Caroline Artiss is a French-born artist and illustrator who became famous for her patriotic artwork during World War Two. She created over sixty award-winning works of art, most notably The Return of the Painters. Though not originally from France, she had much of her work classified as ‘France’ in her native England. She never served in the armed forces but was instead a talented and promising illustrator who pursued her artistic career in Britain. She lived in London and worked as a typist before eventually moving to New York City where she began to create political cartoons for newspapers and magazines.
After leaving Britain, her work moved across the Atlantic to Washington D.C. where it was used for advertisements and public announcements and finally to Chicago where she pursued a career as a cartoonist before finally settling down into a career as an illustrator. It was whilst she was still living in Washington that she began to paint professionally and although her career stalled for a while after the death of her first husband, she rediscovered her passion for painting and now shows much interest in commissioning original paintings of her own. As a cartoonist, she has produced some of the most recognizable and loved political cartoons of the modern era and has even received honors for these works. Now, as she ages, she is looking forward to painting more maturely and is hoping to one day pass on the paintings she produces to her surviving children.
Though she has not formally been married since the end of her marriage, she is still legally called married-the-name-with-one-word (her maiden name was Carol). It was not always this way though as she describes herself as a ‘housewife’ throughout her life-partly because she had no money when she was a teenager and partly as she resented the strict social expectations which governed her father’s and other siblings’ lives. It was not until she reached her thirties that she decided to take on a career as a cartoonist and had enough knowledge of English to establish a studio in Manhattan where she spent her younger years. As she got older, she saw the profession as a menial job and even considered it beneath her capabilities to become a writer or a painter. Then she met Albert Odden, who was like a role model, taking interest in her work and urging her to develop a career in illustration before he went on to become one of the most famous cartoonists of the twentieth century. They were married in 1931 and have been together ever since.