Cover cartoons by Louis de Leeuw for De Roskam issues of 10 May 1918 and 3 January 1919.
Louis de Leeuw was a Dutch painter, cartoonist and lithographer. In the first half of the 20th century, he was the house cartoonist of the satirical Catholic weekly De Roskam.
Life and career
Louis Lambertus Petrus de Leeuw was born in 1875 in Arnhem. Not much is known about his life and career. He got his artistic training with the Art Practice Society ("Genootschap Kunstoefening") in Arnhem and the Minerva Academy in Groningen. Apart from these two cities, De Leeuw spent periods of his career working in Renkum and Dordrecht, as well as the Belgian cities Antwerp and Brussels. The artist died in 1931 in the South Holland city of Dordrecht.
De Roskam
Besides fine art activities like making landscapes and figurative studies, Louis De Leeuw was best known as the lead cartoonist of De Roskam. Published between 1912 and 1939 as a supplement to the weekly Het Katholieke Volk and then newspaper De Volkskrant, De Roskam was a political satirical weekly belonging to the Catholic segment of Dutch society. Its main competitor was the left-wing magazine De Notenkraker, and much of De Roskam's satire was aimed at the socialist movement. One of the main targets was the social-democratic foreman Pieter Jelles Troelstra, who held an infamous speech in the House of Representatives on 12 November 1918, stating it was time for the Dutch working class to seize power. However, most of the Dutch citizens weren't in favor for a political coup, making his plans an utter failure.
Louis de Leeuw provided the weekly political cartoon on De Roskam's front page, but his art also appeared on many of the magazine's interior pages. Some of his contributions had sequential narratives, revealing influences from the picture stories made by Felix Hess for De Groene Amsterdammer, as well as the fervor of De Notenkraker's Albert Hahn. Starting in 1924, some of Louis de Leeuw's cartoons were reprinted in the anti-revolutionary magazine De Houten Pomp. Other prominent artists for De Roskam were P.A. Schols, Frans Lazarus and Joan Collette.
Picture story by Louis de Leeuw for De Roskam, reprinted in De Houten Pomp of 8 May 1929. The devoted Catholics in Limburg are not interested in the socialist propaganda of the SDAP party, and the representative is kicked out of the province.