The Anniversary offers a tender glimpse into the long-married life of one of his most endearing countryside couples. The painting captures two badgers seated side by side on a bench beneath the window of their cottage, dressed in their Sunday best and clearly marking the occasion with a bottle of beer apiece.

The gentleman badger is dressed in a soft teal blue jacket worn over a vivid red waistcoat, with a flat cap perched on his head and a stout bottle of beer cradled in his paw. Beside him sits his wife, resplendent in a bright pink jacket, a floral patterned skirt in soft yellows and a wonderfully celebratory straw boater trimmed with a pink ribbon and a small crown of yellow flowers, marking this as a day of some importance. She too holds a bottle of beer, raised slightly as though mid-toast, and the two figures lean gently towards one another. The setting is unmistakably that of an old cottage window framed in weathered blue paintwork behind them, with warm orange and umber brickwork running across either side, the whole scene anchored by the soft greens and earthy browns of the ground beneath their well-worn brown boots. Between the gentleman badger's feet, a small hedgehog has settled itself contentedly as though entirely part of the family.

Walker's loose, expressive watercolour technique is shown here at its most affectionate, with the pigment allowed to pool and bleed across the paper to give the brickwork, fabric and worn ground a wonderfully tactile quality. The bright pinks and reds of the couple's clothing sing against the cooler blues of the window and jacket, while the broken, sketch-like marks across their arms and hands lend each figure a vivid sense of individual character. As one of the most recognisable names in contemporary British wildlife art, Walker has built a devoted following of collectors drawn to his rare ability to find the deeply human within the animal world. His paintings imagine a parallel rural society where foxes, badgers, hares and mice adopt human habits and personalities without ever losing their essential wildness, a tradition rooted in the great heritage of British illustration yet entirely contemporary in spirit.