Ancestral Trails 2016 » Gwen Mary DARWIN (1885-1957)

Persoonlijke gegevens Gwen Mary DARWIN 

• Zij is geboren op 26 augustus 1885 in Newnham Grange, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire.
• Zij is overleden op 11 februari 1957 in Old Granary, Silver Street, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, zij was toen 71 jaar oud.
• Zij is begraven februari 1957 in Trumpington Extension Cemetery, Trumpington, Cambridgeshire.
• Een kind van George Howard DARWIN en Martha Haskins du PUY

Gezin van Gwen Mary DARWIN

Zij is getrouwd met Jacques Pierre Paul RAVERAT.

Zij zijn getrouwd in het jaar 1911, zij was toen 25 jaar oud.

Kind(eren):

1. Sophie Jane RAVERAT  1919-2011 
2. Elizabeth RAVERAT  1916-2014

Notities over Gwen Mary DARWIN

Gwen Mary Raverat (26 August 1885 - 11 February 1957), née Darwin, was an English wood engraver, who was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers. Her memoir Period Piece was published in 1952.

Gwen Mary Darwin was born in Cambridge in 1885, she was the daughter of Sir George Howard Darwin and his wife Lady Maud Darwin, née Maud du Puy. She was the granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin and first cousin of the poet Frances Cornford, née Darwin.

She married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911. They were active in the Bloomsbury Group and Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagan group until they moved to the south of France, where they lived in Vence, near Nice, until his death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. They had two daughters: Elisabeth (1916-2014), who married the Norwegian politician Edvard Hambro, and Sophie Jane (1919-2011), who married the Cambridge scholar M.G.M. Pryor and later Charles Gurney.

Raverat is buried in the Trumpington Extension Cemetery, Cambridge with her father. Her mother Lady Maud Darwin was cremated at Cambridge Crematorium on 10 February 1947. There is a memorial to Raverat in Harlton Church, Cambridgeshire, where her family and friends donated towards the restoration of the church in her memory.

Cambridge and the people associated with it remained very much the centre of her life. Darwin College, Cambridge, occupies both her childhood home, Newnham Grange, 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.

Raverat was one of the very first wood engravers recognised as modern. She went to the Slade School in 1908, but stood outside the groups growing up at the time, the group that gathered around Eric Gill at Ditchling and the group that grew up at the Central School of Arts and Crafts around Noel Rooke. She was influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and developed her own painterly style of engraving. There was some similarity between her early engravings and those of Gill, and she did know Gill, but the similarity was based mostly on her black line style at the time, influenced by Lucien Pissarro, and the semi-religious themes that she then chose.

Balston credits her with having produced one of the first two books illustrated with modern wood engravings. This was Spring Morning by her cousin Frances Cornford, published by the Poetry Bookshop in 1915. It was accessioned at the British Museum Library in May 1915, which makes it the first modern British book illustrated with wood engravings, as the other contender, The Devil's Devices illustrated by Eric Gill, was accessioned in December 1915.

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. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote about her in his introduction to the book: Mr. Greenwood excels in the delicate and minute work in white line upon black, which has also won the admiration of many collectors for the earlier wood engravings of Mrs. Raverat. Much of Raverat's work was for friends from Cambridge and appeared in books with small editions. She found a wider public with the London Mercury which reproduced many of her engravings. The most famous are perhaps the engravings Six Rivers Round London which were produced for the London General Omnibus Company.

Raverat had to give up wood engraving after a stroke in 1951.

Raverat played a significant part in the wood engraving revival in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1914 she had completed some sixty wood engravings, far more than any of her contemporaries. Her name recurs consistently in all contemporary reviews, and the first book devoted to a modern wood engraver was Herbert Furst's Gwendolen Raverat. She illustrated the first book illustrated with modern wood engravings, Spring Morning, and she exhibited at every annual exhibition of the Society of Wood Engravers between 1920 and 1940, exhibiting 122 engravings, more than anyone else.

Apart from her studies at the Slade and the period from 1915 to 1928, which covered her life with Jacques and early widowhood, Raverat lived in or near Cambridge. In 1928 she moved into the Old Rectory, Harlton, near Cambridge. The house was the model for her engravings for The Runaway. In 1946 she moved into the Old Granary, Silver Street, in Cambridge; the house was at the end of the garden of Newnham Grange, where she was born.

Her life revolved around her contacts in Cambridge. One aspect was her work for the theatre, designing costumes, scenery and programmes. Her first experience was in 1908, when she designed costumes for Milton's Comus at the New Theatre, Cambridge. Her brother-in-law Geoffrey Keynes asked her to provide scenery and costumes 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 premiere of which took place in Cambridge in 1931. The miniature stage set that she built as a model still exists, housed at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. She went on to design costumes, scenery and programmes for some ten productions, mostly for the Cambridge University Musical Society. Raverat met one of her close friends Elisabeth Vellacott, in the society's production of Handel's oratorio "Jephta".

Raverat had a keen interest in children's fiction. Three of her books were Victorian stories that she convinced publishers to reprint - The Runaway, The Bird Talisman and Countess Kate. When she discovered that The Runaway had gone out of print, she convinced the publisher Duckworth to reissue it in 1953. Frances Spalding has written an illuminating article about this aspect of Raverat's life in The Guardian.

When she was 62 Raverat started to write her classic childhood memoir Period Piece, which she illustrated with line drawings. It appeared in 1952 and has not been out of print since then.

Gwen Raverat was a member of the Society of Wood Engravers, which held an annual exhibition that included works from other artists such as David Jones, John Nash, Paul Nash, Paul Gauguin and Clare Leighton

Raverat joined the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1920.
SOURCE: Wikipedia

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