Joan Hassall, (3 March 1906 – 6 March 1988) was a wood engraver, book illustrator and typographer. Her subject matter ranged from natural history to illustrations for English literary classics. In 1964 she was elected the first woman master member of the Art Workers Guild[1] and in 1987 was awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire).
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Born in Notting Hill, London, Joan Hassall was the daughter of illustrator John Hassall and his second wife, Constance Brooke-Webb. She attended The Royal Academy Schools from 1928 to 1933. In 1931 she began evening classes in engraving at the London Central School of Photo-engraving and Lithography in Fleet Street, where her teacher was R. John Beedham.[2] While her style is similar to the English wood engraver Thomas Bewick, she studied many engravers as a student.
The engraving of the title page of her brother Christopher Hassall’s book of poems, Devil’s Dyke, published in 1936, was her first commissioned illustration.[3] She subsequently illustrated works by Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Mrs Gaskell and Mary Russell Mitford and The Saltire Chapbooks, published by the Saltire Society in the 1940s. During World War II, Kingsley Cook, a tutor of Book Illustration and Drawing at Edinburgh College of Art, suggested that Joan Hassall act as his replacement, a post that she accepted. By 1948 Hassall had set up her own small press, Curtain Press. In that same year she supplied the original engravings for the postage stamps issued in commemoration of the Royal Silver Wedding.[4] In 1950 she designed an edition of Robert Burns' poems, to which she contributed a series of illustrations. She also designed the invitation that Prince Charles received to Queen Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation,[5] judged to be "the best thing of its kind in the history of the Coronation."[6]
The London bookbinding firm of Sangorski & Sutcliffe bound the limited editions (for the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis) of Eric Linklater's A Sociable Plover (1957) and Sealskin Trousers (1947), with Joan Hassall's wood-engravings. "These were to be signed by author and artist, and Linklater, cantankerous after lunch, insisted on signing 'Joan Hassall' and making the hapless Joan write 'Eric Linklater'."[7] In 1960 Hassall created 42 illustrations for The Collected Poems of Andrew Young, about which John Gibbens observed, "Joan Hassall's wood engravings...are exquisite miniatures, at only one remove from the artist's hand, and exquisitely matched to the poems in their concentration."[8] These large-paper editions were also bound by Sangorski & Sutcliffe. Between 1957 and 1962 Hassall's black and white woodcut prints for Jane Austen's novels came out in an edition by the Folio Society.[9] Although many subsequent editions of these books have been published, the first editions are now quite rare. Known to be a perfectionist, Hassall tried to capture in her work that "monumental moment".[10] She sometimes used a scraperboard or scratchboard medium for designing book plates.[11]
Hassall's health was frail, and as early as 1943 she asked to be relieved of teaching at Edinburgh College of Art on medical grounds.[12] She loved music and art, and was devoted to cats.[13] Bookplate expert Brian North Lee collected thirty-nine items by or about Hassall, who engraved his first bookplate,[14] and she named him her literary and artistic executor. When Hassall died in Malham, Yorkshire, in 1988, Lee spoke at her funeral, making his affection for her clear.[15] In 2001, under his direction, the two-volume Dearest Joan: A Selection of Joan Hassall's Lifetime Letters and Art was published by the Fleece Press in a limited edition of 300 copies.
