Wardle was born in London, England in the year 1860.
Arthur Wardle was best known for his wonderful canine paintings. He was known for his paintings of wild life, if I had to compare him to a more modern painter I would pick Bob Kuhn.
A great montage of the artist’s work. The paintings start at 22 seconds into the video. You get a great feeling of his compositional skills. The dogs he paints are interacting happily with their owners. Very serene and peaceful works.
The artist was supposedly entirely self taught. At the age of sixteen Wardle was able to have a painting included in the Royal Gallery annual exhibition. It was a study of cows alongside the Thames river. It was not until eleven years later when the artist was to include the genre or animals and the sporting life as the major theme in his arwork.
The artist was included in more than one hundred shows at the Royal Gallery. He was quite prolific in the number of paintings he produced each year.
Even his animal works can divided among domestic and exotic animals. Occasionally he mixed the two ideas and came up with some fantastic results such as the lady with the leopard in the picture gallery. The artist used a great deal of mythology in his artwork. For his mediums he worked in crayon, pencil, chalk, oils, charcoal, and watercolor.
Part of Museum Collections including the National Wildlife Museum in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Also has work in the McCord Museum of Canadian History. Also has work in the dog museum just outside of St. Louis, Missouri and the Kennel Club in London, England. The Kennel Club has what many consider his most famous work, The Totteridge XI. A collection of the eleven smooth fox terrier show dogs owned by Francis Redmong. The dogs are painted towards the ideal purebred standard, not as they appeared in real life. If one had to choose a certain type of the dog that Wardle loved to paint it would be the fox terrier.
When World War II came about the artist was called upon to create a poster to help get Canadians to go along with their brothers from the United Kingdom. The poster helped to draw in some 32,000 recruits!
I love this artist and consider him my favorite BK painter, before Bob Kuhn! My favorite animal painter.
High price range: Oil painting of two lionesses for $72,000.
Low price range:
Wardle died in 1949 at the age of 75.
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