The painting was childish, the great chocolate-brown creatures blockish and crude. But that was because it was half-finished. Her husband, wildlife artist and animal-lover Simon Combes, will never complete this painting, his last before he died after being gored by a buffalo on a remote Kenyan hilltop near his home last month. 

Late that sunny Sunday afternoon, he was working on this canvas. The light was failing. His wife, known as Kat, was waiting for him with their friend Mary Wykstra, a cheetah expert, to set off on an hour-long walk. 

It would take them from their bungalow near the dusty floor of the Great Rift Valley up to watch the sunset from the steep side of a volcanic peak known as Delamere’s Nose.