Art & Artists

George Edward Lodge (1860 - 1954)

George Edward Lodge was brought up in Lincolnshire and educated at home. As a child he was already fascinated by birds as well as by taxidermy: he stuffed his first bird, an owl, at the age of twelve. As a student at the Lincoln School of Art he was awarded fourteen prizes for drawing and later became an expert wood engraver.

As a young man he travelled widely, visiting Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), Japan, the United States, Scandinavia and the West Indies. A great sportsman, he made annual visits to Scotland and the salmon rivers of Norway, where he gathered material for his work on raptors. He was a keen falconer and spent the last part of his life in a house at Camberley which he named Hawk House.

Lodge was a prolific illustrator, being best remembered for his superb work on Dr Bannerman's twelve volumes of The Birds of the British Isles. He only wrote one book, though, at the age of eighty-five: Memories of an Artist Naturalist.