A Sapajou and an Aspirin

A friend is currently putting together what looks like it will be a fantastic collection of Sapajou cartoons from various newspapers, books and adverts. This prompted me to remember I had a piece of commercial work Sapajou did in 1937 for Aspirin that seemed worth posting (left).

Sapajou was legend in inter-war Shanghai – born Georgii Avksentievich Sapojnikoff, a graduate of the Aleksandrovskoe Military School in Moscow, a Lieutenant of the Russian Imperial Army, an aide-de-camp to a Tsarist General as well as being a veteran of World War One where he was wounded on the battlefield. Invalided out of the army he enrolled in evening classes at the Moscow Academy of Arts to study drawing. The tall, thin and bespectacled Sapajou always limped and walked with a cane as the result of his war injuries though had maintained a pretty good social standing by marrying the daughter of a Tsarist General while in exile in Beijing.

With the victory of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the ensuing civil war Sapajou came to China. He fell instantly in love with life in Shanghai where he continued doodling and drawing local scenes while he worked out how to rebuild his life. Despite job offers from major newspapers around the world in 1925 he joined the staff of the A friend is currently putting together what looks like it will be a fantastic collection of Sapajou cartoons from various newspapers, books and adverts. This prompted me to remember I had a piece of commercial work Sapajou did in 1937 for Aspirin that seemed worth posting (his own self-portrait left).

Sapajou a legend in inter-war Shanghai – born Georgii Avksentievich Sapojnikoff, a graduate of the Aleksandrovskoe Military School in Moscow, a Lieutenant of the Russian Imperial Army, an aide-de-camp to a Tsarist General as well as being a veteran of World War One where he was wounded on the battlefield. Invalided out of the army he enrolled in evening classes at the Moscow Academy of Arts to study drawing. The tall, thin and bespectacled Sapajou always limped and walked with a cane as the result of his war injuries though had maintained a pretty good social standing by marrying the daughter of a Tsarist General while in exile in Beijing.

With the victory of Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the ensuing civil war Sapajou came to China. He fell instantly in love with life in Shanghai where he continued doodling and drawing local scenes while he worked out how to rebuild his life. Despite job offers from major newspapers around the world in 1925 he joined the staff of the North-China Daily News and continued to produce cartoons for them until 1940 despite only being paid a relatively meagre salary. In his memoir of Shanghai the Englishman Ralph Shaw who worked as a reporter for the North-China Daily News, described Sapajou as ‘the star of the office’.

I’m looking forward to this book as it’s the first real varied collection of Sapajou’s work to appear – although an excellent reproduction of Sapajou’s 1937 Shanghai Schemozzle came out recently and is well worth getting.