Vincent Haddelsey

Vincent Haddelsey (13 April 1934 – 29 August 2010) was an English naïve painter, who focused on landscapes and horses. He was the only child of Sam Haddelsey, and Mary Lucy (nee Tierney). His father was a lawyer, and his grandfather and great-grandfather had also worked in the legal profession. At the end of the Second World War, the family moved to Canwick, a rural village just outside Lincoln. Canwick House had stables, and was surrounded by farms which still used shire horses for agricultural work, all of which taught him to look on horses as part of life.

His two grandmothers were gifted painters, and when he was eight his maternal grandmother started him off with oils by giving him her own paint box, brushes and palette. collected by Robinson, himself a H'aisla, the hereditary Chief of the Beaver Clan. The book included a selection of Haddelsey's pictures, as well as his explanatory line drawings. In this collection, Haddelsey wrote the text himself, but for his next book he collaborated with equestrian author and journalist Caroline Silver to produce a 64-page showcase of his equestrian paintings. This was Haddelsey's Horses: The Paintings of Vincent Haddelsey (1978) consisting of full-page colour plates of his work, with a text provided by Silver. "Many of Haddelsey's paintings tell a story," writes Silver: one tells of a bull who wouldn't eat, who ends up on a pub sign, another tells of a ghost who hitches a ride home on a motorbike, then disappears (characteristically, horses feature in both paintings).

In 1980, Vincent Haddelsey went on a journey to Inner Mongolia, where he studied and painted the Mongolian Pony. Various paintings resulted from this trip.

In 1989 Vincent travelled to Chile staying with his cousin Margaret Lunt (née Millen) whose husband John was stationed with the British Embassy as the Defence Attache. Vincent visited a number of Quasimodo horse gatherings and drew many sketches and pencil drawings of the riders and horses of Chile.

Preferring to be known as an "equestrian painter" rather than an artist, Haddelsey exhibited widely, and has paintings included in the Royal collection among others. He died on 29 August 2010 in Paris, having suffered from dementia during the final years of his life.

Works

Paintings Gstaad Village of the Fourth Banner, Inner Mongolia (1980 or later) Herding Cattle, Inner Mongolia (1980 or later)

Books Gordon Robinson, illustrated by Vincent Haddelsey, Tales of Kitamaat, Northern Sentinel Press, British Columbia, 1956 Vincent Haddelsey, The Horse, Our Heritage, Arthur Niggli, 1971, Vincent Haddelsey, with Caroline Silver, Haddelsey's Horses: The Paintings of Vincent Haddelsey, Jonathon Cape, London 1978