

Country Life Magazine (October 8, 2024): The latest issue features…
Daffy goes digital
Annie Tempest’s inimitable characters totter gently into the modern age with a new website
Mud, mud, glorious mud
Dogs, birds, pigs and humans alike follow hippopotami down the hollow. Deborah Nicholls-Lee dons her wellies and joins them
A sense of time and place
Ben Pentreath unravels what makes an interior English, that indefinable, yet instantly recog-nisable and beguiling aesthetic
Made in the Marches
The border of England and Wales is proving inspiring for artisanal craftsmen, finds Arabella Youens
Mixing old and new
Country Life’s Interiors Editor Giles Kime opens the doors to his revived 17th-century cottage
New looks for a new season
From bamboo bookshelves to lamps and pots, Amelia Thorpe chooses accessories to covet
Turi King’s favourite painting
The scientist and historian picks a powerful royal portrait
Growing pains
Minette Batters takes her seat in the House of Lords
The right place to build
The historic streetscapes of our towns and cities reveal lessons we still need to learn about how to build, believes Ptolemy Dean
The legacy
Kate Green salutes Dorothy Brooke and the global equine charity that bears her name
Antlered majesty
Manmade, yet wild, deer parks prove we can create Arcadia, asserts John Lewis-Stempel
Timber of the gods
Jack Watkins admires the huge, ancient and once-exotic cedars that punctuate our landscapes
The good stuff
Hetty Lintell tallies her trinkets
Interiors
An imaginative kitchen extension and tea-tinged fabrics
Building on great bone structure
The good bones that anchor the gardens of Foscote Manor, Buckinghamshire, please the eye of George Plumptre
Foraging
John Wright raises a dram of home-made vodka to the crab apple
Operation mincemeat
Always comforting, cottage pie satisfies Tom Parker Bowles
Salt of the earth
Pick up a handful or several of salted peanuts when you’re next in the pub, urges Rob Crossan
I have news for ewe
The humble sheep changed the course of British art history, reveals Bendor Grosvenor


‘We are fond of tracing the resemblance between Poetry and Painting,’ wrote William Wordsworth
When, in 1840 or so, a well-meaning houseguest called Margaret Gillies made a drawing of the 70-year old Mrs Wordsworth, everyone agreed that it was an excellent likeness; but her kind act was rewarded with a testy and somewhat ungracious sonnet from the sitter’s husband. He preferred to visualise Mary in her salad days: ‘’tis a fruitless task to paint for me, / Who, yielding not to changes Time has made, / By the habitual light of memory see / Eyes unbedimmed, see bloom that cannot fade, / And smiles that from their birth-place ne’er shall flee / Into the land where ghosts and phantoms be’.
Every artist needs to learn and master the still life. Written by a well-known artist and expert instructor, The Art of Still Life offers a comprehensive, contemporary approach to the subject that instructs artists on the foundation basics and advanced techniques they need for successful drawing and painting.
manual and a visual treasure trove of some of the finest still life art throughout history and being created today.