Beningfield's Countryside

New York: Studio Books / Viking Press. Very Good/Good. 1980. First USA Edition. Hard Cover. 4to 0713912820 Dust jacket complete, price clipped, tear and top of spine. Green cloth covered boards with bright gilt titling on spine. Illustrated end papers. 141 pages clean and tight. In this book Gordon Beningfield celebrates a classic countryside that was once typical of much of England but is increasingly falling victim to modern intensive farming and the spread of urbanization. Gordon Beningfield's world is centred on the gentle, rural landscapes of Hertfordshire and the open downs and lush valleys of Dorset. Here are the dense, leafy hedgerows with their rich variety of flowers, offering cover to a wealth of creatures but only a hindrance to the plough. The lush, sweet-scented water-meadows he portrays so evocatively are equally shrinking before the onslaught of mechanical diggers and drainage schemes promoted by those who see the balance sheet of the countryside as being purely a matter of finance. Even the broad-leaved woods, which provide tantalizing glimpses of deer and badgers, cannot compete as a cash crop with alien conifers. Gordon Beningfield captures the essence of a countryside that man has created in harmony with nature and which he is now inexorably destroying. Gordon Beningfield is almost unique among artists who have made a reputation painting wildlife since he is also a perceptive and gifted landscape painter. Beningfield's Countryside combines intimate close-ups of animals and flowers with broad landscapes that provide a setting and at the same time convey a powerful feeling for the special qualities of English scenery. In these fine pictures, Beningfield's talent as a painter of landscapes is displayed to the general public for the first time. In his text, his sketches and his exquisitely detailed watercolours and oil paintings, Beningfield again shows himself to be a skilled and observant naturalist. Beningfield's Countryside is irresistible in its evocation of the small-scale pleasures of the country-here a pile of nuts neatly opened by a dormouse, there a fox basking only half asleep in a shaft of sunlight or a yellowhammer singing boldly from the top of a hawthorn bush. .