Claude Lovat Fraser was born in London and educated at Charterhouse, and afterwards studied for a time with the painter Walter Sickert. He did some illustrating before the First World War, where served with the Durham Light Infantry and was severely shell shocked and gassed as Loos. His fame rests chiefly on his sets and costumes for John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1920). His work was executed in the ‘chapbook’ style, black outlines and flat areas of colour. He died in Sandgate, Kent on 18 June 1921.