Robert Brook

Despite a great deal of digging, almost nothing is known about artist Robert Brook. He appears to have begun working for the educational weekly Look and Learn in around 1965 and produced both colour and black & white illustrations for the magazine. His work could be highly detailed, as shown in the illustration above which he produced for the cover of issue 297 (23 September 1967), depicting a scene from Margaret Landon's novel Anna and the King, which was later turned into the musical The King and I (filmed in 1956, starring Deborah Kerr and Yul Brynner).

This was one of a series of covers Brook produced featuring famous couples, others including Hiawatha & Minnehaha, Robespierre & Eleanor Duplay, Andrian Nikolayev & Valentina Tereshkova (two Russian cosmonauts) and Heathcliff & Cathy. Other cover series drawn by Brook included "Animal Heroes" and "Famous Partnerships".

Inside Look and Learn, he illustrated the serial "The Red Bonnet" by Henry Garnett with some delightful black & white illustrations and a feature on "The Literary Lambs"—Charles and Mary. He often worked in colour, illustrating historical features such as "The Tyrant of Mysore", about the Duke of Wellington's defeat of the Sultan of Mysore in 1799, and a long-running feature on "Dancing Around the World", which ran for 20 episodes in 1968.

Brook disappeared from the pages of Look and Learn to destinations unknown. Thankfully, some of his artwork has survived the years and is available for purchase at the Illustration Art Gallery.