Bernhard Gillam was born on April 28, 1856, in Banbury, Oxfordshire, England, the seventh of the fourteen children of John Sewell Gillam, artist and inventor, and his wife, Lucy Clarke. In 1866, he emigrated with his parents to America and settled in New York.
Aside from three years’ training in the schools of Williamsburg, New York, Gillam was practically self-educated. In the drawing, his favorite activity from early childhood, he had no lessons until he was grown.
While Gillam was still in his teens, he entered a lawyer’s office as a copyist, with the intention of reading law. The work proved dull, however, and when he came of age, he gave it up to study engraving. He had begun to sell his drawings in 1876. They were of a humble order - show cards for window display, illustrations for serials in weeklies, and sketches for newspapers.
For a time, he had ambitions to be a portrait-painter, and through the kindness of Henry Ward Beecher, an early subject, he found a few people to sit for him. His first drawings to indicate his own artistic idiom, however, were his caricatures in Leslie’s Weekly and the New York Graphic.
After their appearance, his career was determined, and he continued until his death a political cartoonist. During the Garfield campaign, he worked with Thomas Nast on Harper’s Weekly.
The following year, 1881, he was engaged by Puck, in which his caricatures of Blaine appeared during the campaign of 1884.
In 1886, with the reorganization of Judge, Gil- lam became part owner, along with W. J. Arkell.
During the following ten years, while he was director-in-chief and a contributing member of the staff, Judge became a powerful factor in the molding of political opinion.
Gillam’s cartoons for the campaigns of 1888 and 1892, stressing the perils of Democratic free trade, and the need of Republican protection.
The last was intended to celebrate the expected Republican victory, but by skillful last-minute touches was altered to commiserate the defeat. Gillam’s cartoons were done in color and given double-page space in the center of the magazine.
He died there of typhoid fever at the age of thirty-nine, in the home of his father-in-law, Hon. James Arkell.
Although Gillam was himself a Republican, voted for Blaine, and during the same campaign suggested satires of Cleveland for Judge, his series of cartoons in Puck from April 16 to October 29, showing Blaine as the “tattooed man, ” was “probably the most far-reaching ever drawn and did dreadful damage to the Republican candidate”.
In 1889, Gillam married Bartelle Arkell.
