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Endpoint: Francis Marshall (Illustrator)

created on: 19/02/2026
by: bob (10589)

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William Francis Marshall (born 9 January 1901 in Bloomsbury, London, UK - died 22 March 1980 in Barnet, Hertfordshire, UK (aged 79)) was a prominent British fashion illustrator who began his significant career in the 1920s for Vogue magazine.
He studied at University College in London and Slade School of Fine Art. During World War II he was a camouflage officer with the Admiralty, having been educated on HMS Worcester.

Active from the 1920s until the 1960s, Marshall's work was published widely, from Vogue magazine to the more accessible and widely read pages of the Daily Mail.
Other periodicals illustrated by him were Woman’s Journal and Harper’s Bazaar.

He is one of the few artists to have given his name to a particular type of feminine beauty, and from the nineteen thirties on, the Marshall Girl was as celebrated as was the Gibson Girl in her day. The Marshall Girl , featured in nearly every issue of Vogue in the decade before the war, and also in the prestigious advertisements of Jaeger and Elizabeth Arden , was an elegant creature with unswept hair, high cheekbones and a lovely figure, equally at home in a ballgown or on the racecourse ,but she was a relaxed and friendly woman too.

Marshall also had a short stint as a newspaper comic artist, illustrating installments of the French true crime series 'Le Crime Ne Paie Pas' by Paul Gordeaux.

He also worked extensively in advertising, for companies such as Jaeger, Fortnum and Mason, Liberty and Elizabeth Arden, and released several books - ranging from manuals on drawing fashion or ballet, to the nostalgic records of fashionable society London West and An Englishman in New York.

After World War II, he continued making advertising illustrations and was, until 1963, the main weekly societal and fashion illustrator of the newspaper The Daily Mail. For this job, Marshall often attended fashion shows in Paris and Milan, as well as ballet performances at the Covent Garden Opera House.

Marshall was also notable as a book cover illustrator. He painted numerous covers for romantic fiction, especially the Barbara Cartland titles for PAN, Bantam, Corgi and NEL. Marshall met Cartland in 1966 during a lunch break, kicking off a long creative partnership lasting until his death in 1980.

In 1959, Marshall wrote his first book on drawing, entitled 'Magazine Illustration'. It was followed by more similar books, such as 'Fashion Drawing', 'Sketching the Ballet' and 'Drawing the Female Figure'. Marshall is known for his many drawings of London, especially the ballet in the Covent Garden Opera House. Several of these works were collected in the books 'London West' (1946) and 'The London Book' (1951), and also in the brochure 'Shopping in London' (1950), a post-war guide issued by the British Tourist association to lure overseas visitors back to the UK. He is also the author and illustrator of the book 'An Englishman in New York' (1949), made during a trip to the States.

Francis Marshall left behind an extensive archive, held at the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London.
For much of the 20th century, he was one of Britain's most prolific and highly regarded fashion illustrators, yet today his work remains relatively unknown. Unlike his gregarious contemporary Cecil Beaton, Marshall was a retiring character, not interested in self-promotion and preferring to focus on his work.

He died in 1980, after a long and happy marriage to Margaret Simpson Chambers, whose face and figure inspired much of his early work.