he was employed as timekeeper in a foundry, and at twelve years of ago had began to help the scone painter and make himself generally useful at the Leeds theatre. Subsequently he joined a touring company as an actor, his first appearance being at the Spa Theatre, Scarborough. He played among other parts François in 'Richelieu' and the cat in 'Dick Whittington.' In his fifteenth year he sot out for London to earn his fortune, suffering there great hardships. Part of the return journey he performed on foot. In Leeds again, he took to drawing in earnest, contributed to a paper called 'Yorkshire Gossip,' and designed pantomime costumes. At the age of nineteen he married Sarah Elizabeth Emerson.
In 1883, after more London poverty, May drew a caricature of Irving, Bancroft, and Toole leaving a Garrick Club supper, which was published by a print-seller in the Charing Cross Road. The print caught the eye of Lionel Brough, the actor, who bought the original (cf. The Bancrofts: Recollections of Sixty Years, 1909, p. 330, with reproduction). Replicas were subsequently acquired by King Edward VII, Sir Arthur Pinero, and Sir Squire Bancroft. Brough recommended May to the editor of 'Society.' For 'Society' he did some work, and then passed to 'St. Stephen's Review,' of which paper he was the artistic mainstay until a break down of health made it advisable to go to Australia, where he had an offer of 20l. a week from the 'Sydney Bulletin.' He left London in 1885 and remained in Australia until 1888, completing altogether some 900 drawings for the 'Bulletin.' For a while after leaving that paper he remained in Melbourne practising painting, and then settled in Paris to study art as seriously as he was able. Returning to live in London in 1892, he resumed his labours on 'St. Stephen's Review,' to which from Paris he had contributed his first widely successful work, the illustrations to 'The Parson and the Painter,' published as a book in 1891. In 1892 appeared the first 'Phil May's Winter Annual,' destined to be continued until 1903, containing some thirty to fifty drawings by himself, with miscellaneous literary matter. There were fifteen issues in all (three being called 'Summer Annual'), and these shilling books probably did as much to make the artist's reputation as a humorist as any of his journalistic drawings. His first important newspaper connection was with the 'Daily Graphic,' for which paper he started on a tour of the world, which however came to an abrupt close in Chicago, and he returned to London in 1893, never to leave it again. There followed very busy period, during which he contributed not only to the 'Daily Graphic' and 'Graphic' but, among other illustrated papers, to the 'Sketch' and 'Pick-me-up,' and steadily acquired a name for comic delineations of low life such as none could challenge. In 1805 there appeared 'Phil May's Sketch Book: Fifty Cartoons,' and in 1890 his 'Guttersnipes: Fifty Original Sketches,' containing some of his most vivid and characteristic work, on the strength of which he was elected to the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours. In the same year he succeeded to a chair at the 'Punch' Table, Although he retained it until his death the traditions of the paper were a little cramping to one so essentially Bohemian as he, while some of his contributions to it, such as the illustrations to the 'Essence of Parliament' (reissued in Lucy's 'Balfourian Parliament,' 1906), must be considered a misapplication of his genius. Portraits were not his forte, and any time which he spent on drawing from photographs was lost. In 1897 appeared 'Phil May's Graphic Pictures' and also 'The ZZG., or Zig-Zag Guide. Round and about the beautiful and bold Kentish coast. Described by F. G Burnand and illustrated by Phil May,' to which the artist contributed 139 illustrations; in 1899 followed both 'Fifty hitherto unpublished Pen and Ink Sketches' and the 'Phil May Album, collected by Augustus M. Moore,' with a biographical preface.
Phil May once stated that all he knew about drawing had come from Edward Linley Sambourne [q. v. Suppl. II]. Although the initial line work of the two men is very similar, the difference in the completed drawings is wide. Sambourne progressed by multiplying strokes; May by the process of omitting them. Phil May struck out line after line until only the essentials remained. His usual method for his 'Punch' contributions was to draw more or less fully in pencil and then work over this with pen and ink, with the utmost economy of stroke, and finally rub out the pencil. But latterly he often omitted the pencil foundation. Those who attended his lectures, which he illustrated as he talked, or were present at Savage Club entertainments at which he acted as 'lightning cartoonist,' say that the rapidity and sureness of his hand were miraculous. May's line at its best may be said to be alive.
