Pierre Bellocq

Pierre Camille Lucien Hilaire Jean Bellocq (born November 25, 1926 in Bedenac, Charente-Maritime, France) is a French-American artist and horse racing cartoonist known as "Peb". As a small boy, his family moved to Maisons-Laffitte where his father worked at the local race track. There, at a young age Pierre Bellocq used his natural talent to begin creating caricatures of horses and horse people. At age 19, the French racing journal France Courses gave him national exposure when they published one of his cartoons of a jockey. Bellocq signed the drawing as "Peb", a signature which would become his lifelong moniker. Within a few years Peb was widely known and an emerging artist who also gained recognition for his caricatures on sports advertising posters.

By 1954, Bellocq's work had achieved international recognition and he was contracted by Laurel Park owner John D. Schapiro to do drawings for the inaugural running of the Washington, D.C. International Stakes. He settled in the United States and in early 1955 accepted an offer to work as the staff cartoonist for the Morning Telegraph newspaper and its sister paper, the Daily Racing Form, a job he held until December 2008.

Pierre Bellocq has produced several books; his first consisted of 150 cartoons and was titled Peb's Equine Comedy. It was published by Random House in 1957 and is still in print. As well, he did the illustrations for the 1969 Joe Hirsch book A Treasury of Questions and Answers from the Morning Telegraph and Daily Racing Form. In 2004, he created drawings for author Ed Hotaling's book on jockey Jimmy Winkfield whom Bellocq had known personally when the African American rider was living and racing in his hometown of Maisons-Laffitte, France.

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