'Above all, he was a master of hounds'

Cecil Aldin is among the best-loved of sporting artists, and his hunting credentials were ‘impeccable’, as his fellow painter Liam Clancy explains

- Liam Clancy

“ONE November day in 1922 I was watching the South Berks hounds draw a big, hilly woodland.

“A lightly built, middle-aged man, reddish haired and very fair of complexion, in a dark blue coat and velvet cap, took my attention partly because of the grace of his horsemanship, partly because of an arresting gaiety of bearing that might have been that of a boy.”

Thus author Patrick Chalmers recalled his first encounter with one of the great figures of English sporting art.

“‘That’s our deputy Master, Cecil Aldin,’ a friend explained. ‘The artist?’ said I. ‘Is there another?’ said he.’” 

Cecil Charles Windsor Aldin was born in Slough in 1870 and came of age in the self-confident world of late-Victorian England. The son of a Berkshire builder, a keen amateur artist himself, there never seems to have been any doubt about the path he would follow in life.

He trained under Frank Calderon, who later numbered Lionel Edwards and Alfred Munnings among his students. The role of the artist had not yet been superseded by the camera in the press, and a number of magazines, notably The Illustrated London News, were eager to print Aldin’s pictures of horses and dogs and sporting life in the 1890s.

By the turn of the century his sporting prints and book illustrations had won him a substantial public following.

His rollicking scenes of hunting and racing provide a bridge between the sporting artists of the 19th century, whose spraddle-legged horses and tall-hatted sportsmen adorn the walls of many a country house, and the great names who dominated the genre in the early 20th century.