Gallery - Mildred Elsie Eldridge 1909-1991

Welcome to The Gallery where you will find images of Elsie Eldridge’s sketches, watercolour and oil paintings, botanical and bird studies, as well as book illustrations created throughout her lifetime.

The subtitle of this website is Murals to Medici. Here you will see her first Murals (Oil Paintings) and her last publication for Medici (Book Illustrations).

There is a section in this website, The Dance of Life, which looks closely at the mural-panels, so they are not included here.

This section of the website will always be a work in progress as we trace and record Elsie’s works from the four corners of the world.

We welcome owners of her art to provide us with images for inclusion in The Gallery, assuring you that we will not disclose ownership.

Oil Paintings

(click to read more)

1934/5 Aesops Fables, Brockley School, London ((Mural)

1937 River of Life, Bryn Coed,
Chirk (Mural)

Watercolours

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1933/4 Still Life Puppets and Dandelions

1936 Morning Flight (photograph) Birmingham Museum Trust

1937 Rain on the hill.
Hepworth Gallery, Wakefield

1937 The sedge has withered from the lake and no birds in it

1937/9 Poplars Chirk Valley, Manchester Museum

1939 Foundation or destruction of the Countryside (photograph)
Ibis Club, Prudential Insurance, Chiswick

1939 Design of stained-glass window Llanpumsaint

1941 Baptism in River Ceiriog. *Recording Britain*

1941 Gathering Water Lilies,
Llyn Moelfre

1956 In the boardroom. Robert Jones and Agnes Hunt Orthopaedic Hospital, Gobowen

1959 Sanguinaria Canadensis Eglwysfach. Aberystwyth University School of Art Museum

1970 Self-portrait
also known as St Lukes

Medici cards

(click to read more)

Flowers

Animals

Birds & Butterflies

1962 ‘with all good wishes for your birthday’

Book Illustrations

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Elsie Eldridge was a prolific book illustrator during the half decade following the end of the Second World War. This was a challenge, but one she was prepared to meet by her training at the Royal College of Art. The college’s principal urged every student to master such marketable skills as book-illustrating.

Her first book, a story for children with color illustrations, was published in 1945, the year her son was born. The next year’s books reveal her versatility. For one, she created illustrations of herbs; in another, her black-and-white drawings accompany a headmaster’s walks in the natural world. Three are books for children. Finally, something completely different: 96 black-and-red illustrations for The Three Royal Monkeys by Walter de la Mare.

No book featuring her work appeared in 1947, but 10 were published in 1948. Six were children’s stories written by Dorothy Richards, with Eldridge’s color illustrations. She turned to surrealism in a fantasy book for adults, The Star-Born by Henry Williamson.

These details allow us to picture Eldridge in the Manafon rectory, during the post-war years of austerity, expanding her creative skills, while earning enough money to supplement her husband’s stipend as a country priest and to pay for a nanny for her son. We can imagine her doing numerous preliminary sketches for creating more than 500 illustrations.

What follows is a list of the 25 books Eldridge illustrated, all but five of which were published by Faber and Faber.

A Home for Mrs Field Mouse

1945, 18 Drawings as Elsie Thomas