Albéric Bourgeois

Albéric Bourgeois, comic strip artist, columnist, musician and composer, was born 29 November 1876 at Montréal and died 17 November 1962. Bourgeois studied art in Montreal then moved to the United States where he worked as a newspaper illustrator and drew the English-language comic strip “The Education of Annie,” for the Boston Post. He worked on the strip from 1900 to 1903, then went home and was employed by Montreal’s La Patrie, where he worked drawing comic strips from 1903 to 1905.

Bourgeois created the series Des aventures de Timothee a la famille Citrouillard (The Adventures of Timothy) in 1904, with word balloons replacing the usual captions of newspaper comics. He drew dozens of other strips for La Patrie, one called Les chroniques de Baptiste et de Catherine, featuring the Quebec everyman, Baptiste. Alberic Bourgeois then joined the daily newspaper La Presse in 1905 and stayed until his retirement in 1954.

He illustrated Les voyages de Ladébauche, published in Montréal: A. & N. Pelletier, (191?) and Joyeux propos de Gros-Jean; petits monologues comiques en prose rime, by Régis Roy (1928). A slim book, Albéric Bourgeois, caricaturist (Montréal-Nord : VLB), was written by Léon-A. Robidoux, with prefaces by Normand Hudon, and Robert LePalme (1978).

*Top Illustration from the Montreal Gazette, 3 March 1942. (And its very hard to find images by Bourgeois these days.)