A to Z of artists Edwards, Lionel 1878 - 1966

Lionel Edwards was the fifth son of Dr James Edwards who had given up his practice in Chester on the death of his wife in 1845. He bought a small estate called Benarth, near Conway. His second wife died in childbirth and, marrying Harriet Main, a cousin of his first wife, she gave him a son, Lionel, on 9 November 1878. As Lionel grew up in North Wales, with his older brothers either in the army or at school, he was educated at home. He was soon showing a talent for drawing horses and following his father’s enormous enjoyment of hunting, although Dr James died when Lionel was seven. After short-lived thoughts of the army, his mother’s confidence in her son’s artistic ability led to him being sent to Frank Calderon’s School of Animal Painting in Baker Street, London, where he thrived. From 1897 to 1903, Edwards rented a small studio in Holland Street, Kensington from a cousin and, at the age of nineteen, became the youngest member of the London Sketch Club. Riding as often as he could afford, his main source of income was from illustrations in Country Life and later The Sphere and The Graphic. In 1905 he married Ethel Wells whose enthusiasm for hunting soon matched his own. They lived for a time near Radley, Oxfordshire before moving to Worcestershire, and then back to Benarth. Magazine illustration and a few commissions came almost second to hunting during this period. At the outbreak of the First World War Lionel Edwards joined other artists (G.D. Armour (q.v.), Cecil Aldin (q.v.) and Alfred Munnings (q.v.)) as a Remount Purchasing Officer. He was posted to a Remount Depot at Romsey. While out hunting after the war he saw and rented a house named Buckholt near Salisbury which became the family home for the rest of his and Ethel’s lives. An ever increasing demand for his pictures of hunting (and to a lesser extent of racing, shooting and fishing) led to Edwards travelling widely to paint and usually hunt with nearly every pack in the British Isles and Ireland; many of these hunting pictures were reproduced. He continued to provide articles for Country Life until the magazine turned to only using photography, and embarked on writing and illustrating some twenty-five of his own books as well as illustrating more than sixty by others. He wrote an autobiography in two parts: Scarlet and Corduroy (published in 1941) and Reminiscences of a Sporting Artist (1947). His one-man exhibitions included those at Graves’s Gallery, Pall Mall in 1914, Sporting Gallery (1925), Roland Ward Gallery (1955) and the Tryon Gallery in 1961 and 1964. The British Sporting Art Trust mounted a loan exhibition of his work at the Alpine Gallery, London and the Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery in 1986. He died at Buckholt on 13 April 1966.