Animals: Wildlife Prints by Anthony Wren

Pencil is an unforgiving medium for wildlife. There is no colour to carry a picture that is not quite right, so everything rests on the drawing itself: the set of the shoulders, the way light sits on fur or feather, the particular stupidity or intelligence in an animal's eye. Wren works in close detail and the results reward being looked at properly rather than glanced past.

The range is wide. Felix Lynx and Spotted give you two of the cats, watchful in the way cats are. The Siberian is the largest of them. Family Portrait sets a group of polar bears together, and Tawny Owl is exactly what it says: an owl, head on, doing that thing owls do where they appear to be judging you. Alert catches a goose in the second before it decides something is wrong. The Boss is an ostrich, and it is not a flattering portrait, which is rather the joke. King of Diamonds, King of Spades, Out for Lunch and The Wild Bunch round the collection out.

They are reproductions of pencil originals, printed on archival paper with fade-resistant inks so that nothing yellows or washes out over the years. As with everything on this site, each print has stayed in its wrapping since the day it was bought and has never been hung or displayed. They come to you clean and unmarked, and the sizes suit a standard off-the-shelf frame and mount.

Prices run from around twenty-one pounds to fifty-six. The larger and more detailed pieces sit at the top of that range, which is fair enough given the hours in them.

Wildlife prints tend to suit rooms that other pictures do not. A pencil drawing of an owl works in a hallway, a study, a downstairs cloakroom, a child's bedroom, and it does not date the way a colour photograph of the same bird would. They also make reliable presents, because almost everybody has an animal they are fond of and few people own a good drawing of one.

Anthony Wren also drew the two Viking pieces elsewhere on this site, if you like the style and want something other than wildlife. And if you are after dogs specifically, that is a collection of its own with over two hundred prints in it.