The cartoonist Marie Duval is one of the forgotten wonders of 19th-century art. Her drawings have something in common with Honoré Daumier, but also look forward almost uncannily to modern comics in their fantastical surreal wit.
As Jonathan Jones wrote in an
Top hats off to Marie Duval, a lost Victorian cartoonist sensation
The woman behind Ally Sloper, the feckless rogue who became a hero for a fusty age, is finally getting the attention her husband may have stolen
Jonathan Jones
Mon 27 Oct 2014
The cartoonist Marie Duval is one of the forgotten wonders of 19th-century art. Her drawings have something in common with Honoré Daumier, but also look forward almost uncannily to modern comics in their fantastical surreal wit . . .
To
the dear Memory
of
ISABELLE,
the loved wife of
Charles Harry Ross,
who died
on the 11th of June 1890
Aged 38 years.
Also of the said
Charles Harry Ross,
who died
on he 12th of October 1897,
Aged 63 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Duval
DNB?
Readers of Ana Olendraru’s introduction to the work of Marie Duval can also see almost 1400 of her drawings at ‘The Marie Duval Archive’ (www.marieduval.org) or in the accessible and handsomely produced picture book for general readers ‘Marie Duval’ (https://myriadeditions.com/books/marie-duval).
She is named as Emilie de Tessier in n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_1900s_in_comics
"Charles H. Ross (text) and Émilie de Tessier publish the comic strip Ally Sloper.[92]"
____
Tessier [other name Ross], Isabella Emily Louisa [pseud. Marie Duval, Ambrose Clarke]unlocked
(1847–1890)
Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite
https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.66300
Published online: 09 November 2023
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66300
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66301#odnb-9780198614128-e-66301
Charles Henry Ross died on 12 October 1897, at 499 Wandsworth Road, Clapham, London, survived by his son, Charles. He was buried in the same plot as Marie Duval, who had predeceased him in 1890.
Hard to find 499 Wandsworth Road
>>https://www.google.com/maps/place/499+Wandsworth+Road
But appears to be v close to [opposite? since an odd number] Pensbury Place/
Charles H Ross, The Book of Cats (1867)
Read but no images, other than the cover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mqu-aixgq0
Text and images: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43790/43790-h/43790-h.htm
https://archive.org/details/bookofcatschitch00ross
Downloaded as "charles-ross-book-of-cats-1867.pdf"
The cartoonist Marie Duval is one of the forgotten wonders of 19th-century art. Her drawings have something in common with Honoré Daumier, but also look forward almost uncannily to modern comics in their fantastical surreal wit.
As Jonathan Jones wrote in an
Top hats off to Marie Duval, a lost Victorian cartoonist sensation
The woman behind Ally Sloper, the feckless rogue who became a hero for a fusty age, is finally getting the attention her husband may have stolen
Jonathan Jones
Mon 27 Oct 2014
The cartoonist Marie Duval is one of the forgotten wonders of 19th-century art. Her drawings have something in common with Honoré Daumier, but also look forward almost uncannily to modern comics in their fantastical surreal wit . . .
To
the dear Memory
of
ISABELLE,
the loved wife of
Charles Harry Ross,
who died
on the 11th of June 1890
Aged 38 years.
Also of the said
Charles Harry Ross,
who died
on he 12th of October 1897,
Aged 63 years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marie_Duval
DNB?
Readers of Ana Olendraru’s introduction to the work of Marie Duval can also see almost 1400 of her drawings at ‘The Marie Duval Archive’ (www.marieduval.org) or in the accessible and handsomely produced picture book for general readers ‘Marie Duval’ (https://myriadeditions.com/books/marie-duval).
She is named as Emilie de Tessier in n https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Before_1900s_in_comics
"Charles H. Ross (text) and Émilie de Tessier publish the comic strip Ally Sloper.[92]"
____
Tessier [other name Ross], Isabella Emily Louisa [pseud. Marie Duval, Ambrose Clarke]unlocked
(1847–1890)
Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin, and Julian Waite
https://doi.org/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.013.66300
Published online: 09 November 2023
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66300
https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-66301#odnb-9780198614128-e-66301
Charles Henry Ross died on 12 October 1897, at 499 Wandsworth Road, Clapham, London, survived by his son, Charles. He was buried in the same plot as Marie Duval, who had predeceased him in 1890.
Hard to find 499 Wandsworth Road
>>https://www.google.com/maps/place/499+Wandsworth+Road
But appears to be v close to [opposite? since an odd number] Pensbury Place/
Charles H Ross, The Book of Cats (1867)
Read but no images, other than the cover:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mqu-aixgq0
Text and images: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43790/43790-h/43790-h.htm
https://archive.org/details/bookofcatschitch00ross
Downloaded as "charles-ross-book-of-cats-1867.pdf"
Build 1 — 30 August 2026
[PB/Claude: checked the Google AI overview against Wikipedia's dedicated Marie Duval article, the Wikipedia pages for Charles Henry Ross, Ally Sloper and Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, the Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org), and — usefully — the June 2025 Chronicle, which already has your own photograph of Isabelle's actual headstone in Wandsworth Cemetery. Most of the overview held up. A few things flagged rather than stated flatly: (1) MARRIAGE, GENUINELY UNRESOLVED: the dedicated Wikipedia article on Marie Duval says outright that "there are no records of a marriage," yet the headstone you photographed calls her "the loved wife of Charles Harry Ross," and Ross's own Wikipedia page also calls her his wife. I haven't resolved this — it may simply be a Victorian couple presenting as married without a formal record, which was common enough. (2) NAME DISCREPANCY: your headstone photo gives his name as "Charles Harry Ross" — every secondary source I found (Wikipedia included) calls him "Charles Henry Ross." Worth a second look at the stone. (3) The exact birth address (22 Portman Place, Marylebone) and the exact death address (1 Pensbury Street) both come only from the Geni.com family tree cited in the AI overview — I couldn't independently confirm either street number, though the Pensbury Street location is at least geographically consistent with everything else (see "Battersea or Clapham?" below). (4) I could find no source at all — not Wikipedia, not the Ally Sloper's Half Holiday article — for the AI's claim about a "Railway Accident Life Policy" printed on the comic's cover as a marketing gimmick, so I've left it out rather than repeat it. (5) The researchers' names: it's Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin and Julian Waite, not "David Sabin and Roger Waite" as the AI overview had it. (6) The precise "950 strips" figure and the claim she drew directly onto boxwood engraving blocks are plausible and consistent with what the Archive says in general terms ("hundreds of comic strip pages," an "untutored" technique) but I couldn't pin down that exact number or that specific technical detail from what I could access — worth checking against the Grennan/Sabin/Waite book itself if you want it stated as fact.]
Isabelle Ross — born Isabelle Émilie de Tessier, and far better known by her professional name Marie Duval — was a Victorian actress turned comic artist, and, on the current scholarly view, Europe's first professional female cartoonist. Working largely for the satirical magazine Judy from 1869 to 1885, she was the principal illustrator behind Ally Sloper, one of the 19th century's most popular comic characters, at a time when almost no other woman in Britain was doing anything comparable.
Her South London years were spent right on the boundary between the two. From about 1874, after the birth of her son, she and her creative and domestic partner Charles Ross were living in Battersea. She died on 11 June 1890, aged 38, of bronchitis, pneumonia and nephritis, at an address given in family records as 1 Pensbury Street — just off Wandsworth Road, and today within the London Borough of Lambeth's Clapham/Larkhall area, immediately alongside the old Battersea parish boundary that ran along Wandsworth Road itself. So the honest answer to "Battersea or Clapham?" is genuinely both: her working and family life was centred in Battersea, but she died a few streets over, on the Clapham side of the same road. She was buried in Wandsworth Cemetery, Magdalen Road, sharing a headstone with Ross, who outlived her by seven years, dying on 12 October 1897.
Isabelle was born in London on 25 September 1847 to parents of French descent, and worked briefly as a governess before turning to the stage, where she performed under the name Marie Duval — and, on occasion, under further pseudonyms including "Noir," "Ambrose Clarke" and "S.A. the Princess Hesse Schwartzbourg." Her earliest recorded stage appearance was in a Christmas pantomime at the St James's Theatre in 1868, and her real theatrical apprenticeship was served in the music halls and unlicensed "penny gaff" theatres of South London, playing to exactly the kind of rowdy, working-class audience whose world she would later draw.
It was through the theatre that she met Charles Ross, a writer who had created the character of Ally Sloper — a debt-dodging, work-shy comic antihero — for Judy magazine in 1867. Ross illustrated the strip himself at first, but Duval increasingly took over the drawing, and by the late 1860s strips were being signed by both of them jointly. From 1869 until 1885 she drew hundreds of comic strip pages and vignettes for the magazine, working in a loose, theatrical, self-taught style that had no real precedent in British illustration of the period — critics and historians now regard it as an early ancestor of modern cartooning. In 1871 she had an affair with Herbert Augustus Such, and was named as a correspondent in the resulting divorce case brought by his wife in 1873.
Ally Sloper's popularity eventually outgrew Judy itself. In 1884 the publisher Gilbert Dalziel relaunched the character in his own dedicated weekly, Ally Sloper's Half Holiday, first published on 3 May 1884 and now generally regarded as a foundational moment in British comics publishing. It spawned an extensive range of merchandise, from pocket watches to doorstops. But the new title's artist was William Baxter, not Duval — she had no further involvement with the character she had done so much to define, and did not share in its commercial success.
For most of the 20th century Marie Duval was almost entirely forgotten: Judy was cheap, disposable print, she drew straight onto the engraving blocks rather than on paper that might survive, and once her signature stopped appearing her contribution simply dropped out of the historical record. That changed with an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project, which built the online Marie Duval Archive (marieduval.org) cataloguing her surviving work, and culminated in the first full-length study of her career: Simon Grennan, Roger Sabin and Julian Waite, Marie Duval: Maverick Victorian Cartoonist (Myriad Editions, 2018; also published in an academic edition by Manchester University Press, 2020). She is now generally credited as Europe's first professional female cartoonist.
One footnote worth heading off: Isabelle/Marie has nothing to do with the militant suffragette Duval family — Emily, Elsie, Victor and their siblings — who lived nearby at 97 Lavender Sweep a generation later and are separately commemorated by Wandsworth Council's Duval House on Grant Road. It's the same surname and roughly the same patch of Battersea, and no more than that.
Sources: Marie Duval, Charles Henry Ross, Ally Sloper and Ally Sloper's Half Holiday on Wikipedia — The Marie Duval Archive — this site's own June 2025 Chronicle, Part One, with a photograph of Isabelle and Charles's headstone at Wandsworth Cemetery — "Diederichs Duval suffrage family of Lavender Sweep," on the unrelated suffragette Duvals.
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