"LEMURIENS"

Gary has a love of the Ring-tailed Lemur which accounts for the fact that he has drawn a number of pictures that feature them. He also regards them as good subjects for black and white work and that their long tails "work well". At the start of 2001, there are 6 Ring-tailed Lemur prints but there have also been one or two drawings that have not been released as prints (the eagle-eyed will have spotted one, a Lemur grouping, behind Allan Thornton in the "Drawn To Wildlife" video).

Lémuriens is one of the early prints, released in France in 1989. It is one of two pictures drawn for the French conservation group Robin des Bois and exhibited in Paris in May 1989 - the other was the African elephant and calf in the print "Elephants africains". It is a very attractive and intricate grouping of Lemurs and was composed from a mixture of several photographs.

100 copies of the print were sold at a Rainforest Art Exhibition at the Natural History Museum, in aid of Living Earth, in 1990. The success of the issue helped Gary realise how much his work appealed to the public and gave him confidence to issue prints on his own behalf; till then, his prints had been the result of work for conservation groups.

The image appeared in a WWF calendar for 1992.

The Ring-tailed Lemur is one of the species of Lemur, found only on Madagascar in the southern forests. I have read different accounts of the number of surviving species, from 28 to 33, but there were once at least 40. All the survivors are Endangered or critically Endangered. It spends more time on the ground than other Lemurs and uses its stripy tail like a flag to keep in touch with others when out of the trees.

(W.Preston : I have heard that sadly the lady doing the numbering on Lemuriens died in a boating accident/ car crash during the numbering and so many had to be numbered by galleries back in the UK. Also a large number of the prints hade to be rescued when the Paris basement where they were being stored flooded. If any collector can shed any further light on these stories, I would be interested to know.)