Cherry Kearton

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Richard and Cherry Kearton, 1890s
Richard and Cherry Kearton, 1890s

Cherry Kearton, (1871 - 1940) was born in the small Yorkshire Dales (Swaledale) village of Thwaite, North Riding of Yorkshire, England, was one of the world's earliest wildlife photographers and writers. He first married Mary Burwood Coates with whom he had a son Cherry junior and daughter Nina. He later married Ada Forrest in 1922 a South African opera singer. Cherry died in 1940 after reading for the BBC's Children's Hour. The Cherry Kearton Medal and Award was created in his honour.

[edit] Photography

Cherry Kearton was a great animal photographer. In the summer of 1896 he and his brother Richard, a naturalist, reached the Outer Hebridean islands of St Kilda and many other remote places. Three years later their famous book With Nature and a Camera, illustrated by no fewer than 160 photographs, was published in London by Cassell & Co.


The description of Direct From Nature: The Photographic Work of Richard & Cherry Kearton states how "in 1892 Richard and Cherry Kearton took the first ever photograph of a bird’s nest with eggs. Realising the camera’s potential to reveal secrets of the natural world, they resolved to make the best possible records of their discoveries in the habits and behaviour of birds and other creatures. Three years of field work resulted in the first nature book to be illustrated entirely with photographs.

This was the springboard to two outstanding careers in wildlife photography. Richard, with his patience and intellectual clarity, developed the photographic hide through a series of devices which included the extraordinary Stuffed Ox. Cherry became the world’s first professional nature photographer, and travelled the globe as a prolific film cameraman and producer. In 1910 with his brother in-law William Coates, he travelled to Kenya to photograph natives and wildlife and made an early documentary of Roosevelt in Africa. He created a Masai warrior lion hunt scene on film, the first of its kind.

Numerous natural history photographers have proclaimed them as founding fathers of their discipline; none, however, of the thirty-odd volumes published in their lifetimes is now in print. This new study examines the methods and procedures behind their work, and reproduces a selection of the remarkable photographs that they proudly advertised as having been taken ‘direct from nature’."

[edit] Films

With the advent of moving pictures the Kearton brothers went their separate ways and Cherry moved into the field of wildlife documentary film making.

Cherry Kearton directed the following films:

[edit] References

  • Watch the Birdie by W R Mitchell, published 2001 by Castelberg
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