Exhibition:
This exhibition has been assembled in collaboration with the Charles Tunnicliffe Society. We record our thanks to them, particularly Ken Broughton and Stuart Pittman, and to the many private collectors and public collections who have loaned work. Tunnicliffe was one of the most important and influential nature inspired artists of the twentieth century. His impact is still felt today.
Charles Tunnicliffe (1901 – 1979) was the only son of a shoemaker turned farmer and grew up in Cheshire. All his later work as an artist shows him to be a man totally familiar with the animals and machinery of the farm, and the beauty, customs and modesty of the countryside. After art training in Macclesfield and Manchester, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, where he won another scholarship for a further year to study etching.
Having worked for a while as a part-time teacher, Tunnicliffe left London in 1928 and returned to Cheshire as a commercial artist. In 1932 he produced the illustrations for Henry Williamson’s Tarka the Otter which was a great success and established the reputations of both artist and author.
From 1947 until his death Tunnicliffe lived on the Isle of Anglesey. He was hard work and versatility personified. Etchings, wood engravings, scraper-board illustrations, oil paintings, delicate pencil drawings, simple tiny composition sketches and large finished watercolours – all were part of his prolific output.
He was elected RA in 1954 and awarded the OBE in 1978. In 1974, he was honoured at the Royal Academy by an exhibition of his collection of measured drawings of birds. Several of these (and other RA pictures) are included in this show.
Having had work widely published in magazines and books, including some of his own, as well as the likes of Cussons Imperial Leather advertisements, Brook Bond tea cards, The Radio Times, Ladybird books and for 12 years the covers to RSPB’s magazine Bird Notes, he is an artist whose work has impacted on countless people’s lives, earning respect too, not just in the wildlife art world, but the wider art establishment.
Sir Peter Scott described him as simply ’the greatest wildlife artist of the twentieth century’.