Hey, friend.
Every so often, I share a post about people I think you might like. I like them all. Very much. I figure, if you like me, you’ll probably like them.
The series is called “Someone You Might Like”, and you can find the entire archive here.
#26: Peter de Sève
Wednesday 28th October, 2026
Philippe Labaune Gallery, Chelsea
I walked out of Peter de Sève’s new show tonight wanting to do two things: buy everything on the walls, and quit.
I can afford neither.
Tonight was the friends-and-family opening of City Dwellers, Peter’s second solo show at Philippe Labaune Gallery on West 24th Street, a couple of blocks from where I used to live. It opens to the public tomorrow. The room was full of some of the greatest artists in New York City. (Also, me.)
The last time I saw his work on these walls was 2023, for Local Fauna, and I left that one in roughly the same condition: dazzled, a bit sweaty, and suddenly very aware of my own hands.
And Copper was incredible. Copper is Philippe’s dog and the gallery’s mascot. He guarded the door all night, then did laps of the room collecting scratches and rubs, mostly from Emily. He’s a far better networker than I am.
The best part of the night was watching storied artists, people like the cartoonist Peter Kuper, stop in front of a piece and just stare, jaw open. Not only at the finished paintings. At the roughs. At the pencils. You could see it in their eyes: pure respect for the work.
(When Peter Kuper stares at your pencils with his mouth open, you’ve made it. When people stare at mine with their mouths open, it’s usually because I’ve spelled something wrong.)
I got to talk to both Peters, hang out with them for as long as was socially acceptable, and congratulate Peter D on his prolificity, a word I’m only about sixty per cent sure exists. (Hirschfeld called himself a “characterist,” which isn’t a word either, so I’m in good company.)
Philippe has been busy since 2023. He’s renovated and moved things around, and it’s so much nicer. There’s a new little nook around the back, a properly intimate space, and it’s perfect for the smaller pieces. Most Chelsea galleries are built like aircraft hangars for one sculpture of a sad horse. This one now feels more like somebody’s front room, if somebody had filled their front room with Peter de Sèves. You get real time with the work. You can stand close enough to see where the pencil stops and the ink starts, and the spots where he changed his mind.
(For a cartoonist, that’s the good part. It’s the drawing equivalent of reading someone’s search history.)
If you don’t know the name, you know the work. Peter has been drawing covers for The New Yorker for decades, like the lion sitting in a Park Slope café, eyeing the gazelles through the window. And if you have grandchildren, you’ve met his squirrel. Peter was the lead character designer on Ice Age, so the sabre-toothed squirrel who spends every film chasing one acorn while the planet falls apart around him came off Peter’s drawing board. So did characters in A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, The Grinch and The Little Prince. He has an Emmy for character design, the Society of Illustrators’ Hamilton King Award, and a place in its Hall of Fame.
People think that squirrel is a cartoon. I think it’s a documentary. One acorn. Glaciers cracking, continents drifting, and he will not let go of the acorn. That’s every freelance cartoonist I know. (That’s me with a New Yorker pitch.)
Peter has said the first thing he saw in that character was the twitchiness, a nervous little creature, so he drew him digging and looking frantic. Of course he did. The gallery’s notes for this show say Peter grew up on the edge of Long Island, hunting the local ponds for turtles, frogs and snakes, and hanging around the neighbourhood pet shop until the owner gave up and hired him.
Peter told Steven Heller at PRINT that for most of his career his work served an assignment: an article, a film. Now that editorial work and freelance character design are both drying up, he draws more for his own enjoyment. A lot of what’s in this show was aimed at what he calls “the blurry target of The New Yorker.” He pitched those pieces knowing plenty of them never had a chance, and drew them anyway.
When Peter said a few words last night, he told us Philippe likes to insist it was Peter who got him started, that the success of Peter’s first show here is what got the gallery going. Then Peter said no, it’s actually the other way round. These days, when he pitches a cover to The New Yorker, and it gets rejected, he doesn’t throw the idea away. He takes it all the way to finished art, knowing it might hang in his next show with Philippe.
I know that target. I’ve been lobbing things at it for years. The difference is that Peter’s misses get framed and hung in Chelsea. Mine go back in the drawer. (Or the bin.)
There’s also a section of loose drawings and sketches he did for no reason at all, which he says he’s as proud of as the finished pieces. He says he draws them with no plan, so just making it to the other end of the tightrope counts as a win. That’s where I spent most of the night.
The one piece that stopped me was a woman standing in front of an enormous painting of the New York skyline. She’s not looking at the painting. She’s bent over, leaning in, squinting at the little card on the wall underneath it.
I met Peter through Nick Galifianakis, and through this gallery, though I couldn’t tell you which came first.
Here’s why Nick was the right man to introduce us. When Peter went into the Society of Illustrators Hall of Fame in 2016 (the same year as Beatrix Potter, who couldn’t make it on the night), Nick wrote his tribute. In it, he describes sitting in his own studio after two in the morning, overworking a drawing, when his fax machine would screech to life. Slowly, a pencil sketch would come through from a studio in Brooklyn, sent by an artist who couldn’t stand it. Nick would hunt for the flaw before the phone rang. He never found one.
Nick also reports what could be heard, regularly, from inside young Peter’s studio:
