Pierre "Peb" Bellocq

Pierre Bellocq died early on the morning of Thursday, November 12, 2026, at the Princeton Medical Center in Princeton, New Jersey, after a brief illness. He was 99, 13 days before his 100th birthday. The Thoroughbred Daily News and the Paulick Report reported his death that day. The specific cause was not made public. Services had not been determined at the time of the announcement.

Pierre Bellocq was born on November 25, 1926, in Bedenac, Charente-Maritime, France. Racing ran through his family: his father, Hilaire, was a steeplechase jockey, his grandfather was a trainer and his great-grandfather was a breeder. As a small boy he moved with his family to Maisons-Laffitte, the racing town outside Paris, where his father worked at the racecourse. His brother Louis became a leading jockey there.

He began drawing as a young child, copying cartoons from the newspapers and filling albums with caricatures of politicians. During the Second World War, racing continued around Paris under German occupation, and Bellocq documented it with both a sketchbook and a camera. One photograph he took at Maisons-Laffitte shows Louis returning after a race with two uniformed German officers in the crowd. Decades later Peb said that even amid the madness of war, local fans still came out to set their burdens aside for a few hours and try to pick a winner. At Maisons-Laffitte he also came to know the American jockey Jimmy Winkfield, who was then living and riding in the town.

No formal art school training has been documented in the sources reviewed. His early training, as he described it, came from copying newspaper cartoons as a boy and drawing the racing world he grew up in at Maisons-Laffitte. He turned professional as a cartoonist in 1945.

At 19, Bellocq had a cartoon of a jockey published by the French racing journal France Courses, giving him national exposure. He signed it Peb, and the name stuck for life. Through the late 1940s and early 1950s he became well known in France, including for caricatures on sports advertising posters.

In 1954 Laurel Park owner John D. Schapiro commissioned him to create logos, program covers and artwork for the inaugural Washington, D.C. International. He crossed the Atlantic on a cargo plane with the visiting horses. That introduction to American racing led to a job offer, and on April 1, 1955, his first cartoon for the Morning Telegraph, sister paper of the Daily Racing Form, appeared to mark opening day at Jamaica Racetrack.

Walter Annenberg then owned both the Form and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and for several years Bellocq also drew political cartoons for the Inquirer. When Annenberg sold the Inquirer in the early 1970s, the new owners wanted him to pick one beat. He chose horse racing, explaining, "I was born into racing."

For more than five decades his cartoons marked the sport's biggest days, often as Daily Racing Form front pages on the biggest race days. He liked to tie races to current events, once putting a jumbled version of a President Clinton apology into the mouth of the difficult colt Coronado's Quest before the 1998 Travers. He left the Form in December 2008 after 53 years, then became a regular contributor to the Thoroughbred Daily News.

Alongside his cartoons he painted large murals for racetracks including Churchill Downs, Belmont Park, Del Mar, Arlington, Oaklawn, Aqueduct and the Meadowlands. At 78 he was still taking on major works, and the Churchill Downs mural of Kentucky Derby winning jockeys was unveiled on April 21, 2005. He later updated the Belmont Park mural, painted a trainers' mural at Churchill Downs and took a commission at Del Mar.

Bellocq settled in the United States in the mid 1950s and lived for many years in Princeton, New Jersey, where he kept his studio. His first wife, Denise, died before him, as did his daughter Lise. He was later married to Marie-Denise. His children included sons Remi, Pierre Jr. and Denis and daughter Brigitte Toth, and he had a stepdaughter, Elisabeth. Remi became an executive in racing education and later a cartoonist for the Thoroughbred Daily News, and Pierre Jr. became a Thoroughbred trainer in Southern California. A keen rider himself, Bellocq trained as an amateur jockey in the 1950s and founded the Amateur Riders' Club of America.

Bellocq saw his work as a bridge between European and American racing. "I have tried to bring my heritage and my background from France into this job," he said. "In France and in England, you still find an element of sport and beauty that is at the heart of the racing there. I try to depict that in my drawings." He believed humour was good for a sport that needed it, and some of his cartoons took positions, such as one in which a horse rebukes his jockey for excessive whipping with the line "You made your point, Mac."

He was a passionate advocate of amateur racing. "Racing started out with amateurs," he said, adding that in France the word amateur means for pleasure, while in America it suggests someone who does not know what they are doing.

For generations of racing fans, Peb's cartoon was part of the ritual of a big race day. His drawings gave horses personalities and inner lives and caught the character of the sport's people with warmth and wit. His murals remain on public view at racetracks, and his books, beginning with Peb's Equine Comedy in 1957, kept his work in circulation for decades. Thoroughbred Daily News publisher Sue Finley said a NYRA giveaway of Peb's Equine Comedy as a teenager drew her into a career in racing. His son Remi continues the family's cartooning tradition. Tributes on his death came from across the industry, with Paulick Report founder Ray Paulick writing, "There will never be another Peb."

Special Eclipse Award for Outstanding Contributions to Racing (1980). Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, awarded by the French government (1983). National Cartoonists Society Sports Cartoon Award (1991). National Cartoonists Society Newspaper Illustration Award (1999). Exhibition "The Racing World in Sketch and Caricature" at the Daniel Wildenstein gallery in New York (1998). Special exhibition "Peb: The Art of Humor" at the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame, July 2004 to December 2005, marking 50 years of his American racing art. The Jockey Club Medal, presented by chairman Stuart S. Janney III in Saratoga Springs (2016). National Museum of Racing's Joe Hirsch Media Roll of Honor (selected 2020).

Books: Peb's Equine Comedy (Random House, 1957); Peb 71 (1971); Peb at Keeneland (1986); Forty Years of Peb: The Racing World in Sketch and Caricature (1995); Peb: The Art of Humor (2004); PEB: Possum, Emu, Bat: Ablafor and the Art of Sleeping (2005). Illustrations for Joe Hirsch's A Treasury of Questions and Answers from the Morning Telegraph and Daily Racing Form (1969) and for Ed Hotaling's 2004 book on Jimmy Winkfield.

Murals: Churchill Downs (Kentucky Derby jockeys, unveiled 2005, and a trainers' mural), Belmont Park clubhouse, Del Mar, Arlington, Oaklawn, Aqueduct, the Meadowlands, and "Canvas of Stars" at Gallagher's Steak House in New York.

In 2023 he and Remi appeared on the TDN Writers' Room podcast, and he was the subject of a Keeneland film, The Artistry of Peb.