GILL, André

André Gill (originally Louis-Alexandre Gosset de Guines), French draughtsman. The illegitimate son of the Comte de Guines and orphaned at an early age, he was recommended by the journalist Nadar to Charles Philipon, who hired him to work on the Journal amusant in 1859. At that time he signed himself André Gil; this changed to Gill in 1862.

He was very successful during the Second Empire (1852-70) and made a speciality of large caricatures, full of power and movement, that covered the opening pages of satirical magazines - mainly La Lune, an opposition journal created by François Polo in 1865, when Napoleon III's regime was becoming more liberal. Gill's attacks reinforced the current of hostility against the regime in the late 1860s. Many of his prints were censored. On 17 November 1867 he drew the Emperor in the guise of Rocambole, a brigand and assassin who was the hero of a popular newspaper serial, and La Lune was banned. It was immediately replaced by a new journal, L'Eclipse, on which Gill continued to work. Under the Commune (1871) he was appointed Curator at the Musée du Luxembourg. He created two magazines, Gill Revue (1868) and La Parodie (1869), and in 1876 founded his own republican journal, La Lune Rousse. Arrogant and disordered in his life, Gill died in the lunatic asylum at Charenton on the outskirts of Paris.