Arthur John Balliol Salmon (1 June 1868 - 3 January 1953; born Manchester, England)
Balliol Salmon was born in Manchester, Lancashire, England and was a British artist particularly noted for his illustrations and his work in pencil, chalk and pastels. He was one of the twenty leading illustrators selected by Percy V. Bradshaw for inclusion in his Art of the Illustrator.

His father, Henry Curwen Salmon, was a civil engineer (and not a surgeon and barrister as some sources suggest) born in London in 1829. He had quite a chequered past, originally studying law, but after apparently successfully investing in the mining industry he moved to Devon, where he became a geological surveyor, mining agent, speculator in mining shares, and writer. He was elected a Fellow of the Geological Society and a Fellow of the Chemical Society. However, he was declared bankrupt in 1858, and spent some time in a debtors prison. Two years after his discharge from bankruptcy, he founded and edited The Mining and Smelting Magazine, which survived for three years.

He had married Ellen Jane Fennell in St. Pancras in 1857, and Arthur John Balliol was the fourth of their six children. Henry died on 27 May 1873, and his widow subsequently moved to London – in 1881, she was working as a copyist and living with four of her children at 10 Colchester Terrace, Islington.

Balliol Salmon studied for a year under Fred Brown at the Westminster School, where his fellow pupils were F. H. Townsend and Fred Pegram. Salmon continued his training, together with Fred Pegram at Paris ateliers. He trained at the Academie Julian in Paris. He lived in Glasgow and London.

He pursued a career as teacher and illustrator, notably for The Graphic, where he was magazine's resident illustrator of Society subjects.

Houfe wrote in his Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists (1996) that Balliol Salmon was one of the best pencil and chalk artists to work for the press in the Edwardian era.

Between 1911 and 1916 he worked for a few more periodicals – The Bystander, The Lady's Pictorial, The Woman at Home and The Queen, while continuing to contribute to The Pall Mall Magazine, The Graphic, The Illustrated London News, The Windsor Magazine and The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News. For The Graphic he specialized in society subjects, weddings, the Royal family etc., and for The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News he focused largely on theatrical drawings.

He had also illustrated a handful of books for Constable & Co., including a 1909 re-issue of Robert Chambers's collection of supernatural stories The King in Yellow, first published in 1895, and in 1915 he illustrated the first of seven of Angela Brazil's girls' school stories for Blackie & Son. (At around the same time, he began the providing the coloured illustrations for dustwrappers for some early reprints of Brazil's novels).

Salmon was Angela Brazil's favourite among her illustrators with his lovely elongated schoolgirls. He illustrated seven of her girls' school stories (published by Blackie, London 1915 - 1919) in the UK. Different illustrators were used for different markets. Freeman states that Salmon's illustrations were jettisoned for comic cartoons in France and winsomeness in America.

Salmon was chosen by art instructor Percy V. Bradshaw as one of the artists to illustrate The Art of the Illustrator, the seminal collection of twenty portfolios demonstrating six stages of a single painting or drawing by twenty different artists and published in 1918.

His work dramatically tailed-off after the First World War. He did a few illustrations for Cassell's Magazine of Fiction and The New Magazine, and, in the early 1930s, Miss Modern, while continuing to work for The Graphic (until 1924) and The London Magazine. His last book illustrations seem to have been in 1922. He also did some advertising work in the 1920s, for example posters for Crossley Motors Ltd.

In 1926, he moved to “Long Cot,” 16 Newton Grove, Acton, and three years later he moved to 9 South Parade, Acton. He apparently continued working, although nothing by him has been traced after 1931. In the 1939 Register he was recorded (and described as an artist) at the Passfield Oak Hotel, Petersfield, Hampshire, presumably on holiday, while his wife was at “Sparks”, Northiam, Sussex, living with her mother.

He died from bronchopneumonia on 3 January 1953 at Northiam, apparently without leaving a will. His wife died on 1 November 1974 at St. Paul's House, Albany Road, St. Leonards-on-Sea, Sussex, leaving an estate valued at £7,977. His son Geoffrey Curwen died on 15 March 1984 in Keston, Kent, leaving £66,033. His other son, Christopher Russell, died in Toronto, Canada, in 2005.
Source: Illustration Art Gallery; Bear Alley; Wikipedia