Straight through the horse’s ears
Sketching even from the saddle gave the hunting and rural scenes of Lionel Edwards the edge in authenticity, believes
The paintings of Lionel Edwards enjoy a rare authenticity, thanks to his habit of sketching from the saddle, finds Octavia Pollock
TO gaze at a Lionel Edwards hunting scene is to feel the wind and hear the hounds. Few artists capture the sport as he does, because few knew it as he did. As he said: ‘However admirable the artistic treatment, a real understanding of what is happening is absolutely necessary.’
Edwards’s love for the countryside and all its inhabitants was nurtured during his childhood in north Wales. His education was irregular due to the family’s straitened circumstances, but his habit of sketching sustained him; he completed his first hunting drawing, of a huntsman and hound, at the age of five.
Moving to London in 1895, he studied at The Heatherley School of Fine Art and Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting. Although he felt starting too swiftly meant he ‘turned out some dreadful trash’, he burnished a skill of working quickly that stood him in excellent stead as a journalist. He drew an invaluable record of the last years of equine traffic and sketched polo from the sidelines, unable to afford to play the fashionable sport himself.
Edwards would escape the dirt of London as often as possible, travelling with his indefatigable mother to hunt. It was with her that he first experienced stag-hunting on Exmoor and came to love the ‘open treeless country’. He encountered the Devon & Somerset hounds when exercising a hunter bareback and found himself galloping downhill for some ‘ludicrous and uncomfortable minutes’.
Witnessing the stag at bay gave him his first painting of the sport and its sale gave him, in turn, his first exhibition, in a rented parish room at Porlock in Somerset, but he never subscribed to the Continental fashion for depicting the kill: ‘The elementary ferocity… is repugnant to British sportsmen.’ Edwards knew that ‘outside the hunt staff, no one goes hunting merely to see a fox killed’ and discussed his hunter’s affection for the hunted, ‘quite illogical, [but] none the less real’, in his books The Fox and The Wiles of the Fox. Observed sketches (one model was his own pet fox, Charlie) and anecdotes discuss in impressive detail how the animals live, breed, hunt and baffle the hounds.
Snobbish Munnings dismissed Edwards as a “very good illustrator, terrible artist”
In 1903, Edwards left London for good and he and his wife, Ethel, whom he married in 1905, devoted themselves to hunting. With no money to spare, they did the hard graft of stablework themselves, as Edwards set himself to master his subject. Naturally gifted, he never stopped refining his skills, even carrying a portable artist’s box when out riding, drawing scenes that caught his eye and noting the colours down the edge.
He sketched with an assurance and spontaneity that breathes life into his finished works, which have the liveliness of the Impressionists tempered with accurate detail. His use of diagonals draws you in, moving the eye from one point to another—not an innovative technique, but an effective one. His skies were famous, full of wind and cold winter sun.
Edwards valued the new photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904) that revealed for the first time the exact position of a horse’s legs at gallop, but pointed out that far more was needed to give the illusion of speed, not only brushwork, but how
a horse reaches for his bit and the rider leans forward. Working at a time when abstraction was consuming much of the art world, he had sympathy with Sir Alfred Munnings’s 1949 Royal Academy outburst ‘for God’s sake make it look like a tree’. He cared less for the critic than for those who bought his work and was pragmatically happy to carry out commercial illustration.
The snobbish Munnings once dismissed him as a ‘very good illustrator, terrible artist’, but, with characteristic geniality, Edwards never held it against him. Rather, he was generous towards fellow artists, particularly Peter Biegel, whom he promoted to potential clients, praising his ‘doggy drawings’. Edwards did not suffer fools gladly, but was kind, self-effacing and ever the gentleman, valuing hard work and standards.
Indeed, his illustrations, such as those for Black Beauty and Moorland Mousie, the story of an Exmoor pony, are justly admired, revealing personality and the relationship of horse and rider in a few lines. As well as illustrating his own books and the hunting verse of the likes of Will Ogilvie, he contributed to volumes on racing, historical subjects and magazines, particularly Country Life. First to be accepted were sketches of the wild cattle of Chillingham in Northumberland in 1900 and he continued to write and draw for this publication for the rest of his life.