Marie Duval


Isabelle Émilie de Tessier who worked under the pseudonym Marie Duval, was a French cartoonist, known as co-creator of the seminal cartoon character Ally Sloper.

Biography

As co-creator of Ally Sloper with her husband Charles Henry Ross, Tessier was one of the first female cartoonists in Europe, and one of four female contributors to the British satirical magazine Fun edited by Ross. In addition to the Ally Sloper comic strips, Duval produced numerous spot illustrations, cartoons and full page comic strips for the magazine during the mid-nineteenth century. When the Ally Sloper character was given his own magazine, Duval's comic strips were reprinted without her signature.
Duval was also an actress in the English theatre and the author of Queens and Kings and Other Things, a collection of illustrated nonsense verse published under the pseudonym of Princess Hesse Schwartzbourg.