Arthur Wardle (london, 1864–1949) — The Monkey.

Caught atop his chest, between a rug and an abandoned book, this monkey has all the makings of the perfect culprit. He comes to life under the brush of Arthur Wardle, a London painter with a lifelong passion for animals.

Against a restrained background that draws every eye to the subject, the fur is rendered in supple, precise strokes. Wardle keeps his distance from the sentimentality of his age: he never lends his animals human airs, but paints them as they truly are. It is precisely this fidelity that gives them their character, and turns this domestic scene into a composition full of wit.

Born in London in 1864, Wardle taught himself to paint and devoted himself to animal painting from an early age. At barely sixteen, he exhibited a study of cattle on the banks of the Thames at the Royal Academy. Admired for his depictions of big cats, he spent most of his career in London: after Camden, his success allowed him to settle in the artists’ quarter of St John’s Wood towards the end of the nineteenth century.

His self-taught background is no doubt related to his style, which is free from academic convention and surprisingly modern within a naturalist idiom. He is best known for his portraits of pedigree dogs and for the large composition The Totteridge XI (1897), a group of fox terriers now in the collection of the Kennel Club in London.

Wardle worked in oil, watercolour and pastel. He was elected a Fellow of the Pastel Society in 1911, then a member of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours in 1922. In 1931, he held his first solo exhibition at the Fine Art Society. Widely circulated and reproduced, his work brought him great success. He died in London in 1949.

He remains one of the most admired British animal painters of the late Victorian era and the first half of the twentieth century.