William Gunning King

William Gunning King was a British painter and illustrator, trained at South Kensington and the Royal Academy Schools, who exhibited widely in London and drew regularly for Punch, The Graphic and the Windsor Magazine. He specialised in rural and animal subjects, and his gently observed country characters are exactly the register of the 1906 cartoon whose caption became this saying. He is best described as the man who gave the line its famous form, not its inventor — the same joke was circulating anonymously in newspapers a year earlier.