Charles Tunnicliffe, high-flying wildlife artist

by Christopher Proudlove©
Charles Tunnicliffe looked for all the world like a farmer ... big and burly, with hands like cornbin lids, more likely to be swinging a pitchfork than holding a paintbrush. In fact, he was a deeply sensitive craftsman of delicate, artistic skill who became arguably Britain's finest wildlife artist of his time.

He drew birds mostly ... with such scientific precision and painstaking care that it cost him his sight. He was born a farmer but died in 1979 a Royal Academician leaving behind him a legacy of wonderful art; only now has his work gained widespread recognition and acclaim.

The first hint of the artist's future importance was in May, 1981, when a
collection of several hundred drawings, sketchbooks and manuscripts that had been found in his studio at Shorelands overlooking the Malltraeth Estuary on Anglesey, North Wales, were sent for sale at Christie's.

The remarkable collection was Tunnicliffe's private reference library: a painted and sketched record of plummage, beaks, feet and eyes of every species of bird imaginable, birds in flight, birds feeding, swimming, perching, all captured in exact, measured detail.

These pictures were the tools of his trade, his catalogue for his commission customers, but apart from a brief exhibition in 1974, the world was unaware of them. However, publicity surrounding the auction dispersal of the collection alerted the authorities.

With three days to spare before the sale, Anglesey Borough Council stepped in with a £400,000 bid and bought the entire collection. It was the culmination of a national appeal, led by Tunnicliffe’s friend, Wales’s greatest 20th century artist the late Sir Kyffin Williams, backed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (of which Tunnicliffe had been a vice-president and benefactor) and the National Museum of Wales. The collection can be seen today at Oriel Ynys Môn, near Llangefni, which was built specifically to house it.

Charles Tunnicliffe (1901-1979) was born in 1901 in Langley, near Macclesfield, Cheshire, the son of William Tunnicliffe, and his wife, Margaret. The couple also had two daughters.

In 1903, the family moved to a small farm that took its name from the village of Sutton Lane Ends, again on the outskirts of Macclesfield, and it was there that Tunnicliffe found his first artistic inspiration.

From an early age he had surprised his family and teachers with his ability to draw animals. The boy's schoolmaster realised his talents and arranged a scholarship for him at Macclesfield College of Art, where he fitted his studies around helping his father on the farm.

Under normal circumstances the young boy would have followed his father into farming, but the art bug had bitten deep. Some summer mornings Tunnicliffe would be up at four o'clock and harnessing the horse to cut the hayfield before starting his day's work as a student.

However, an abrupt change of environment came a couple of years after the Armistice. Tunnicliffe's art tutors suggested he try for a scholarship at the Royal College of Art and when he was accepted at the age of 19, he leapt at the chance to broaden his horizons.

There was great excitement on the auction circuit when a cache of drawings by Tunnicliffe, some of which were believed to be previously unseen and unpublished, were uncovered in the home of his late niece.
It appears that in addition to the measured drawings now on exhibition in Anglesey, Tunnicliffe made a number of bequests to family members, one of which was a group of about 18 works discovered in her home following his niece’s recent death. They were sold at Cheshire auctioneers Peter Wilson in July for a total of £14,382. They had been expected to fetch £10,000. Click here to see some of the works sold.

Again the young student impressed and he readily agreed when it was suggested he stay on for an extra year to study etching. It was during this time that he produced a now prized series of etchings showing mainly farming and rural scenes. He also met Winifred Wonnacott who later became his wife.

After living for seven years in London, latterly earning a living as a printmaker, he returned to Macclesfield, married Winifred and set about making a career for himself as a book illustrator and commercial artist.

His first commission was for wood engravings for Henry Williamson's “Tarka the Otter”, followed by “The Lone Swallows”, “The Old Stag” and “A Peregrine's Saga”, Tunnicliffe illustrated more than 80 books including ones by H.E. Bates and Ernest Hemingway.

Tunnicliffe was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1945, more than anything for the high standard of his engraving. He was elected a full Academician 10 years later.

His ties with the Cheshire countryside were finally broken in 1947 when he and his wife found a house on Anglesey suitable for their studio. They had been regular visitors to the island on birdwatching trips and the house, Shorelands, at Malltraeth, with magnificent views to Snowdon and at the Water's edge of the Cefni estuary, he described as his “escape”.

It was there that he produced his best work. Commissions flooded in and at the same time he toiled unremittingly on the measured drawings of wildlife. Word spread that Tunnicliffe wanted dead birds to measure and draw and friends would watch for fatalities at the roadside and bring them to his house. Rarer finds sometimes arrived by post but all had died by accident - Tunnicliffe refused to kill a bird in order to draw it.

This exact recording of wildlife was a gruelling task, drawing of a creature often taking up to four days to complete, and Tunnicliffe's health began to suffer. The death of his wife in 1969 affected him badly and his eyesight began to fail. He died in 1979, in his chair by the fireside from a heart attack, a year after being awarded the OBE.


Picture shows a gouache study of Waxwings, sold for £200. Click here to see a slideshow of other works by Charles Tunnicliffe

16980-061010-869370-87


© 2006 All Rights Reserved.

Picasso - pictures for the price of a print

by Christopher Proudlove©
It's possible to pick up a Pablo Picasso print on an Internet site selling posters for £7.99. At the time of writing, a quick check on eBay revealed around 300 currently up for auction, some with a "Buy It Now" option for as little as £4.99. They were all probably printed yesterday. How then do you explain the fact that the print with the lady riding sidesaddle illustrated here sold for £1,650. Or indeed that the other two, at the foot of this page, fetched just £700 and £620 respectively. What makes the conundrum even more difficult to understand is that the auctioneer estimated the value of each of them before the sale at £200-300.

No, I don't know either, but I have a theory. At the spring sale of Impressionist art at Sotheby's in New York, Picasso's portrait of his mistress Dora Maar with her black cat perched on her shoulder sold for £51.6 million. The price that was more than twice the estimate and made the work the second most expensive painting in auction history. The ripple effect spread across the entire art market and Picassos flooded onto the market, one dealer reportedly taking 25 of the artist's works to Switzerland's Art Basel fair last week and selling three of them on the first day.

London's blockbuster Impressionist sales in June were awash with them as owners tried to cash in their investments. At Sotheby's, two of the top 10 most valuable paintings in the sale were by Picasso: an oil on canvas titled The Painter and His Model, done in 1963, sold for £7.4 million, while an oil on board painted in 1901 and showing elegantly dressed racegoers, titled "Les Courses à Auteuil", sold for £2.6 million.

Perhaps it was coincidence that the trio of Picasso prints appeared in a provincial sale when they did, but they were received enthusiastically and made the estimates look woefully inadequate. The three coloured lithographs came from the artist's "Toros Y Toreros" (Bulls and Bullfighters" Series and were titled respectively: “The Bull Ring of Arles”; “The Bull Fight” and “Jacqueline on horseback”.

Picasso’s fascination with the bullfight started when he was a young boy in Malaga. His childhood notebooks from school are filled with sketches of matadors, bullrings, and picadors. Interestingly, the first oil ever created by the young artist was of a matador (1889-1890) and the bullfight remained an important theme that Picasso continued to explore throughout his creative years.

Naturally, a unique work by Picasso is out of the reach of all but the mega-rich, but prints remain affordable - at least for the time being. But there are prints and there are prints. The three illustrated dated from the 1950s and were early impressions of limited editions which in each case numbered just 125. And most importantly, they were signed by the artist himself. This fact alone confers huge significance on the value. Literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Picasso prints are in existence, but not all of them bear his signature which in effect, was his seal of approval.

The trio were originally retailed by the London dealers Templeton & Rawling, whose gallery was based in Kendal Street W2. Each print was accompanied by its authentication certificate, and all three were framed and ready to hang on the wall. Each was a potential prize for a Picasso aficionado with champagne taste but beer pocket money.

Dramatic image

Most valuable of the three, "Jacqueline on Horseback" was an early number 27 in the edition. Another clue to its significance was the impressed the date on the plate which read 10.3.59. "The Bullfight", also numbered 27 in the edition, was an altogether more dramatic image, showing the matador being tossed head over heels by the bull which stands on its hind legs. It sold for £700, while the altogether more childlike and sketchy "The Bullring of Arles", again number 27 in the edition, was cheapest and £620.

Clearly, there is more to buying Picasso prints than it first might appear. Picasso was a prolific printmaker, using all the different techniques to master the art. His lithographs, etchings, drypoints, lino cuts, woodcuts and aquatints were all experiments aimed at pushing the boundaries further and further. Indeed, some of Picasso's graphic works are combinations of several techniques, which really tested his printmaker's skills.

A series of 15 drypoints and etchings called Les Saltimbanques (The street acrobats) were Picasso's first venture into printmaking in 1905 and the results were published by the dealer Vollard in 1913. More followed in the early 1930s but it was not until after the Second World War that most of Picasso's prints were created.

From 1945 to 1949 he produced a massive body of about 200 lithographs working in close co-operation with Henri Deschamps, a professional printmaker from the Mourlot studio, a renowned art publisher and print workshop in Paris.

Prices vary wildly. In May this year, Christie's New York sold an etching and aquatint done in 1938 and titled "Girl with Tambourine" for £401,800. It was signed in pencil and numbered number 17 from an edition of 30, but as we have seen, 1950s signed Picasso prints can be purchased for a fraction of the price.

Prints from large editions, made after the artist's death and obviously therefore unsigned, but still by skilled printmakers copying his drawings as their base material are still highly collectable though not necessarily good vehicles for investment. The ones to avoid are those that purport to have been signed by the master but whose signatures are also copies and engraved onto the plates from which the prints are produced.

Or you could just buy them anyway because they look great in any trendy minimalist setting when framed and hung together. And when you get bored with them you simply throw them away and replace them with new, cheap alternatives.

Pictures show, top: "Jacqueline on horseback”, which sold for £1,650

Above, left: "The Bull Ring of Arles", which sold for £620 and "The Bull Fight", which sold for £700

75955-060925-676689-46


© 2006 All Rights Reserved.