And Another Thing | 21 March 2009

One of my favourite parts of London, in easy walking distance of my house in Newton Road, is what I call the Ardizzone country. This stretches from the edges of Little Venice into Maida Vale and is, or was until the crunch, in the process of rapid gentrification. I call it after the artist because, from 1920 until his death in 1979, he lived (on and off) at 130 Elgin Avenue, and made hundreds, perhaps thousands, of little sketches of its people. He had not much artistic training, apart from a spell under Bernard Meninsky at the Westminster School of Art, but he had an extraordinary skill at doing rapid figure drawings, which he deepened by clever hatching and watercolour washes. They look lightweight at first glance, but the more you study them, the more you come to admire their quality and the amount of interesting information they convey.

Edward Ardizzone had a fine gift for drawing children, and made his living by writing and illustrating books for them.