-2009)
John Leslie Berry (9 June 1920 – 10 December 2009) was a British illustrator. He came up with the idea for the iconic Esso tiger adverts.
Early life
Berry was born in 1920 Hammersmith, West London. His father was a foreman on the railway at Hammersmith who, in his son's words, "Skipped when I was five years old, my mum brought us up on £1 a week, my sister and me.". Berry, having displayed an early artistic talent, entered the Hammersmith School of Art in 1934, where he studied under Alfred Egerton Cooper and William Dring. His main interests at that time were figure paintings and etchings. At 19 Berry won a scholarship to the Royal Academy Schools but was unable to take it up owing to the outbreak of World War II.
Career
From 1941 to 1944 Berry served as an official war artist in World War II, attached to the Eighth Army in North Africa and Egypt painting battle scenes. Some of these wartime paintings including '25 Pounder in action at Alamein' were exhibited at the National Gallery during the war before being moved to the Imperial War Museum. During this period he spent a lot of time in Cairo from where he was able to gather material for some of his other paintings. Berry began to paint scenes of the past which were witty and frivolous, genre paintings set in the 17th century or in his own period, and pictures of the Moslem world.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q18379510. VIAF identifies the subject as 94421752. The Library of Congress control number is n79056586. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 1 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1920, 2009, 1934 and 1941.
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This entry incorporates text from “John Berry (illustrator)” 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.