Nora Fry Lavrin

Nora Lavrin, née Fry (1897 - 30 August 1985), was an English engraver, book illustrator and painter. She illustrated twenty editions of children’s books.

Life

Family

Nora Fry was born in Liverpool, the daughter of Canadian-born Ambrose Fry, a property developer and chemical manufacturer,[1] and Lydia (Lily) Thompson. Nora's brother, architect Maxwell Fry, in his Autobiographical Sketches mentions their mother playing the piano and that she had painted.[2] She had an older sister Muriel Fry, and two younger brothers, Edwin Maxwell Fry and Sydney Fry.

Lavrin had two children, John Lavrin, painter, and David H. Lavrin, immunologist.

Studies

Nora Lavrin studied arts with her sister Muriel at the Liverpool School of Art and the Royal College of Art in Kensington where she specialized in engraving and etching under Robert Austin. She spent some time in Paris in 1927 attending the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She also traveled in the provinces, particularly Semur-en-Auxois where she did drawings and watercolors. In 1928 she met and married Janko Lavrin. Her marriage to Lavrin introduced her to Slovenia and Yugoslavia, a region she memorialized with some of her dry point landscape sketches in Yugoslav Scenes (1935). From 1935 to 1937 she joined the University College of Nottingham as an art teacher.

Early career

Nora Lavrin began her career as an illustrator of children’s books in 1926. Her illustration of Aesop’s Fables (1927 and 1934) ran eight editions between 1927 and 1989. She also illustrated A Treasure of Tales for Little Folks (1927) which ran several versions in the 1930s, Averil Demuth's Trudi and Hansel (1938) and Hilda Lewis's The Ship that Flew (1939, 1986). She also illustrated Elizabeth Kyle’s The Seven Sapphires (1944), Holly Hotel (1945), Mirror of Castle Doone (1947) and Lost Karin (1947).

In the 1920s and 1930s she exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer exhibition; Liverpool Autumn Exhibition, Nottingham Society of Artists and galleries in England and Ljubljana, Yugoslavia (1961).

During the war Lavrin was commissioned to record life in England along with a corps of other artists engaged in that task. Her works of that period are at the Imperial War Museum archives.

In 1952 she published The Hop Dog (1952) in collaboration with Molly Thorp. The story was later adapted into a children’s film, Adventure in the Hopfields (1954).

Lavrin's interest in ballet sets and costumes resulted in her designs for Love and Litigation, choreographed by Pino Mlakar for the Slovene National Dance Company [1956]. She left sketches of the Colonel de Basil's Ballet Russe when it toured England in the 1930s.

Post World War II

After World War II Lavrin illustrated books on Slovene literature such as Vladimir Levstik, An Adder’s Nest (1931, 1943), Ivan Cankar’s The Bailiff Yerney and his Rights (London 1946), and The Ward of Our Lady of Mercy (Slovenia 1976), and Matej Bor’s A Wanderer in the Atomic Age (1967 and 1970). She also illustrated translations of several English classics into Slovene such as Villete by Charlotte Bronte (Ljubljana 1965), The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte, and The Return of the Native, Far from the Madding Crowd and The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy. Among her publications is a personal memoir of the relationship between D. H. Lawrence, Jessica Chambers, a friend of his youth portrayed in Sons and Lovers, and Frieda Weekley (née von Richthofen), his mistress and wife. It was published posthumously in 1987 as D. H. Lawrence. Nottingham Connections.

Lavrin also created many portraits sketches from daily life on paper in the 1950s. Her landscape oil works and watercolor portraits of her children and family are mostly held in private collections. The Ashmolean Print Room at Oxford has a collection of her original illustrations. She is also represented in the collection of the Maribor Art Gallery in Slovenia. Her illustrations have been published in thirty-eight books, which are available in sixty-eight publications in five languages, and are available in 542 libraries.

As an oil painter Lavrin produced portraits of her own children and landscapes. Her dry points of Yugoslavia published in 1935, in which the landscape is expressed in volumes and the people are captured as in snap shots. The Yugoslavia dry points aimed at witnessing a country and its people and have a very important historical value as they captured a past that would very soon change irreversibly after World War II.

Works

References

Notes

  1. ↑ Fry Autobiographical Sketches, pp.75,77
  2. ↑ Fry, Autobiographical Sketches, p.76
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