Thelwell: more than a one-trick pony

Sixty years after Penelope and Kipper rode into our lives, Alice Wright explores Norman Thelwell’s expert touch in capturing all aspects of country life

- Alice Wright

NORMAN THELWELL is undeniably best known for his cartoons of fat hairy ponies and their fearless young mounts. Yet to look past these instantly recognisable characters is to discover a Hogarth of the countryside, who left no aspect of British rural life untouched.

Born in Birkenhead, Merseyside, in 1923, the young Thelwell nurtured an innate fascination with the great outdoors from an early age, aided by family holidays to a farm in North Wales. Even as a child, he noted in his autobiography Wrestling with a Pencil (1986), he had ‘an irresistible compulsion to draw almost everything’ he saw.

During the Second World War, an 18-year old Thelwell joined the East Yorkshire Regiment in 1941. He began training near Hursley House in Hampshire, before being posted to India. Despite hating almost everything about the army, he later demonstrated a curious nostalgia for that golden, but dark time in his youth, returning to Hampshire to live with his family mere miles from where he remembered jumping into the river on an army exercise. This homecoming echoes the sense of place and memory his art evokes— for many, to look upon a Thelwell illustration is to see the countryside of one’s own youth.

It was in this countryside around Romsey and Winchester that some of the artist’s most sensitive and exquisite watercolours were painted. Those that knew him understand that he was never happier than when alone in the woods and fields, brush in hand. His deep-seated love for the land and the eclecticism of life it supports bleeds into his landscapes and is preserved there.