Ralph Thompson: animal artist who illustrated the books of Gerald Durrell (Times UK)
Hyfler/Rosner
From The Times
June 6, 2009
Ralph Thompson: animal artist
Ralph Thompson's career as an animal artist began in earnest
when Rupert Hart-Davis, the publisher,asked him to
illustrate the books of Gerald Durrell. Among the Durrell
books Thompson worked on were The Bafut Beagles, The Drunken
Forest and Menagerie Manor.
Later, writing an introduction to Thompson's own collection
A Brush With Animals (1963), Durrell recollected that he was
"a bit doubtful about the idea of illustrating an animal-
travel book with line drawings". But his fears dissolved
when he saw the pictures. "Not only were they (the drawings)
beautiful, sensitive and accurate," wrote Durrell, "but many
of the things he had drawn were so accurate that he might
have been with me in Africa." He went on: "It was quite
uncanny and I began to suspect that Thompson had indulged in
some curious form of witchcraft to obtain these startling
results."
Ralph Shillito Thompson was born in 1913 at Thorner in West
Yorkshire. He obtained a place at the Leeds College of Art
and went on to take a teaching diploma before winning a
scholarship to the Royal College of Art in London on the
basis of his etchings and line engravings. He moved from his
place in Bayswater, a few days before it was destroyed by a
bomb in September 1940, to Bigfrith End, Cookham Dean,
Berkshire, where he lived for the next 66 years.
As the war began he was employed spray-painting camouflage
on factory roofs. As a conscientious objector, he spent most
of the war working as a farm labourer in Cookham Dean, an
occupation that left little time or energy for painting.
After the war, Thompson made a humble living from
book-jacket illustrations and part-time teaching at
Camberwell College of Art in South London. Then came the
invitation to illustrate Durrell's books.
In the late 1950s he did a series of three-minute programmes
on television entitled Ralph Draws an Animal. The drawings
had to be done quickly, so he developed the technique of
"wet on wet", in which he made rapid strokes on wet paper.
The result was that a freer and more spontaneous style of
drawing and painting began to emerge.
Thompson's best work was done mostly in the 1960s and 1970s
and was admired for the way it captured the movement, spirit
and personality of his animal subjects.
The animal drawings caught the eye of Aylmer Tryon, the
owner of the Tryon Gallery in Cork Street, and a fruitful
relationship began, involving exhibitions from 1954 to 1996
in London, New York and Paris.
At the first exhibition Everard Read invited Thompson to
exhibit at his Johannesburg Gallery and to visit the Kruger
National Park. This, in the days before cheap air travel to
safari parks and also before wildlife television programmes,
inspired and excited Thompson. He would make rapid sketches
from which he would later produce a drawing or painting.
Some of these are beautifully reproduced in An Artist's
Safari (1970).
With the generous assistance of Oliver Brooke, Thompson
explored the major game parks of East Africa, visiting the
Ruwenzori, Budongo Forest and Murchison Falls, and then
Tiger Tops in Nepal and the Kanha Forest Reserve in India.
The safaris led Thompson to hold the animals he saw in deep
affection. He was a keen observer of their movements and
also developed an understanding of their personalities,
which he succeeded in capturing in the best of his work. He
also developed a sincere concern for the future of the
animals and their habitat, which led to him making a
significant contribution to the World Wildlife Fund (now the
WWF), through donating calendars, cards and prints. For this
charitable work he was appointed MBE.
The 1998 exhibition at the Tryon and Swann Gallery was a
disappointment and Thompson was encouraged to move to the
Wildlife Art Gallery in Lavenham, Suffolk, where four
exhibitions were held from 2000 to 2006. The shows also led
to the publication of Dance of the Brush (2006), a book that
chronicled his life and work.
Thompson's first love was animals, especially cats, but he
was devoted to his garden and did some excellent drawings
and watercolours of shrubs, flowers, butterflies,
dragonflies and other objects and creatures. He had a great
sense of fun and a fertile imagination, which gave rise to
crazy cards to family and friends and to such paintings as
his series of flying horses, angels over Lincoln Cathedral
and another book, Chess Dream in a Garden, which appeared in
1993.
In 1967 Thompson was married to Dolores Reilly, often known
as Bill, who was both an inspiration and a constructive
critic of his work until her death in 1982. They had no
children.
Thompson was a cultured and remarkably well-read individual
who took a keen interest in the people and the world around
him. As his life ended, a selection of his paintings was
exhibited at the Cookham Festival.
Ralph Thompson, MBE, animal artist, was born on June, 3,
1913. He died on May 3, 2009, aged 95