“Watch the birdie!” – Getting nature to hold the pose

Wild flowers and garden flowers. You’d think the skills required to illustate one book or the other would be much the same – but that’s not how one artist saw it.

‘British Wild Flowers’ (1957) is one of the best-loved of the Ladybird nature books. It was illustrated by Edith and Rowland Hilder and I was surprised to find out that the Hilders had also been asked to illustrate the companion book ‘Garden Flowers’. Edith was keen, but Rowland turned down the commission.

Instead the job went to John Leigh-Pemberton, whose joyful festival of colour is just as lovely a book – but lovely in a very different way.

This got me thinking about the different approaches of the Ladybird nature artists and what their interpretation tells us about their work.

Let’s start with the Hilders – Edith and Rowland; wife and husband. Edith’s passion was the painting of acutely observed botanical studies while Rowland had already made a name for himself with his stark, sweeping watercolour, mainly of the Kent countryside in winter.

Their two very different styles came together first with a commission from oil company Shell to illustrate their guide ‘Flowers of the Countryside’ – a popular series of advertisement posters, begun in the 1950s. There are lots of similarities between their Shell Guide work and Ladybird’s Wild Flowers – look for example at August.

Although the two artists’ work blends beautifully together, it is clear that Edith painted the foreground studies and Rowland the (usually bleak and moody) backgrounds. The slight disjuncture between Edith’s detail and Rowland’s atmosphere is something of a positive in a field guide. It helps the brain separate the salient features needed for plant identification and makes these stand out from the page.

The book was a big success – of course it was – so why would the Hilder’s turn down the chance to illustrate the sister book: Garden Flowers? In a recently rediscovered letter, it becomes clear that it was Rowland who veto-ed the proposal – feeling that the less dramatic, softer nature of a domestic setting would result in illustrations that looked twee and would therefore be ‘damaging’ to his artistic reputation.

As you will appreciate, it is an extremely difficult business to relate close-up flowers to landscape background. The difficulty with the garden flower idea is that while gardens themselves in reality look very beautiful, they tend to look cheap and sentimental in pictures. Whatever one does, the result tends to look like a cheap “home and gardens” cover and personally I do not feel that I would be able to handle 24 subjects in a way that would not be damaging to myself. My wife, however believes that the thing might be possible and would like to attempt a couple of compositions in the view that the result might convince me that I am wrong in this view. Up to the moment, however, I just cannot see the treatment being successful at all.

He didn’t relent; the commission went to artist John Leigh-Pemberton instead. Perhaps Rowland had a point – but I am left feeling rather sorry for Edith who had who had far fewer opportunities than her husband for wider recognition; the commission would have played to her strengths perfectly.

That brings us to John Leigh-Pemberton for whom the book ‘Garden Flowers’ was the start of a long collaboration with Ladybird. He worked for them steadily from 1960 right up to the 1980s and was their most prolific nature artist. When he approached the topic of garden flowers, how did he escape the curse of “Home & Gardens” sweetness that proved such an obstacle to Rowland Hilder ?

Where the Hilders escaped the ‘twee’ by setting their wild flowers against often striking, rugged landscapes, Leigh-Pemberton’s solution to the garden flowers problem was to find domestic grandeur in … well, grandeur.

Elegant columns, archways, plinths and stately terraces form the backdrop to Leigh-Pemberton’s illustrations. You can even catch glimpses of a carriage in the background and a humble gardener all but doffs his cap at the reader. Even the stream and the thatched cottage (which is huge) seem something of a rustic whim in the grounds of a stately home. And when the whole threatens to get too overpoweringly rich, the artist tempers it with dark, glowering skies and the promise of a downpour.

You might think John Leigh-Pemberton made an inspired choice in setting his garden flowers in the grounds of a stately home rather than in his own back garden, but I suspect that this WAS his own back garden. The Leigh-Pemberton’s were (are?) a very rich and well-to-do family with their family seat in Kent, Torry Hill. I googled ‘Torry Hill’ for images of the walks and views that must have been a big part of the childhood of John Leigh-Pemberton. I did indeed find one or two pictures of the main Georgian house with strong echoes of the scenes in Leigh-Pemberton’s book. But the pictures were few in number and all in black and white: sadly it seems the great house was demolished in 1958.

The Ladybird book was published in 1960 – just two years later. Like Leigh-Pemberton’s stormy skies, the reality of post-war economics have served to damped down the flower-lined path to sentimentality.

After Garden Flowers, most of Leigh-Pemberton’s commissions for Ladybird featured fauna: birds, insects and mammals.

When reflecting on the different approaches to depictions of nature by the Ladybird artists it one day dawned on me that John Leigh-Pemberton was in essence a portrait painter. It is as if the mammals, birds and even insects have been asked to sit for him like affluent 18th century gentlemen. (Even his moths, plants and dragonflies are clearly posing for the artist – that pot of nasturtium is loving the attention with its artful three-quarter stance).

It helps, I think, that Leigh-Pemberton makes much more use of oil paints than most of the other Ladybird artists, allowing him to build up his pictures with layer after layer of fine detail. Like any successful portrait artis, Leigh-Pemberton seems keen to flatter his subjects into a sweet temper, thereby ensuring the prompt and generous settling of his bill. If, with kind lighting and an atmosphere of solemnity, a sense of movement is lost, what is gained is a timeless, majestic quality.

So there we have it. In the roughest of simplifications I see Rowland as a painter of stark landscapes, Edith a mistress of botanical detail while Leigh-Pemberton painted fine portraits.

This blog post has grown rather long and I’ve only dealt with two books and three artists. There are still a number of other Ladybird nature artists to discuss, including, Tunnicliffe, Badmin, Seaby, and Lampitt. But that, I think, leaves a story for another day.