Merrily Harpur, who has died aged 76, was one of a few pioneering female cartoonists in a profession previously dominated by men. She began her career in 1978 at the Guardian, and her work immediately attracted the attention of other publications, including Punch (its editor Alan Coren was an early fan), the Listener, the Spectator, the Times, the Sunday Telegraph and the London Evening Standard.
Her witty and socially astute spiky drawings gently exposed human foibles and social pretensions. In one Punch cartoon, a couple in a black cab lean forward to read a notice: “Thank you for not committing adultery.” In another, a gaily dressed young couple, she in high heels and fur-lined coat, he with a bow-tie, wave and greet a suburbanite standing at his door, while two neighbours comment: “I see the Jehovah’s Witnesses have developed a new marketing strategy.” A puzzled husband gazes at a note on the kitchen table reading: “Your dinner is still in the realms of my imagination.” Two women sit at a table, one remarking to the other, “I am just going to finish my nails and then claw my way to the top.”
Merrily also undertook book illustrations for authors including Kingsley Amis, Jill Tweedie, James Fenton and Miles Kington. Her own cartoon strip books included The Nightmares of Dream Topping (1986), which satirised urbanites moving to the country. Unheard of Ambridge (1989) featured the lives and imagined dramas of the non-speaking characters of the BBC radio soap The Archers.
In 1987, at the height of her popularity, with a diary column in the Times and appearances on BBC Radio 4’s Start the Week, Merrily abandoned her London life. She later explained: “I could do that because the fax machine had been invented, and that meant I could still produce the work, while enjoying the blissful freedom of living where I liked.” (She claimed to have acquired a fax machine even before the Guardian.)
She migrated to Ireland, and the remoteness of Toormore, near Schull, in West Cork. There she was able to continue her cartoon work while indulging in country pursuits and enjoying rural Irish culture.
In a further search for the latter, in 1994 she bought a remote mountainside cottage near Strokestown in County Roscommon, where she planted a “druid grove” and a full-sized maze, and kept peacocks, hens and a tortoise. Most significantly she co-founded the Strokestown international poetry festival in 1999, which still continues. Merrily was herself an excellent poet.
The eldest of the four children of Brian Harpur, a director of Associated Newspapers, whose family background was Irish, and his wife, Alicia (nee Myers), Merrily was born in Buckinghamshire and brought up in Surrey. She boarded at Headington school, Oxford, and in 1967, went to Trinity College Dublin, to study English literature. Graduating in 1971, she began an apprenticeship as a picture restorer in Upton Bishop, Herefordshire. Always naturally talented at drawing and painting, and with a quirky sense of the absurd, in 1977 she moved to Hammersmith, London, to focus on becoming a cartoonist.
Merrily’s interests included traditional Irish music and she befriended many musicians, notably the Chieftains and especially their flute player, Matt Molloy, writing the sleeve notes for his solo albums. She was an accomplished fly fisher, fishing annually on Scottish and Irish salmon rivers. She was well informed about ancient history, sacred sites and early earthworks. She became fascinated by “big cat” sightings, and presented her findings in Mystery Big Cats (2006).
In 2003 Merrily moved back to the UK, immersing herself in village life in Cattistock, Dorset. There she was able to focus on her first love, painting. She was drawn to the landscape of sweeping hills and lone trees, realised mainly in oils, but also linocuts and prints. Active in Dorset Art Weeks, she sold her work from her cottage and set up the cheekily named “Tate Cattistock” with fellow local artists.
She ran weekend Mythic Imagination courses in Cattistock, in which the idea of sacred landscapes featured strongly; and wrote the libretto for an oratorio based on a Dorset myth, The Fox That Walked on Water, with music composed by Nick Morris, which was performed in 2013 as part of the Fox festival she organised in the village.
Merrily was naturally enthusiastic and invariably wise. She set less store by innate characteristics and more by the exercise of virtues such as kindness and compassion. She unfailingly helped and supported her family and friends; and made the lives of two nonagenarian aunts happy in their decline. She personified joie de vivre, loved entertaining friends to dinner and lifted the spirits of all who spent time with her.
Merrily is survived by her brothers, Patrick, John and James.
• Merrily Jane Charlotte Harpur, cartoonist, born 2 April 1948; died 4 December 2024
