GWEN RAVERAT (1885-1957)

Wood-Engravings
1909-1928

This exhibition brings together the wood-engravings Gwen Raverat made between 1909 and 1928; from her very first, ‘The Knight and the Burning Pestle’ (SN1) to ‘The Princess by the Lake’ (SN147). Missing is only one impression from the numbered blocks Joanna Selbourne and Lindsay Newman list in their Catalogue Raisonné of Raverat’s work, and a handful from the ‘un-numbered’ blocks listed in their appendices.

Gwen Raverat (née Darwin) grew up in Academic Cambridge. Her grandfather was the great naturalist Charles Darwin. Her father, Sir George Darwin, was Plumian Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University and a fellow of Kings College. Her mother, Maud du Puy, was a Philadelphian who had come to Cambridge in 1883. The Darwin family and their circles of friends extended into a large network of academics and artists; the Wedgwood and Darwin families were closely intertwined, Ralph Vaugh-Williams was a cousin, Raverat’s sister married into the Keynes family, Virginia and Vanessa Stephens (later Woolf and Bell) were friends. Raverat’s autobiography, Period Piece, published in 1952, is a brilliant account her childhood and we encourage everyone to read it.

In 1908 Raverat became friends with a like-minded group of contemporaries that Virginia Woolf labelled the ‘Neo-Pagans’. This group included the French born, British educated painter Jacques Raverat (later Gwen’s husband) and centered around the beautiful and charismatic poet Rupert Brooke. ‘Exuberant, untrammelled, delighting in physical existence and in nature’ (Virginia Woolf), these friends, not unlike ‘Bloomsbury’ itself, sought to throw off the restrictions and traditions of their Victorian upbringings.

Three epiphanies marked Raverat’s early artistic life. In 1898 she saw the Rembrandt exhibition in Amsterdam; ‘Rembrandt became my God’, she said. The following year she discovered the work of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), ‘grandfather’ of the wood-engraving tradition in Britain and the single biggest technical influence on her work. And finally, in 1908 while at the Slade, her cousin Elinor Monsell sent her the materials to make her first wood-engraving; ‘It is very shocking, but I really care for nothing but wood-cuts now’ she wrote.

Raverat was one of only a very small group of people experimenting with wood-engraving as a discrete art form in the first decade of the Twentieth Century. It was not until 1912 that Noel Rooke established a wood-engraving class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and not until 1920 that Raverat, Gill, Nash, Rooke and others founded the Society of Wood-Engravers. It is remarkable then, that she took to the medium so quickly and assuredly, and that she made so many wood-engravings in her first two decades of practice.

The period 1909-1928 was an incredibly fertile one for Raverat the artist, but it was also marked by personal tragedy. Jacques Raverat had suffered from bouts of unexplained illness from the earliest days of their marriage in 1911. Then, at the outbreak of War in 1914 he was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis. In 1920 the Raverats moved to Vence to aid Jacques’ health, ‘An Earthly Paradise’ in the mountains behind Nices, Antibes and Cannes. The town and the Southern light lent themselves perfectly to Raverat’s work and she made some of her finest prints there. But naturally, her life became dominated by Jacques’ illness and he died in 1925, aged only 40. Raverat returned to London physically and emotionally exhausted and suffered a breakdown. Reinvention brought her around. She began to teach and contributed criticism to the feminist periodical Time and Tide and to publications such as the New Leader magazine and The Times Literary Supplement.

1928 was a watershed year, a culmination as well as a new beginning. The Redfern Gallery held a retrospective of her prints and then, after making the last work in this exhibition, she embarked on illustrations to Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (we exhibited these prints in 2016). While Raverat made many ‘stand-alone’ prints after 1928, her subsequent work was dominated by book-illustration. Indeed many will know her work, and have experienced it first through the Cambridge Book of Poetry for Children published in 1932. Raverat was a highly regarded and influential illustrator. Numerically her book illustrations far exceed her other prints. But the wood-engravings shown here, made between 1909 and 1928, are unarguably her greatest artistic acheivement. Taken as a whole, they should be considered one of the most important contributions to the ‘revival’ of print-making in Britain in the early decades of the Twentieth Century.

We encourage anyone interested in women printmakers to see the V and A exhibition ‘Print and Prejudice – Women Printmakers 1700-1930‘ which includes works by Gwen Raverat.

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Exhibition: Thursday 16th March to Saturday 15th April 2023.

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There was an
EVENING RECEPTION
on Thursday 30th March

which will included an
Introduction to the Wood-Engravings of Gwen Raverat 1909-1928
given by Tom Edwards (Managing Director, Abbott and Holder)

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Provenance: these prints all come from three albums compiled by the artist.

Note: We have more than one impression of many of these prints. If you are interested in a work that is marked ‘sold’, do get in touch and we will let you know if we have another available.

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