He painted to hunt

‘Even horses, dogs and wives have to be fed sometimes. They devour the monetary results’

RARE is the country home without a Cecil Aldin print somewhere on its walls, of a terrier on a sofa or a venerable gentleman out hunting. In a few lines, Aldin could capture character and circumstance to comic or dramatic effect, from a tumble over a facer or a mail coach at full stretch. He illustrated dozens of books, including his own, and earned a well-deserved reputation as a sporting artist. He could have been even greater, had it not been for his insatiable appetite for sporting pursuits. ‘I have no pretensions to Art,’ he wrote in his engaging autobiography . Painting ‘has had to provide the wherewithal to enable