Lovely Print of Grouse up on the moor, Signed by C Stanley Todd 1973

Lovely Print Of Grouse Up On The Moor

Signed By C Stanley Todd 1973

Signed by the artist in pencil

This is a beautiful scene, full of colour

The frame is unglazed (so would benefit from being glazed again) and measures approx 55.5cm x 47. 5cm



Published by J M Macmillan, Scotland.



Charles Stanley Todd (known as Stanley, 1923-2004) hailed from Northumberland where he grew up with a love, becoming an obsession with the work of the late Archibald Thorburn (1860-1935). He was determined to emulate his boyhood hero and taught himself to draw and paint with watercolours. He began visiting Highland Perthshire in the 1950's with the intention of becoming a professional artist and became friends with a local gamekeeper and his family in the Rannoch area with whom he would stay during his trips north. He worked at perfecting his craft, although many would argue that his work was mostly Thorburn's birds and mammals painted into different landscapes and this is certainly evident in his early paintings.
Todd, his sister, niece and nephews moved to Crieff in the late 1960's before buying a run down church manse on a nearby estate which he would renovate and use as a base as he attempted to establish himself as a professional wildlife artist. He enjoyed some limited success during the early 1970's with an exibition and series of prints, however his obsession with Thorburn rather than the wildlife itself caused him to make some major anatomical errors, a famous one being a winter Ptarmigan scene in which all the birds are male.
In the mid 1970's he took the first of many commissions from the whisky company Matthew Gloag & Sons, producers of The Famous Grouse brand who reproduced his paintings on the bottle label and later many more aspects of advertising their brand. Whilst there would be little doubt that this would become the most financially successful era of Todd's career, it was also the point at which he effectively became solely a 'Grouse' artist and painted little else until Gloags dropped him in favour of Rodger McPhail, around the early 1990's. McPhail had establised himself as the foremost natural history and sporting artist from a relatively early stage in his career, as well as one of the most prolific