Ralph Thompson MBE

Order of the British Empire

The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire is an order of chivalry established on 4 June 1917 by George V of the United Kingdom. The Order comprises five classes in civil and military divisions...

 (3 June 1913 - May 3, 2009) was an artist

Artist

An artist is a person engaged in one or more of any of a broad spectrum of activities related to creating art, practicing the arts and/or demonstrating an art. The common usage in both everyday speech and academic discourse is a practitioner in the visual arts only...

 and book illustrator

Illustrator

An Illustrator is a narrative artist who specializes in enhancing writing by providing a visual representation that corresponds to the content of the associated text...

, who specialized in pen and ink sketches of animal subjects. His most noteworthy works are his series of book illustrations for the famous naturalist and author Gerald Durrell

Gerald Durrell

Gerald "Gerry" Malcolm Durrell, OBE was a naturalist, zookeeper, conservationist, author and television presenter...

 in the period 1954 to 1964 when Durrell was associated with the publishing firm of Rupert Hart-Davis

Rupert Hart-Davis

Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis was an English publisher, editor and man of letters. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd...

. During this period of time, he visited Gerald Durrell's Jersey Zoo numerous times to sketch his subjects, especially when working on the illustrations of Menagerie Manor.

He has illustration credits for numerous other animal books and stories mostly for children and young adults, as well as commissioned animal posters and drawings.

Ralph Thompson also illustrated picture books like Chess Dream in a Garden by Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff

Rosemary Sutcliff CBE was a British novelist, and writer for children, best known as a writer of historical fiction and children's literature. Although she was primarily a children's author, the quality and depth of her writing also appeals to adults; Sutcliff herself once commented that she wrote...

.

He was the author of three books on animal illustration.

• A Brush with Animals, Rupert Hart-Davis
  Rupert Hart-Davis
  Sir Rupert Charles Hart-Davis was an English publisher, editor and man of letters. He founded the publishing company Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd...
  
   1963
• An Artist's Safari, Collins
  HarperCollins
  HarperCollins is a publishing company owned by News Corporation. It is the combination of the publishers William Collins, Sons and Co Ltd, a British company, and Harper & Row, an American company, itself the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers and Row, Peterson & Company. The worldwide...
  
   1970

He was also the author of a pictorial history:

• The 15th/19th The King's Royal Hussars : a pictorial history, Quoin 1989

Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest

Reader's Digest is a general interest family magazine, published ten times annually. Formerly based in Chappaqua, New York, its headquarters is now in New York City. It was founded in 1922, by DeWitt Wallace and Lila Bell Wallace...

 issued a sketchbook of Ralph Thompson in 1970 titled Animals Through the Eyes of an Artist.

An exhibition of his works is part of the 2009 Cookham

Cookham

Cookham is a village and civil parish in the north-easternmost corner of Berkshire in England, on the River Thames, notable as the home of the artist Stanley Spencer. It lies north of Maidenhead close to the border with Buckinghamshire...

Festival.