Gwen Raverat
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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.
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[edit] Biography
Gwen Darwin was born in Cambridge, England, 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 1919) who married the Cambridge scholar Mark Pryor and Elisabeth (born 1916), who married the Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro.
She illustrated a number of books 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, Gwen and Jacques Raverat were active in the Bloomsbury Group and Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagans.
In 1927, Raverat's brother-in-law Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenic designs for a proposed ballet drawn from William Blake's Illustrations of the Book of Job to commemorate the centennial of Blake's death; 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.[1] In 2004, the Raverat's grandson, William Pryor edited the complete correspondence between Gwen, Jacques, and Virginia Woolf and published it under the title Virginia Woolf and the Raverats.
Darwin College, Cambridge, occupies both her childhood home and the neighbouring Old Granary where she lived for the last years of her life. The college has named one of its student accommodation houses after her.[2]
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood, first published in 1952 by Faber & Faber. ISBN 1-904555-12-8 (hardcover) ISBN 0-571-06742-5 (paperback).
[edit] Notes
- ^ The Customer Reviews on Amazon explain why the book remains so popular.
- ^ Darwin College: Facilities
[edit] External links
- Archival material relating to Gwen Raverat listed at the UK National Register of Archives
- Broughton House Gallery Arcive - Accessed 26 August 2009
