Granddaughter of Charles Darwin, daughter of astronomer/mathematician George Howard Darwin, first cousin to poet Frances Cornford and married to French painter Jacques Raverat, Gwendolen Mary "Gwen" Raverat no doubt came by her talent, and her eccentricities, naturally.
Though the average reader probably better remembers Raverat today, if she is remembered at all, for her surprising literary bestseller Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (which has never been out of print), it is as the "square-headed woman who cuts wood" (in the words of her friend Rupert Brooke) -- i.e., as one of Great Britain's greatest 20th century wood engravers -- that Raverat is today honored by most book collectors:
Her grandson, in a long and affectionate homage, observed that Raverat's
...early life was a confluence of several important torrents of change: the emancipation of women, particularly in the intellectual life of turn-of-the-century Cambridge, the transformation of the arts, notably through the efforts of the Neo-Pagans – “exuberant, untrammelled, [delighting] in physical existence and in nature” – and the perseverance of that Darwinian pursuit of understanding into the arts....
In an age when women could not vote, had just been admitted to the university and were generally expected to prepare themselves for a life of familial and domestic routine, hers was the kind of independent-minded behaviour for which the Darwins were celebrated. So serious was her rebellion in insisting on doing serious, full-time art at the Slade that Gwen did not talk to her parents for two years while there.
But it was not until after her husband died of multiple sclerosis (in 1925) that Raverat turned seriously to wood engraving,
As her grandson notes,
[n]ow a widow, she was truly alone in the world, with the added responsibility of two young children. Once again, her awkward, disconcerting courage came to her rescue and, though Virginia Woolf could brilliantly characterise her as “frozen, like an old log dried out of all sensation”, she poured her instinctive and formidable powers of observation into her work as an engraver, becoming one of the foremost miniaturists of her generation, a far greater artist than many in the overhyped Bloomsbury set she had grown up with....
Only 5 years earlier (1920) Raverat had co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers with fellow artists Philip Hagreen, Robert Gibbings, Lucien Pissaro and Eric Gill. Over the four decades that were left to her (she died in 1957), Raverat produced an extraordinary body of work. (Her illustrations for the very rare surviving copies of the Ashendene Press' Les Amours Pastorales de Daphnis et Chloe, below, are via Bromer Booksellers:)
Most of the 500+ wood engravings that Raverat produced during her career are now held by the Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House, from whence reproductions of most of Raverat's engravings may be ordered. A nice complement, as it were, to a private library built around the books she illustrated....
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