Gwen Raverat

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Plaque commemorating her childhood home, now part of Darwin College, University of Cambridge.

Gwendoline Mary "Gwen" Raverat (née Darwin; 26 August 1885-11 February 1957) was a celebrated English wood engraving artist who co-founded the Society of Wood Engravers in England.

[edit] Biography

Gwen Darwin was born in Cambridge in 1885, the daughter of George Howard Darwin and his wife Maud du Puy. She was the granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin. She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911 and they lived in Vence, near Nice in the south of France, until his death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. They had two daughters, Sophie (born ?) who married the Cambridge scholar Mark Pryor and Elisabeth (born 1916), who married the Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro.

She illustrated a number of books both with her distinctive line drawings and characteristic wood engravings, and prints from her original wood blocks are much sought after today. Before they moved to France, they were part both of the Bloomsbury Group and of Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagans.

In 1927, her brother-in-law Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenic designs for a proposed ballet drawn from William Blake's Illustrations to the Book of Job to commemorate Blake's centennial; her second cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the music to the work which became known as Job, a masque for dancing. The miniature stage set which she built as a model still exists, housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Eventually she settled back in Cambridge where, in 1952 she published her classic childhood memoir Period Piece which is still in print 53 years later. In 2004, her grandson, William Pryor edited the complete correspondence between Jacques, herself and Virginia Woolf which was published as Virginia Woolf and the Raverats. Darwin College, Cambridge occupies both her childhood home and the next door Old Granary where she lived for the last years of her life. The college has named one of its student accommodation houses after her. [1]