GEORGE EDWARD LODGE TRUST

By Brian Bird

What a lesson to all of us, what a life to have led. To have made a living out of the thing you liked best in the world. To of known that your work sends those who see it back delightedly in thought to the salmon river, the forest, the crags and the hills, and the deer and the birds they have watched there.

From J.K. Stanford’s obituary of George Lodge in The Field, 25^th February 1954

I would like to start by acknowledging Mr John Savory’s book, on George Edward Lodge, titled GEORGE LODGE artist naturalist, published by Croom Helm Ltd, 1986. This book has helped immensely in my research work.   

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GEORGE EDWARD LODGE

By Dick Treleaven MBE

In the late 1940s when wandering down Piccadilly, my eye was taken by some paintings of falcons in Rowland Ward’s window. The pictures portrayed cold, sharp-eyed gyrfalcons perched atop lichen covered boulders, staring out into Arctic wastes; a welcome change from the plethora of ducks endlessly flying against purple sunsets which frequently adorn the walls of suburbia. I decided there and then that this was the way I wanted to paint. I asked the Hon Aylmer Tryon, a director of the gallery, if it would be possible to meet the artist. He gave me George Lodge’s address and suggested that I write to him.

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GEORGE EDWARD LODGE

^{3rd December 1860 – 5th February 1954}

By The Tryon and Moorland Gallery 1989

George Lodge was born at Horncastle in Lincolnshire, one of a family of eight children. From an early age he and his brother R.B. Lodge, the pioneer bird photographer, were keen naturalists, roaming the local countryside in search of subjects.

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GEORGE EDWARD LODGE

December 1860 – February 1954

Written for an exhibition of paintings by George Lodge at the Moorland Gallery 29^th March – 21^st April 1977

It must be close on seventy years ago that George Lodge and the writer of this Foreword met for the first time in the Bird-Room of the Natural History Museum, when he was visiting his friend Bill Ogilvie-Grant, then Deputy Keeper of the bird collections. I was but recently down from Cambridge and a great deal of water has run under the bridge since then. Lodge was twenty-six years my senior and I knew him to be ranked with Archibald Thorburn as a master-painter of birds; indeed that great artist admitted that, as a portrayer of Birds of Prey, George Lodge had no equal. His Game Birds were to my mind in the same category as exemplified by his plates in Beebee's magnificent Monograph of the Pheasants. Like so many great artists he never received the appreciation due to him until after his death.

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SOME OBSERVATIONS OF PAINTING BIRDS

Extracts from George Lodge’s autobiography

 “Memoirs of an Artist Naturalist”

“This is not an easy subject to write about and must not be approached with assurance or dogmatism, as everyone who studies art has his own ideas and methods and, quite rightly, follows and uses them in order to get the results that appeal to him.”

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