As one of Britain 's leading wildlife artists, Yorkshire 's Robert Fuller has braved the ice of Antarctica , the heat of the African plain and even the jungles of India in order to study his subjects.

But so far no foray into the wilderness has been as gruelling as the week he spent crammed into a child's Wendy house to photograph fox cubs in a Cambridgeshire suburban garden.

The 6ft 2” artist endured cramp and the suffocating temperatures of last week's heat wave as he squatted on a chair designed for toddlers' tea parties in the back garden of a terraced house in Huntingdon.

He spent up to 15 hours a day in the cramped four foot-high Wendy house after hearing about the den through a friend and customer.

Frustrated of late by the extreme shyness of country foxes, he jumped at the opportunity to try his luck at studying their urban cousins.

“The vixen had made her den under a garden shed opposite the Wendy house, so all I had to do was make a small window in the back of the house and sit and wait,” he said.

“I always go to a great effort to find wild subjects to paint, but wild foxes are tremendously difficult to study. One slight whiff of human scent or a click of a camera and there off,” he said.

Mr Fuller, who paints his trademark detailed pictures directly from the photographs he takes, has been trying to get a good photograph of a vixen and her cubs for many years now.

In the past he has woken at 4am to scan the countryside around his home in Thixendale, near Malton, North Yorkshire , for these elusive creatures and has only ever returned with a meagre handful of pictures.

Photographing the urban den, on the other hand, was his most successful trip to date. He returned with more than 2,500 photographs of the romping cubs and their mother.

Mr Fuller, who grew up on a farm in Givendale, East Yorkshire and learned to track and record the comings and goings of wildlife almost as soon as he could walk, claimed to have “seen and learned more about foxes in the last week than in my whole life.”

Foxes have recently adapted to urban life in ways that are still remarkable to wildlife lovers and Mr Fuller found the experience an eye-opener.

“They have different pressures to those experienced by country foxes. They have to negotiate busy roads, get used to quite alarming noises like lawn-mowers and, of course, overcome their instinctive shyness of people,” he explained.

“In the countryside, these same animals will move their cubs away if you so much as walk close to a den even when they are not actually there.”

The vixen Mr Fuller watched last week also appeared to have adapted her diet to suit that of a suburban dweller. She ate chicken carcasses left out for her by a well-meaning neighbour and seemed to have developed a particular liking for garden birds, in particular black birds and collared doves.

Mr Fuller is renowned for detailed paintings that reveal a deep understanding of his subjects and he regularly travels the world to study and photograph wildlife.

Soon he flies to Kajanni in northern Finland to photograph brown bears. The trip promises challenges at the other extreme to those endured in the Wendy house.

He expects to have to stay awake each night in temperatures of just 4°Centigrade in a bare wooden hide. The bears are largely nocturnal and will only come out at night when they hunt and forage for food.

Photographs of the artist's wildlife exploits both at home and abroad will be part of an exhibition due to open at his gallery in Thixendale, Malton, North Yorkshire from June 7 – 15 th .

The photographic collection – which spans the globe from tigers prowling through the Indian jungle to penguins slipping on the Antarctic ice - will be exhibited alongside his paintings.

The exhibition, which will run daily between 11.30am and 4.30pm, is to have a particular focus on Mr Fuller's passion for conserving barn owls.

Alongside paintings of birds spotted in the area, there will be displays of newly-dissected barn owl pellets and other educational material to help wildlife lovers find out more about these birds in the wild.

In addition, Mr Fuller will be throwing open the doors to his studio so that visitors can see how he paints.