Calderon School of Animal Painting

Calderon was noted for his excellent depiction of animal particularly horses and while living in Midhurst, Sussex he started his own summer school. In 1892 he married Ethel Armstead the daughter of noted Victorian sculptor and Royal Academician Henry Hugh Armstead. Arguably his most accomplishment away from the easel was the establishment of his school of animal painting in 1894. It was located at 54 Baker Street in central London where it remained until 1911. The logistics of maintaining, organising, feeding, watering and exercising a resident menagerie of animals hardly bears thinking about. Calderon also spent much time arranging the appearance of his equine models, which due to limitations of space, could not be kept on the premises. For obvious reasons, lightning sketches were an important feature of the curriculum. Classes for ladies only for painting the human figure from the nude were held on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, while similar classes for men students took place on Monday and Thursday afternoons, with the whole school working in the costume and portrait painting class or in the composition class on Wednesdays.

The large cast-room contained a number of productions made specially for Calderon by a late member of the Royal Zoological Society and ranged from snakes, monkeys, armadillos and sheep, and endless horses and dogs, to special parts, such as heads and paws of lions and tigers – as well as many anatomically set up animal skeletons and casts of partial dissections, made by an expert, of a horse and of a calf with the outside skins removed. In 1911 he built a new school in conjunction with his own private house and studio at Kensington. The school was highly influential and many of the great 20th century horse and animal painters studied there. Among his students were Cecil Aldin, Lionel Edwards, Alfred Munnings, Lady Helena Gleichen, Frederick Whiting and George Studdy, besides a good many, who, with already-established reputations came to him from time to time for the special purpose of studying animals. Calderon had a thorough understanding of anatomy and published 'Animal Painting and Anatomy' in 1936, it was reprinted in 1975.