Arthur Wardle was born in London in 1864 and started painting at a very early age. In later life, he stated that his artistic education had been undertaken ‘privately’. He had no formal training, but as an aspiring artist, would probably have taken lessons from some of the many artists resident near his home in Chelsea. In 1880, when Wardle was only 16, his paintings were first accepted for exhibitions. The subjects of this period reveal little of the artist’s later work; rather they read like the standard titles of a hundred Victorian landscapists – grey days, twilights, evening glows and moonrises. In 1880 Wardle lived in Oakley Square, Camden, but artistic success enabled him to move to the rather more upmarket 34 Alma Square in St John’s Wood by 1892. In the 1890s however, new titles signal a change of direction in his work: his exhibition at Suffolk Street in the winter of 1890-91 and at the Royal Academy the following summer, marked Wardle’s conversion to animal painting. This coincided with the maturing of his technique as an artist. Perhaps because Wardle was largely self-taught, he was slow to develop as a painter and his early works, though competent, show little of the facility with oil which emerged in the mid 1890s. Wardle established his reputation as a painter at the RA with a series of large oils of mythological or imaginative scenes which combined figures, often loosely draped, with animals. The Bacchante of 1909, described in The Studio (Vol 52, 1911, page 208) as a ‘charming fantasy … The Bacchante is particularly to be noted for the beauty of its line arrangements and for the charm of its colour, but it is also singularly attractive as an example of his animal painting at its best: it has all his intimacy of observation, all his sense of character, all his intelligent regard for nature, and it is distinguished not less by its freshness of conception and grace of style’ Wardle’s reputation may have been established with his large mythological paintings, but his most individual work was in pastel which underwent a revival in Britain in the 1890s. Inspired by French art, many leading British artists had experimented successfully with pastel, leading to the foundation of the Pastel Society, of which Wardle was elected member in 1911. Pastels were important to him as they were easily portable and they enabled him to work with speed – vital when his subjects were restless wild beasts who were liable to suddenly move, or stalk off and could not be obligingly rearranged like a studio model. A long article by the critic Alfred Lys Baldry published in The Studio magazine in July 1916 paid tribute to Wardle’s skill in the medium: He has a brilliant appreciation of the genius of pastel … He used it with delightful dexterity and with a sureness of touch. If his wildlife subjects earned him critical acclaim – and indeed important sales it was his dog paintings, however, which gave him a wider fame among the public. His images were widely reproduced; several tobacco companies commissioned Wardle to design sets of cigarette cards of dogs, no less than 250 in all, which proved to be enormously popular; he was commissioned to paint dog paintings for books, postcards, playing cards, calendars, chocolate boxes, pottery and biscuit tins. Wardle painted what is probably the best known painting of the fox terrier in its modern form, The Totteridge XI (1897). The painting was commissioned by the fox terrier breeder Francis Redmond; Wardle painted a number of Redmond’s dogs. The original is in the gallery of The Kennel Club in London. Public collections in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa purchased major paintings by Wardle. In the first two decades of the 20th century, he was one of the best-known British animal painters. He portrayed an astonishing diversity of subjects with an engaging naturalism, and a command of different media. Unlike most British animal and sporting artists who restricted themselves to horse and hound, deer and domesticated beasts, Wardle both drew and painted every mammal from elephant to mouse – in watercolour, pastel and oils. In 1924 Wardle was one of the few animal artists represented at the ‘Palace of Arts’ at the Great British Empire Exhibition at Wembley and in 1931, he held his first one-man exhibition at the Fine Art Society, consisting largely of big game subjects. Despite showing no fewer than 113 works at the RA during his working life, he never managed to secure election to that august body. Arthur Wardle died on 16 July 1949.