Norman Thelwell

My wife and I visited Hampshire recently in order to see the Norman Thelwell exhibition (16 January to 10 April 2016, 11am – 5pm)at the National Trust property, Mottisfont House. I was really pleased to see that the captions, which were excellent, stated that all the artwork on display was “On loan from the Thelwell Family Archive”. I hope they won’t mind me sharing these crude photographs all taken by me, and thus including reflections!

It was wonderful to walk round a few rooms and find older people than me laughing out loud. The cartoons still work so well and as one caption stated:

“In some ways Thelwell was out of step with conventions for cartoons in post-war Britain – these were often political and urban in outlook and acerbic in tone. […] Thelwell’s approach was completely different. His style was always naturalistic  and he included a great deal of descriptive detail. […] Although he said that politics bored him, Thelwell did produce cartoons that used humour to protest against environmental issues.”

Instructions pencilled onto the art for Thelwell to make corrections

River Test by Thelwell

Mottesfont House by Thelwell

Four local studies

First version of “Point to point”

Published version of “Point to point”

Northumberland Hamlet by Thelwell

St. Andrew’s Church, Timsbury by Thelwell

Bird sketches by Thelwell

River sketch

“Come along girls, playtime is over!”

“Hello! You’ve left the gate open in the safari park again”

Preliminary drawing

Published drawing

“Henry! Please! They’re our bread and butter!”

Thelwell Merchandise

Thelwell Merchandise

The Pheasant Shoot – cover for Punch

Defending the Test Valley

“Why couldn’t they have built these houses on good agricultural land?”

 

The following are borrowed from the Mottisfont website (All Thelwell material is © The Estate of Norman Thelwell, and the official website has great stuff that I have no need to reproduce here!):

 

Romsey Abbey by Norman Thelwell