Juliet Peter

Juliet Peter

Juliet Peter (born 1915) was one of the School Journal's most prolific designer/illustrators between 1946 and 1960, contributing hundreds of drawings and dozens of cover illustrations. Her line drawings and two-colour covers from the 1950s shaped the visual character of the School Journal in the same way the work of Russell Clark and E Mervyn Taylor had in the 1940s.

In an unusual move for the Journal at this time, Peter was personally profiled more than once in the Journal's pages. An article written about her in the Journal in 1950 paid particular attention to her habit of leaving the office to find her subjects:

One day Miss Peter looked out of the office window and saw five elephants walking along the street. The elephants had chains on their legs so that they would not move too fast, and the men who were leading them took them along very gently. These men knew there would be trouble if five elephants bolted down a city street.

Now, Miss Peter, who is the artist at the Journal office, wanted to see where the elephants were going. She took a notebook and a pencil with her, and she followed the elephants to the park where the circus people were going to pitch their tent.

A circus is a good place for an artist to find pictures, and Miss Peter stayed there most of the day. She watched everyone getting ready for the circus at night. She made a lot of quick drawings of the horses and the elephants and the clowns and the circus riders. When she came back to the office, she used the small pictures in her notebook to help her, and drew two circus covers for the Standard 1 and 2 Journals.

Permission of the National Library of New Zealand Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa must be obtained before any reuse of this image.

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