George Edward Lodge (1860 – 1954)

Lodge was one of several English artists whose work I first encountered in a series of volumes about birds of the United Kingdom that I was given in my mid-teens. It featured tiny reproductions of paintings by various artists and when (pre-internet and home PCs) I learned that Lodge was a “serious” artist who painted birds, often in oils. But the reproductions were too small to appreciate.  As I become more familiar with his work published elsewhere, I felt that he seemed often not to get the proportions of the heads correct – his birds sometimes seemed a bit pigeon-headed, but that said, he often was spot on and had a wonderful way of creating a sort of cross between a vignette, and a full painting. Indeed, his backgrounds were, when fully done, often superbly crafated and evocative. He did many paintings of various species of pheasant that were, and are, among my favorite paintings of birds, creating patterns with leaves and foliage and ground cover, that made for extremely attractive illustrations overall.