Fritz Wegner

About Fritz Wegner

Fritz Wegner (1924-2015) was an Austrian-born British illustrator, a refugee from Nazi Vienna, known for witty pen-and-ink drawings in books by Allan Ahlberg, Dorothy L. Sayers and Mordecai Richler and for many book jackets.

He was born in Vienna on 15 September 1924 into a Jewish family. After the Anschluss a pro-Nazi teacher beat him over a drawing of Hitler, and in August 1938, aged 13, his parents sent him alone to London; they and his sister later followed. He was taken in by the lettering artist George Mansell, who taught at St Martin's School of Art; Fritz won a scholarship there with a drawing made from memory and where he studied from 1939 to 1942. After the war he worked freelance.

His work ranged from drawings for the Radio Times to Royal Mail Christmas stamps in 1969 and covers for the English editions of The Catcher in the Rye and Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye. For Sayers he illustrated The Story of Adam and Christ (1953), The Story of Noah's Ark (1956) and The Days of Christ's Coming (1960) with a medieval flavour. Later books include André Maurois's Fattypuffs and Thinifers (1968), John D. Fitzgerald's The Great Brain (1969), Richler's Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang (1975), Michael Rosen's Till Owlyglass (1990) and Brian Alderson's The Tale of the Turnip (1999). With Ahlberg he made Woof! (1986), Heard It in the Playground (1989), The Giant Baby (1994) and The Better Brown Stories (1995), as well as titles in the Happy Families series. Commentators single out his historical detail and quiet, teasing humour. He taught at St Martin's for 25 years from 1969, where Nicola Bayley, Nick Sharratt and Sara Midda were among his students. He died in London on 15 March 2015.

For collectors

The Great Brain was first published in the United States by Dial Press in 1967 with drawings by Mercer Mayer, so Wegner's 1969 illustrations belong to a later edition; check the title page. In the mid-1980s he also designed limited-edition Christmas plates for Fleetwood and Wyoming.