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Arthur Wardle
1864 – 1949
It is undeniable
as a child Arthur Wardle must have been blessed with a strong
natural talent to use a pencil and, in due course, the paintbrush.
How else can one explain that with virtually no academic training,
he was accepted at the Royal Academy when he was only sixteen.
In the years that followed, Arthur Wardle became
one of the leading animal painters of the period, especially
his paintings of hounds in full cry.
When Wardle exhibited his first work at the Royal
Academy in 1880, he was living and working in Camden in Oakley
Square. Twelve years later he had become well enough known to
be financially secure. He was therefore able to move to the
more fashionable area in St John’s Wood where he purchased
a property in Alma Square.
Although Wardle is best known for his oil paintings,
he was also just as successful in the media of watercolour and
pastel. He was elected to the Pastel Society in 1911 and became
a Member of the Royal Society of Painters in Watercolour in
1922. The amount of hard work and dedication that Wardle applied
to his art in order to achieve the degree of success that he
enjoyed is difficult to appreciate in the light of his lack
of training – it is extremely rare that an artist should
achieve such success in the field of fine art without his serving
an apprenticeship either in an academy or a recognised artists
studio. This is not the case today, but at the end of the 19th
Century there were strict rules to be followed in the search
for success and the acceptance of such by one’s peers
and the public.
By the time Wardle died at the grand age of eighty-five,
having survived the latter days of the 19th Century, two World
Wars and half the Twentieth Century, his continued success had
taken him to the West End of London. He exhibited with the Fine
Arts Society in 1931 and Vicars Brothers in 1935. He also sent
works to Paris, to the Salon where he was also much admired.
Examples of his work are still to be found in France.
Wardle had a searching eye of the conformation
of different animals, but where he excelled was in his large
composition of hounds running. He caught exactly the almost
fluid motion of a hunting pack, pouring through a gap in the
hedge, down a bank or along a gully like flood water. Standing
in front of such a canvas, one can almost hear hounds giving
tongue, spurred on by the huntsman’s horn.
During his long career Arthur Wardle exhibited
twenty-one paintings at the Royal Academy, twenty-nine at Suffolk
Street, twenty at the New Watercolour Society and twenty-seven
subjects at various shows in Paris and the provinces.
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