The artist who gave Ladybird books their visual identity was Harry Wingfield, whose work is to be celebrated at the two-year-old New Art Gallery in Walsall. He is 91 and produced his last Ladybird illustration in the late Seventies. But his pictures of smiling children, romping animals and catalogue-fresh household objects continue to figure in children’s lives and in the nostalgia of previous generations.

Wingfield received no formal art training, although he knew from an early age that he could draw. Legend has it that he was once voted the most popular boy at school because he entertained his classmates by drawing horses on the blackboard whenever the teacher left the room. That was in Manchester, where his family kept a pub, and where he had hoped to study at the art school.

But when he was 12 the Wingfields moved back to Derby, where he had been born in 1910. At 16, he began to look for a job, and found one in -nbsp; as he puts it - “a grotty little advertising agency” in Derby. There he taught himself commercial art from trade magazines, experience that came in useful years later for objects of all kinds, including scientific instruments.

When the recession hit in 1930, Wingfield moved to a Walsall firm called Crabtree, which specialised in small electrical goods, as artist, designer and layout man on its complicated catalogue. Throughout these early years, he attended art school in the evenings in Derby, Walsall and then Birmingham.

Wingfield had joined the RAF during the war, but by then he already knew Doug Keen, who was working for Ladybird. Keen recognised that his friend was adept at figure drawing. Introductions took place and Wingfield began his publishing career with Little Red Riding Hood and Goldilocks and the Three Bears - after, it is said, other artists rejected the chance as insufficiently lucrative.

This exhibition will celebrate the work of a particular artist, but it will also record a period in education which is remembered with mixed emotions. That many of Wingfield’s early works have been sold (which has led to few examples pre-1970 being available to the gallery) suggests that there is a vigorous market for nostalgia.

Wingfield is not (and would not claim to be) a great master, but in his competence, the worlds of commerce, education and art meet in a still satisfying way.

Harry Wingfield: Ladybird Illustrations of the 1960s and 1970s runs from January 31 to March 13. Information: 01922 654400; www.art@walsall.org.uk

A longer version of this review appears in this week’s Friday magazinenbsp;