Friday’s library snapshot

I surprised myself this week when I discovered I had not featured the work of Gwendolen Raverat (1885 – 1957). So I will amend that today.

Gwen Raverat; the wife of Jacques Raverat, a French artist, is the daughter of Sir George Darwin (Professor of Astronomy at Cambridge University), and a grand-daughter of Charles Darwin.

Working for 3 years at the Slade School under Henry Tonks, she became interested in wood cuts and according to Herbert Furst writing in 1923 ‘ Raverat began to practice this craft with extraordinary … inborn dexterity.  Mrs Raverat’s work is distinguished by that rare quality, creative imagination combined with a craftsmanship of originality and unusual skill.  Whether she works with knife or graver, on a soft or on hard wood, her technique is always in deep and instinctive sympathy with the material. Her cuts are never drawings transferred to wood but seem to have been produced, as Rodin said he produced his sculpture, by merely removing irrelevant matter from the block and so revealing what was already in it.  Her imagination ranges from the representation of the beauty of light in nature to the realisation of profound emotion and soaring fantasy’.

Praise indeed …