Jonathan Walker

Hog Harry takes the form of a tightly composed bust portrait, focusing in on a hedgehog whose bright, alert eyes meet the viewer with all the warmth and bashful charm of a gentleman caught slightly off guard by the attention. Walker's title here has a delightful affection to it. Hog Harry sounds for all the world like the nickname of some beloved village character, the sort of name passed down at the local pub or remembered fondly by neighbours. The familiarity of the name pairs beautifully with the dignity of the sitter, the smallest and most retiring of British wildlife given the kind of personal billing usually reserved for old friends.

Harry himself is rendered with extraordinary delicacy of touch, his spines lifting in a soft halo around his head in finely judged strokes of umber, ochre and slate, while his small black eyes and dark snub nose are painted with real tenderness. He is dressed in the manner of a thoroughly respectable countryman attending a special occasion, wearing a deep aubergine jacket over a crisp white shirt, finished with a soft pink bow tie tied a little askew at the throat, lending him an air of slightly rumpled formality that suits his retiring nature beautifully. The portrait is set against a softly washed background of cool lavenders, dusty mauves and pale blues, the colours bleeding gently across the paper to create a wonderfully atmospheric depth that throws Harry's warmly coloured face forward into the light.

Jonathan Walker's loose, expressive watercolour technique is shown here at its most refined, with the pigment allowed to pool and bleed across the paper to give the spines, fabric and softly washed background a wonderfully tactile quality. Areas of the paper are left exposed around the edges of the figure, lending the portrait an immediate, almost sketch-like quality that draws the eye straight to Harry's gentle face. 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.