Today for Thursday Art-Day I’m featuring my very favourite book illustrator and artist Anne Bullen (1914-1963)
Images and words adapted from an article featured by Jane Badger books www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk

Anne Bullen’s illustrations, portray different types of ponies and horses but all have a distinct Bullen “look”. There is a genuine knowledge about conformation in her art and with a few flowing lines her drawings have a feeling of lightness and movement. She portrayed the English show pony with an almost fey quality. (How I dreamed for a pony like that!  I still have all these books, some complete with dust jackets…CR)

Anne Bullen Cover “Pony Craft”

Anne Bullen was co-owner and founder of the Catherston Stud with her husband Lieutenant Colonel Jack Bullen. She was brought up with horses, and started their stud after the second world war. Jennie Loriston-Clarke, neé Bullen, said “they started rescuing a lot of ponies off the moors and crossing them with thoroughbreds to produce the British riding ponies which we all rode.” The Bullens bred ponies of different sorts: mostly Welsh to start with, but some Exmoor, Dartmoor and cross-breeds, who were ridden by the Bullen’s six children with considerable success.

The ideal pony Anne Bullen worked for in her work breeding emerged too in her illustrations. Cascade, in Monica Edwards’ Wish For A Pony, is the pony that inhabits many small girls’ dreams, and the British pony breed illustrations in Ponycraft all have a look about them almost of fantasy: although recognisibly the breed, they are all overlaid with the characteristic Bullen feel.

Anne Bullen’s work illustrating went in tandem with her work on the stud. After training at the Academie Julien in Paris and at the Chelsea School of Art her career in book illustration coincided with the birth of the classic pony story: one which is told from the point of view of the rider. The first book Anne Bullen illustrated was Joanna Cannan’s A Pony For Jean (Collins 1936), a funny and wry look at the acquisition of a pony and introduction to the countryside of an urban child.
Anne Bullen worked principally for the publishers Collins from 1938 to 1950, thereby illustrating the work of some major contributors to the pony book genre: all three Pullein-Thompson sisters and Monica Edwards, for whom she produced arguably her most striking work.

The fashion for producing pony book dustjackets as either black and white or virtually so ( the Pullein-Thompson’s Six Ponies and Three Ponies for Shannan both have only the faintest degree of colour) did not allow Anne Bullen to extend herself as much as she later did for Monica Edwards’ first four books. These four stories all have full colour dustjackets which are delightful, in particular Wish for a Pony, which shows Cascade against a darkening sky: he is the sort of pony who must have cantered through many pony obsessed children’s childhood, a noble creature from a dream, and not at all the mud covered shaggy pony far more likely to be the average child’s experience.

Although Anne Bullen illustrated much fiction, she only made one excursion into it herself: this was Darkie, the Life Story of a Pony, co-written with Rosemary Oldfield, and illustrated by Anne. The two other books she wrote are both non-fiction: Showing Ponies, published after her death, and Ponycraft, a short book combining the basics of looking after and riding a pony with a survey of British Native Pony breeds.

The Catherston Stud still continues: Anne Bullen died on 22nd December 1963 after fighting cancer for 5 years, and when her husband died in 1966, the Stud was taken over by Anne’s daughter, Jennie, and her husband Anthony Loriston-Clarke. The Stud now breeds horses rather than ponies, but most of their stallions are descended from the pony mares Anne and Jack Bullen bred. Jennie Loriston Clarke is to retire this year (2010), and is to sell the Stud name and some of the stock.

Adapted from an article featured byJane Badger books www.janebadgerbooks.co.uk