Edward Julius Detmold

[2] Their father, an electrical engineer was absent for much of their childhood, and they lived with their uncle and guardian, Dr. Edward Barton Shuldham, who saw to their tuition and was a noted collector of porcelain and Japanese woodblock prints of plants and animals.

"Particularly noticeable are the early influences in the paintings, Edward's design for an osprey, with its unusual water effects, testifying to a Japanese contribution.

Already apparent is that style in which a searching study of natural forms, especially bird plumage, is subordinated to the decorative arrangement" - David Larkin (The Fantastic Creatures of Edward Julius Detmold)[4] This was followed in 1900, by an exhibition at the Fine Art Society's Gallery in London.

[9] During the First World War, Edward Detmold sought recognition as a conscientious objector, but this was denied by the official tribunal, and he was forcibly enrolled in a training unit attached to the Middlesex Regiment.

Edward Detmold was painstaking in his work, missing deadlines so that a complete set of colour plates for Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Tales were never used by Hodder and remained unpublished.

[12] Edward Julius became one of the most talented of illustrators, depicting animals and plants with an extraordinary understanding, and making use of fantasy settings of architecture and landscape.

[10] He lived in London, sharing a house with his mother, artist Sidney Laurence Biddle and musician Harold Hulls, until the outbreak of the Second World War, when the household moved first to Sussex and then to Montgomeryshire, and in his final years he retired completely from public life.