- Gwen Raverat
Gwendoline Mary "Gwen" Raverat née Darwin (
26 August 1885 –11 February 1957 ) was a celebrated Englishwood engraving artist who co-founded theSociety of Wood Engravers inEngland .Biography
Gwen Darwin was born in
Cambridge in 1885, the daughter ofGeorge Howard Darwin and his wife Maud du Puy. She was the granddaughter of the naturalistCharles Darwin . She married the French painterJacques Raverat in 1911 and they lived inVence , nearNice in the south ofFrance , until his death frommultiple 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 politicianEdvard 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 theBloomsbury Group and ofRupert Brooke 'sNeo-Pagan s.In 1927, her brother-in-law
Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenic designs for a proposed ballet drawn fromWilliam Blake 's "Illustrations to theBook of Job " to commemorate Blake's centennial; her second cousinRalph 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 theFitzwilliam 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. [The [http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/1904555128 Customer Reviews on Amazon] explain why the book remains so popular.] 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. [ [http://www.dar.cam.ac.uk/accommodation/ Darwin College: Facilities ] ]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)
Notes
ee also
*
Darwin-Wedgwood family External links
* [http://www.broughtonhousegallery.co.uk/raverat_index.html Broughton House Gallery Archive]
*NRA|P23864
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