ERIC ENNION - BIRD MAN'S RIVER

London: Benton Street Books in association with The Wildlife Art Gallery, 2011. Book. Illus. by Eric Ennion. New. Hardcover. First Edition. 4to. pp. 160, colour frontispiece and numerous colour plates and illustrations. More than seventy years after Eric Ennion began work on this title Bob Walthew has brought together the work and additional illustrations to produce this superb title. Dust jacket fine, not price-clipped. Hardback binding, fine. [Eric Arnold Roberts Ennion 1900 - 1981 A British artist, writer, illustrator, and radio presenter, specialising in birds and other natural history subjects. Born 7th June 1900 at Kettering in Northamptonshire, the son of a country doctor. In 1904 the family moved to Burwell on the edge of the Cambridgeshire fens where, after studying medicine at Caius College and St Mary's Hospital, he joined his father's practice in 1926.He held his first London one-man show of sporting pictures at the Greatorex Galleries in 1937. At the end of the war he became warden of the Field Studies Centre at Flatford Mill in Suffolk. After five years at Flatford, he and his wife Dorothy established their own Field Centre and Bird Observatory at Monks' House in Northumberland. In 1961 they 'retired' to Shalbourne in Wiltshire. There Eric ran his own private courses on landscape and wildlife painting and continued to paint, lecture and teach natural history until his death in 1981. A great champion of wildlife art, he exhibited his own work widely and was especially keen to encourage young artists. He was the author of twelve books (including the posthumously published Bird Man's River), illustrating all but one of them himself, and the illustrator of a similar number by other authors. Ennion was a founder member and Honorary Vice President of the Society of Wildlife Artists. Widely exhibited at the Greatorex Galleries, Arthur Ackermann & Son Ltd, West Mills Gallery and snapped up at auctions today.].