Inside St Paul's Studios: a painters' workroom home

 

 This article is more than 10 years old

Inside St Paul's Studios: a painters' workroom home

This article is more than 10 years old

An Arts and Crafts studio built for painters has been reinvented as a home full of light

Katie Forster

Sun 24 Jan 2016 07.00 CET

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/jan/24/inside-st-pauls-studios-a-painters-workroom-home

 

Talgarth Road in west London is one of the capital’s busiest, dirtiest thoroughfares. With three lanes of traffic thundering to and from the M4, it’s easy to miss the row of eight Arts and Crafts-era houses when driving past Barons Court station.

For architect Marius Barran and his wife Veronica, living in one of these historic homes, built in 1891 as artists’ studios, is worth the inconvenience of the busy road. Veronica first spotted the house online when the couple were looking to move in autumn 2013.

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St Paul’s Studios: the outside aspect. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

“I sent the link to Marius almost as a joke,” she says. It was at the top end of the couple’s budget, and very different from the other properties they’d seen. But Marius, who had known and admired the houses all his life, went to view it that afternoon.

The terrace’s remarkably large windows were designed by architect Frederick Wheeler to provide natural light for bachelor artists to work in. St Paul’s Studios, as they are known, have been used for various artistic endeavours through the years, from a dance school for the Margaret Morris Movement to a home for the writer Ernest Gébler.

The remarkably large windows were designed to provide natural light for bachelor artists

The Barrans were sold their end-of-terrace “studio” by an elderly art collector from America named Dorothy Braude Edinburg. But there was lots of work to do to restore the Grade II-listed home to its original spacious glory.

“In the 30s or 40s, we think, it went through a fairly unglamorous period of being multiple occupancy, when it was subdivided to make as many bedrooms as possible,” says Marius. The large studio room, which is now the couple’s bedroom, had been bisected horizontally by a mezzanine floor.

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Clean lines: the ensuite bathroom overlooking Barons Court station. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

“Someone told us it was put in during the Second World War, when the house was requisitioned by the RAF,” says Marius. “There would have been a couple of RAF sergeants lying on their backs on the mezzanine floor, looking up through the studio window with night-sight binoculars, in radio contact with the RAF to warn of approaching German bombers.”

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The ‘enviably large’ bedroom and mezzanine Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

The couple kept a part of the mezzanine, where their six grandchildren play and sometimes sleep, and refitted the bathroom underneath. They cleared the rest of the room to create an enviably large bedroom, with a new fireplace and furniture that complements the style of the era. The striking batik is by the painter and singer Thetis Blacker, a friend of Marius’s mother.

“Our existing furniture and pictures worked very well in this environment,” says Marius. “And we’ve designed the furniture we’ve built to be in keeping as much as possible with the original style.”

RAF men would have lain on their backs, looking up through the studio window for bombers

The house has two floors and a basement, where Marius works. The yellow wallpaper in the hall was designed by Veronica’s niece, fabric and wallpaper designer Neisha Crosland. “It brightens the hall up, as otherwise it’s a little bit gloomy,” says Marius.

As well as fitting shutters on the doors and acoustic seals on the windows, Marius and Veronica have found another solution to the traffic problem. They have turned their back on the busy road by building a new back entrance to the house, right next to Barons Court station.

“The back door is constantly in use; 95% of the coming and going takes place via that door,” says Marius. “Living this near to the station has revolutionised life in London. I used to drive my car every day, but the tube is so much more convenient.”

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Room with a view: the ‘studio’ bedroom. Photograph: Sophia Evans/The Observer

While Marius sometimes uses the studio bedroom for painting, Veronica enjoys gardening and is getting used to the noise of the road.

“I like living here. We have fewer rooms than in our old house, but there’s an amazing feeling of space,” she says.

“It’s not what I intended to do at this age, but it has kind of worked out. This isn’t the first time we’ve taken on a wreck – we have never moved into anywhere where you could just boil the kettle and put your feet up.”

• This is the archive of The Observer up until 21/04/2025. The Observer is now owned and operated by Tortoise Media.

 

St. Paul’s Studios

10TuesdayDec 2013

 https://baldwinhamey.wordpress.com/2013/12/10/st-pauls-studios/

 

Posted by Baldwin Hamey in building

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Anyone travelling out of London along the A4 (or the Great West Road as it used to be called) must have seen this row of houses on the left-hand side at Talgarth Road (numbers 135-149), just before the Hammersmith flyover. They were designed as artists’ studios by Frederick Wheeler (1853-1931) and built in 1891. Wheeler designed the studios in the Arts and Crafts style for James Fairless, a publisher of prints of classical works of art. The houses were meant for bachelor artists and had three rooms on the ground floor and in the basement a kitchen and a room for the housekeeper. Despite this intention of providing houses for single artists, many inhabitants managed to cram more people into the studio than was originally envisaged; in 1911, William Logsdail, for instance, lived at number 5 with his wife, his son and daughter and a servant. The studios themselves were situated on the first floor and were 30 feet long and 22 feet wide (9.1 × 6.7 m). The large barrel-vaulted windows, facing north, were specifically designed to let in as much light as possible.

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Just to the west of the studios, at number 151, is Colet House, which, although not part of the studio project, is in the same style and often referred to as 9 St. Paul’s Studios. It is a larger property that has been used for various purposes, such as the ballet dance school where Margo Fonteyn worked. It was originally thought that Colet House was also designed by Frederick Wheeler, but recent research favours Fairfax Blomfield Wade-Palmer (1851-1919). For more information on Colet House see here.

In 2007, the contents of one of the studios came on the market and the sale was reported in the Hammersmith & Fulham News of August 2007. In the leaflet, a number of photos of the interior of the studio give a good idea of what they must have looked like when they were just built. Disregard the modern office chairs for a moment and you could be back in the 1890s.

Click on the picture to go to the original PDF from the Hammersmith & Fulham Council website

The stretch of Talgarth Road with the studios started life as Red Cow Lane, later to be named Colet Gardens after John Colet, Dean of St Paul’s. It received its present name in the 1960s. Over the years, many famous and not so very famous artists have lived in the studios. From various sources, the following – most likely incomplete – list will give you some idea. Click on the * to get more information on an artist or her/his work. A ? before or after a year means the artist may have lived there before or after that date, but I have found no information on the exact period. If you can add to the list, please leave a comment.

 

Mette-Marit: From Drug Parties to Queen of Norway: The Full Story

NOTRE SALUT Bande Annonce (2026)

‘We swept a lot under the carpet’: Vichy regime film hits home in France of 2026

 

Movie about Nazi-collaborating administration strikes chord during what director calls ‘time of great uncertainty’

Angelique Chrisafis in Paris

Sat 3 Oct 2026 06.00 CEST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/oct/03/french-film-notre-salut-vichy-regime

 

It is the story of how a lowly state administrator unthinkingly becomes a cog in the machine of an authoritarian regime, embracing the bureaucracy and logistics of sending people to their deaths – and it is drawing in audiences to French cinemas.

The French film Notre Salut (Our Salvation), with its modern lighting, improvised scenes and anachronistic 1980s Europop soundtrack, is far from the standard historical costume drama about the second world war.

But the award-winning film about the daily lives of ordinary people participating in the puppet Vichy regime that collaborated with the Nazis – and ensured the deportation of a quarter of France’s Jewish population to concentration camps – is poised to become a box office hit.

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Rounding up of Jewish people in Paris in May 1941. Photograph: LAPI/Roger Viollet/Getty Images

The film, which has been given the English-language title A Man of His Time, had a strong cinema opening in France this week, particularly among young audiences, at a time when the country is soul-searching ahead of next spring’s presidential election.

Marine Le Pen of the far-right, anti-immigration National Rally (RN) continues to top the polls for the presidential race despite the political fallout from an investigation by Mediapart alleging that her party leader, Jordan Bardella, published antisemitic comments as a young party member, which he denies.

Notre Salut comes amid a boom in films about France during the second world war, including more than 5m ticket sales for the two-part biopic of Charles de Gaulle, as well the controversial Les Rayons et les Ombres about the press baron and Nazi collaborator Jean Luchaire, and the forthcoming Moulin, about the last days of the French resistance leader Jean Moulin.

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A scene from Notre Salut. The film was inspired by a stash of family letters found by director Emmanuel Marre that shed light on the life of his great-grandfather, a Vichy administrator. Photograph: TCD/Prod.DB/Alamy

But rather than tackling well-known heroes or monsters, Notre Salut focuses instead on the role of ordinary people in the Vichy regime that, under Marshal Philippe Pétain, collaborated in the deportation of 76,000 Jewish people to Nazi concentration camps.

The film was inspired by a stash of family letters found by its writer and director, Emmanuel Marre, that gave insight into the life of his great-grandfather Henri Marre, who worked as an administrator under the authoritarian puppet regime.

“There are great figures who make history, but history is also made by the second-players, the grassroots who act on the ground, and that is what is interesting about this film,” said Marc Olivier Baruch, a historian and specialist on state administrators in the Vichy regime.

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Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp in France during the second world war. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

For Baruch, the most chilling scene in the film is the bureaucratic nitpicking about the costs incurred by providing Jews on cattle trucks with straw and chamber pots. The central character in the film, the administrator Henri Marre, “never chooses to reflect on things or look at what he’s doing, to wonder what his room for manoeuvre is”.

Baruch said the film’s sense of unease was a pull for modern of audiences because today France was “in a time of great uncertainty … There’s a strong lack of confidence among French people in their elites and in their state and that has been going on for a long time.”

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A notice in a restaurant window banning Jews from entering, German-occupied Paris, July 1940. Photograph: Art Media/Print Collector/Getty Images

He said the Vichy regime had resonance today as a period in history. “The Pétain dictatorship is the only moment when the far right was in power since 1820. There were these four years at the heart of the 20th century when the far right was in power and clearly for French people in 2026 and 2027 that is interesting … There has been a certain unease in modern France that it would be better to stop talking about Vichy, to draw a line under it, stop the masochism [of looking back]. That of course is stupid, and not possible.”

Film critics suggested modern audiences were seeking to better understand the rise of the far right across Europe and in France.

Henry Rousso, a historian who has studied the place of the Vichy regime in collective memory, wrote of the film in Le Monde: “The RN is not the fascism of the 1930s, nor a resurgence of the Pétain regime, but knowing this history allows an understanding of what [the RN] is the heir to, and how the mechanisms of gradually renouncing democratic and republican values led to disaster.”

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Emmanuel Marre won the screenplay prize for Notre Salut at the 2026 Cannes film festival. Photograph: SOPA Images Limited/Alamy

Emmanuel Marre, the film’s writer-director, who won the best Screenplay prize at the Cannes film festival, began working on the story more than a decade ago after the discovery of the letters from his great-grandfather that his family had kept in a drawer.

He told France Inter radio: “There are [similar] drawers everywhere in France … there is a phantom memory of the collaboration. With this film, we wanted to prise open those drawers and allow all families to look at that – not as flagellation, [but] because after the war France pushed a lot of it under the carpet to survive.”

He said it was crucial to look at the nuance of what led people to collaborate or take a stand. “In between resistance and in collaboration, there is a whole range of human emotions, even the most ambiguous.”

 

Edward Ardizzone

Ardizzone was born at Haiphong, Tonkin, French Indo-China, where his Algerian-born Italian father was on overseas government service. Ardizzone's English mother returned to England with her three eldest children in 1905. The children were brought up in Suffolk, largely by their maternal grandmother, whilst their mother returned to join her husband in the Far East. Ardizzone was educated first at Ipswich School and then at Clayesmore School - where he was encouraged by his art teacher. (see: The Young Ardizzone: an Autobiographical Fragment (London 1970))
He worked as an official war artist in World War II: his early experiences between Arras and Boulogne are illustrated and described in his book Baggage to the Enemy (London 1941). An extensive collection of his war pictures, as well as his wartime diaries, can be seen at The Imperial War Museum.
His best known work is the Tim series, featuring the maritime adventures of the eponymous young hero. The first book, Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain, was published in 1936. The most famous of the books, Tim All Alone, won the British Library Association's Kate Greenaway Medal for illustration in 1956. The series is often thought to have ended in 1972 with Tim's Last Voyage but that was, in fact, followed in 1977 by Ships Cook Ginger. His Sarah and Simon and No Red Paint was issued in an edition by Doubleday in 1966.
As well as writing and illustrating his own books, Ardizzone also illustrated books written by others, including the novels of Anthony Trollope. His 1939 characterization of H.E. Bates's My Uncle Silas was inimitable. Among his happiest collaborations was that with Eleanor Farjeon, especially The Little Bookroom.
He illustrated the Nurse Matilda series of children's books written by his cousin, author Christianna Brand. Both cousins heard the stories from the same grandmother - who had, in her turn, heard them from her father. He also famously illustrated A Ring of Bells, John Betjeman's abridged version for children of his Summoned by Bells autobiographical poem. He worked on C. Day Lewis's children's novel The Otterbury Incident, as well as some novels by the American author Eleanor Estes, including The Alley, Miranda the Great, Pinky Pye, The Tunnel of Hugsy Goode and The Witch Family.
He is also particularly noted for having not just illustrated the covers and contents of books but inking the title text and author's name in his own hand, giving the books a distinctive look on shelves. An example is Clive King's Stig of the Dump.
Ardizzone illustrated a series of books for young children by Graham Greene including The Little Fire Engine, The Little Horse Bus,The Little Train and The Little Steamroller. He also illustrated a re-telling of the Don Quixote story for children by James Reeves. His illustrations for the The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley are classics in their own right.
Ardizzone also illustrated several telegrams for the Post Office in the 1950s and 1960s, many of which are considered collector's items.
His style is naturalistic but subdued, featuring gentle lines and delicate watercolours, but with great attention to particular details.
He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1970, and appointed CBE in 1971. The British Library published an illustrated bibliography of his works in 2003.
Ardizzone died of a heart attack in 1979.

Instroduction to the catalogue for the retrospective exhibition which ran from December 1973 to January 1974 at the Victoria and Albert Museum and was directed by


Gabriel White

Edward Ardizzone, who was born in Haiphong in 1900, is very much an English artist in spite of his Italian name and partly Italian ancestry. Though an admirer of the drawings of Constantin Guys, one can discern little or no foreign influence in his work, which belongs to the long tradition of illustrators of this country including such names as Cruikshank, Charles Keene and Caldecott. Any artistic family background came from the side of his English mother. She had been a watercolour painter, as were so many young ladies of that period, but she, more than most, had studied in Paris and worked in Colarossi's studio in the 188os. Further back, there was an almost legendary descent from a Joshua Kirby, who was a Suffolk man and an artist friend of Gainsborough.

Ardizzone's artistic education was a part-time training, but it was forceful and enduring. He worked for a number of years at the Westminster Art School - alas, no more – in Bernard Meninsky's evening life classes, coming under the spell of a man who was not only a born teacher and a brilliant draughtsman of the human form but one who could inspire enthusiasm in his pupils and possessed a vast store of knowledge, which he was always ready to impart to those whom he favoured. In 1927 Ardizzone left the City firm where he had been working and decided to take up art as a career.


He celebrated his newly won freedom with a tour abroad. Foreign scenes however left little impression upon him and the first inspiration in Ardizzone's work was the part of London in which he had lived since early manhood, Maida Vale, where raffishness verging almost on the sinister jostled closely against a respectable population with a slightly foreign and artistic flavour. Architecturally it is a district divided by wide avenues flanked with trees, and it could boast then of possessing some of London's most rewarding "locals", whether for the company found in them, both racy and seedy, or for the interior decor. This ranged from thChristmas Eve at the Warrington- Christmas e palatial resplendence of "The Warrington", with its lordly staircase leading to the billiard room above, which figures so frequently in the artist's drawings and paintings, to the cosy frowstiness of little bars tucked away in some quiet back alley. It is these which provide the milieu for so many of Ardizzone's intimate scenes of London life. There, also, were to be found the dingy "bed-sitters" and the sparsely furnished studios, which enshrine so many resplendent female nudes.

But it was not always seamy metropolitan life. There was another vein that can early be found in the artist's work, softer and more idyllic, arising from his frequent descents into the Kentish countryside. First to Eynsford, with its lovely valley which, forty five years ago, was almost as Samuel Palmer knew it, and later to Rodmersham Green near Sittingbourne, with its family connections and where he himself now lives. Its orchards and leafy lanes have constantly inspired him. Illus. from Blackbird and the Lilac - James Reeves 1952
There was yet a third motif which plays a large part in Ardizzone's oeuvre, the sea and shipping. Knowledge and experience of the sea were in his ancestry on both sides of his family. His father's father had been an Italian sea captain, who lived at Bari and was
a ship owner, and one of his mother's grandfathers had been a Captain Kirby, who left behind him a number of logbooks illustrated by himself.

He visited Kingsdown, near Deal, where his brother David had a house beside the shingly beach and where shipping was constantly passing close in-shore. This was to be the inspiration for the first Tim book, Little Tim and the Brave Sea Captain, in which the Ardizzone house was Tim's home. Ships, sail and steam, small boats, incidents of life at sea and activity on rivers were again and again to provide fruitful themes.

Such were the subjects of many of Ardizzone's pictures throughout his working life, but early in his artistic career came an opportunity to widen his outlook that provided material of sterner quality with a totally different background. He was appointed official War Artist in 1940. From the period in France up to the fall of Dunkirk, during the early London blitzes and Britain's preparations against invasion, to North Africa and the Western Desert and then on to Sicily, ltaly, Normandy and Germany he poured out a long succession of drawings and paintings. He depicts the hardships of civilian life with the sudden interruptions of peacetime existence, the soldiers' training, the frequent periods of waiting and inactivity and then the almost uninterrupted fast-moving warfare of the latter years. Ardizzone was never far behind the battle, and at times he can produce a grim picture of recent fighting. The total output provides a wide survey of human behaviour in times of war, which for its truthfulness parallels the writings of literary recorders such as Stendhal and Tolstoy.
After the war, Ardizzone's subject matter again widens. Though for a number of years he was to continue his "low life" subjects, a world of greater respectability begins to appear, with house parties and bathing pools in the South of France. Records of foreign travel present a life of greater comfort and affluence. Beer in pubs gives place to wine at the dining table, the imbibers may still have red noses, but they are tasting finer products, which are not cheap. Some bite may have gone out of his work, but the social scene isnow richly attractive. In 1962 he was elected A.R.A. and in 1970 R.A.

As a constant observer of life around him, Ardizzone was ideally suited for book illustration. In a sense all his work is illustrative, but the power to interpret an author's text is a gift which he possesses in a marked degree, both from his sympathetic understanding and vivid imagination. His achievement in this field lies in his ability to create a series of small events. He does not concentrate as much on the individual characters of the story as make a picture from their behaviour in the incidents which he has selected. Apart from the people in his own children's tales, one lays down the book with perhaps no extended knowledge of the hero or of the other protagonists, but with a memory enriched by a number of lively scenes



What would Edward Ardizzone have made of the new editions of his Little Tim books as we approach the centenary of his birth? He would have loved them, his daughter, Christianna Clemence, tells Joanna Carey (The Guardian, Tuesday 4 January 2000)

"He drew constantly - always carried a sketchbook, usually a publisher's 'dummy' - but, failing that, he drew on envelopes or the backs of cigarette boxes. Even his letters had drawings all over - I grew up thinking all correspondence was illustrated: when I went away to school I was surprised by the dull letters all the other girls received. Pa was always drawing. We just took it for granted - it was what he did."
Christianna Clemence is talking about her father, Edward Ardizzone. His self-portrait hangs on the wall behind her and bears quite a resemblance to her young grandson, Tom, who's visiting, and who waits patiently as we talk.
Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979) was one of the best-known, best-loved and most influential and important of all 20th century illustrators. Astonishingly prolific, his work includes watercolours, oils, prints, magazine illustrations including those for the Radio Times (which, in its heyday, was a marvellous showcase for illustrators) and, on a larger scale, the famous lithographs for the old J Lyons teashops, posters and even murals for an ocean liner. And, of course, he was a distinguished war artist. He illustrated more than 180 books - from Shakespeare, Dickens, Galsworthy to Walter de la Mare, Eleanor Farjeon and a delightful autobiography - and is perhaps best known for his Little Tim books, which grew from the stories he told Christianna and her brother as children.
They lived in London and Christianna - now 70 and a hugely entertaining storyteller herself - paints a vivid picture of the family home in Maida Vale, whose streets, shops, pubs, parks and raffish local characters are recorded with such affectionate relish in Ardizzone's work. Ardizzone worked at home; he had been a clerk in his father's firm, forever embellishing the accounts with drawings and doodles, and attending life classes at Westminster School of Art in the evenings, but he gave up that job to become a professional artist.
"He started with book jackets," says Christianna, "but money was scarce, so Ma, who was very beautiful and very tall, got a job as a fashion model and Pa looked after us at home while he worked. The house smelled deliciously of turpentine, and he sat at his desk up on a model's throne, on the first floor. With no garden, and a very dark nursery, my brother and I just larked around the studio; mostly he ignored our squabbles and screams, but he'd attend to the odd splinter, and now and again he'd say 'please don't lean out of the window!' or 'please don't climb on the roof'."
And did you obey? "Of course not - we couldn't hear him, anyway, if we were out on the roof. But it was perfectly safe - one of those huge Victorian houses where behind the parapet you could get access to all the different levels," she says briskly (and for a moment I wonder where her grandson has got to). And did he prepare your meals? "Oh, yes, he was a much better cook than our mother! Usually it was semolina and pineapple chunks... and he'd take us out to the park to play, and sometimes I walked down to the framers with him when he had exhibitions at the Leger Gallery. He read to us a lot at bedtime, but we'd always end up asking for "real stories" - ie, the ones he made up himself, and he'd say: 'Well, now ... let's see ... how does it go?' "
So with these exemplary "parenting skills" was he an early version of "new man"? "Absolutely not! Very old-fashioned in his ideas about women... no question of girls going to university - you just had to hope to get married!"
And, indeed, Christianna, as a little girl, had elaborate plans to secure a comfortable future by making friends with rich old gentlemen in Paddington recreation ground where their father took them to play... and that's what inspired the story Lucy Brown and Mr Grimes.
"In his innocence, it didn't occur to Pa that it wasn't a very good example for little girls, and the story had to be somewhat modified.
"Luckily, though, no one objected to the hair-raising situations from which Little Tim makes such heroic escapes - and it's the same benevolent Mr Grimes who so obligingly forks out for the steam yacht Evangeline, in which Tim and Lucy Go To Sea. Reading these stories with my sons was, for me, one of the major delights of parenthood - and the creation of them was clearly very important to Ardizzone.
"He talked about them a lot," says Christianna, "about the simple text, the structure, and the importance of a turning point in the narrative." And although the line and wash drawings, with that vigorous, distinctive hatching and cross-hatching seem so spontaneous, "he'd draw and redraw until he got it exactly right". Lucy and Tim were based on Christianna and her brother, so did they have to sit still to be drawn?
"Oh, no! He didn't draw from life except in formal life classes: he did all his drawing from memory, drawing what he'd seen half-an-hour before. And I have a theory that the speed and fluency of his drawing was partly due to the fact that he had a bit of a stammer - drawing was a much easier form of communication."
And it's that ease of visual communication that allows the pictures to tell so much of the story. Though packed with information, the detail is never fussy or laboured - gestures and facial expressions, however breezily suggested, are marvellously eloquent, the humour is gentle and his perfect understanding of composition, however dramatic, always conveys an overall sense of well-being.
In his illuminating book on Ardizzone, Gabriel White laments the fact that the artist spent so much time on children's books - as opposed to "general illustration" - but really, how lucky that is. Children brought up on these books will never forget the atmospheric vitality of his drawing, will always feel, at any stage of their life, that leap of recognition when they encounter his work - wherever it may be - in books, galleries or at the Imperial War Museum. And anyway, as Christianna points out, her father didn't make much distinction between work for children and work for adults - "he always treated us as equals - he would certainly never talk down or draw down to children." As with Tim and Lucy, whatever happened he simply expected them to rise to the occasion.
Calling to mind Hogarth, Rowlandson, Cruickshank and Daumier, Ardizzone's style has its roots firmly in the traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries; his work spans the greater part of the 20th century; and now, ensuring its accessibility in the new millennium, Scholastic is re-publishing all the Little Tim stories.
In order to create fresh, bright books rather than fusty facsimiles, they've used the latest technology to scan Ardizzone's original colour washes, with the black lines on a separate overlay. Christianna has been involved at every stage of this sensitive operation.
Two of the books are already published, and the rest will appear during 2000 - to celebrate the centenary of Ardizzone's birth. "It's astonishing! It all looks so crisp and lovely - only trouble is the modern scanners are so efficient they picked up all the underdrawing - and you could even see where the cat had walked across the drawing board. Drat that cat! as Pa would say. But they've removed the splodges and the result is wonderful!
"Oh, yes, Pa would have loved it."

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