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.