Reading the countryside Find!

It seems strange to be highlighting for Reading Detectives some books with few words, but the cartoon books of Norman Thelwell grew so much out of the Hampshire Countryside that I feel they need to be included here.

Although Thelwell began painting his catoons of little girls on ponies before moving to Hampshire, the majority of this work was completed from his Hampshire home in Braishfield.

In the Independent's obituary of Thelwell, who died in 2004, it was said that;

There is no more detailed pictorial account of 50 years of change to the English countryside than the work of Norman Thelwell. In an era when other cartoonists were reducing their subject matter to shorthand squiggles, Thelwell fleshed his out with abundant realistic detail, and backgrounds you could walk into. His subject matter, whatever funny caper happened to be going on in the foreground, was always the countryside.

I first read of Thelwell's connections with Hampshire, and Braishfield in particular, in the book Braishfield Memories, a book produced as a result of a Local Heritage Initiative project (an excellent book which probably deserves an entry in its own right - see http://www.lhi.org.uk/projects_directory/projects_by_region/south_east/hampshire/braishfield_memories/index.html)

and now whenever I drive from Romsey to Winchester I sometime imagine plump little girls on plump little ponies populating the fields just beyond the main road.

31 October 2009 from Madelaine - the book thief

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