Pony-Mad Moments Captured On Canvas

No artist understood the bond between young rider and pony better than Anne Bullen, as a new exhibition illustrates

- Janet Menzies

When a horsey girl grows up and becomes a chief executive the first thing she does is buy herself quite a decent competition horse. However, this expensive 16.2 hands high beast is known to her and all her friends as her ‘new pony’, because there will never again be an animal as special and remembered as the childhood pony.

That enchanted bond is expressed forever in the work of artist Anne Bullen, in her illustrations of pony stories by the Pullein-Thompson sisters, Monica Edwards, Violet Needham and so many others. Bullen was already an established artist in 1936 when Joanna Cannan commissioned her to illustrate her seminal pony book, A Pony for Jean. As a teenager, Bullen had won the Royal Academy President’s Prize for the 14- to 15-year-old age group, and she studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and at Chelsea School of Art. Bullen didn’t shy away from serious work. As early as 1926, her painting of World War I scenes were much admired, and through World War II she depicted wartime scenes without sentimentality.

The main inspiration for her work was her life with her husband, Jack, and their six children at the show pony stud they founded at their family home, Catherston, near Charmouth in Dorset. The family’s daily routines were captured in flowing pencil or charcoal sketches of children cantering their ponies; glamorous oils at horse shows; portraits; vignettes of a mare grazing with her foal. Add to these images the beguiling stories they illustrated, of pony-mad children overcoming all sorts of obstacles to pursue their dreams, and the result has a resonance that is more than simple nostalgia.

THIRD RETROSPECTIVE