Vivien Gribble

Vivien Massie Gribble (1888 to 6 February 1932) was a wood engraver who was active at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a pupil of Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited regularly with the Society of Wood Engravers.^[1]

Biography

The frontispiece of Sixe Idillia (1922), one of less than 25 copies hand-coloured by Gribble

The frontispiece of Odes (1923)

Gribble was born into a wealthy family, and was the third of six children. She studied at the Slade and the Central School of Arts and Crafts under Noel Rooke, and clearly made an early impression on her teachers. During the First World War she joined the Land Army. Her brother Julian, who won the V.C., died of influenza right at the end of the war; Gribble designed a memorial window for him.^[2] In 1919 she married Douglas Doyle jones, a barrister from a similarly wealthy background, and they set up house at Higham. Doyle Jones soon gave up working as a barrister to look after his estate and dabble in painting. After several miscarriages the couple adopted a child.^[2] Gribble, who had a restless temperament, tended to lose interest in projects when her initial wish was gratified. She died of cancer on 6 February 1932.

Her wood engravings

The Central School was clearly the place to be in those very early years of the wood engraving revival; in 1912, the year that Rooke began teaching wood engraving there, Gribble was commissioned to produce five wood engravings for an edition of Three Psalms designed by J.H. Mason.^[3] He was impressed enough to ask her in 1916 to produce 12 wood engravings for an edition of Cupid and Psyche by Apuleius which did not appear until 1935. In 1919 Gribble was asked to contribute three wood engravings to Change 2, a small format magazine that reflected the zeitgeist of the period; in the same year Malcolm Salaman included her wood engravings in his Studio anthology.^[4]

She exhibited in the second exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1921, and continued to do so until 1925. In 1922 she contributed two wood engravings to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Duckworth and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. She also produced the cover vignette for the book. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote about her in his introduction to the book: Miss Gribble and Miss Pilkington are among the other women artists who practise wood engraving with zeal and success; the former is now turning her attention to book illustration, in which English engravers of the modern school have hitherto achieved smaller results that their contemporaries in France.^[5] This was a limited edition of 550 copies; Gribble worked with Balston to produce three more books at Duckworth in a similarly luxurious format. The first was an edition of 380 signed copies of Sixe Idillia by Theocritus, printed at the Cloister Press under the supervision of Stanley Morison. This was followed in 1923 by Odes by John Keats in an edition of 170 signed copies (there was an ordinary edition of this and the next book), and, in 1924, an edition of 150 signed copies of Songs from "The Princess" by Tennyson.

Her final commission was her swan song; in 1926 MacMillan published an edition of Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy with 41 wood engravings by Gribble. There was a main edition of 1,500 copies, and an edition of 325 copies signed by Hardy which sold out before publication.

Her work is represented in several national collections, the British Museum,^[6] the Central School^[7] and the Fitzwilliam Museum.^[8]

An overview of Gribble's work

Gribble's wood engravings are clearly modern, but in the black line tradition of Edward Gordon Craig and Lucien Pissarro rather than the prevailing white line tradition. She was prominent in the early period of modern wood engraving, but her period of activity (1912-1926) reflects the lifespan of that modern black line tradition, which was clearly over before her early death. Many of her engravings are in a classical tradition, but the engravings for Tess are more modern in style and content and make greater use of white line engraving. Gribble herself is the model for Tess, and her husband for Angel Clare. The final judgement goes to Douglas Percy Bliss, who wrote of the limitations of the black line style of Gribble and Rooke: If their work had more verve and vitality they would be among the best book -decorators of our time.^[9]

References