As soon as I started work on it, it became obvious that the official website of my grandmother, Gwen Raverat’s work should have a wood-engraving logo. Who better to cut it than Simon Brett who played a significant part in republishing Reynold Stone’s collection of Gwen’s work for Silent Books in 1989? I was delighted when he agreed that the distinctive image of Gwen’s last home, The Old Granary (now part of Darwin College, Cambridge) would serve well – the place plays a key part in many people’s memory of her. Her press was in the room behind the left-hand part of the balcony in the image while under that was the boathouse in which we kept the Canadian canoe she gave us grandchildren.
When my mother Sophie, the younger of Gwen’s two daughters, died in 2010, I took over the management of the copyrights and archive of Gwen’s work on behalf of the family. When it became too much for Rosemary Davidson who housed and marketed the archive from her Broughton House Gallery in Cambridge, it was agreed that I should also take over this role. Sadly Rosemary died just weeks after I had taken custody of the physical archive.
I have been involved with the Web since its inception and with e-commerce since that became a commercial reality, so I was delighted at the chance to develop what Rosemary had started with her Broughton House website. Wood-engraving prints work so well on the Web with the light coming from behind, so this strange new virtual “place” seemed the natural home for the Raverat Archive.
I have scanned and cleaned up every print I could find in the archive, on my cousins’ walls, and in Gwen’s various albums. This mammoth task has taken me the best part of six months since the 574 prints turned into 807 when the different blocks, states or versions of each are taken into account. For just over three quarters of the blocks Gwen cut, prints she made herself are still available, many signed in pencil by her.
Then I had to build the site such that any print can be quickly and easily found and purchased, as well as offering as much background material as possible. Despite the complexity possible using the e-commerce platform of my choice, importing all the images and data and adjusting all the variables has taken another three months.
I am nervous because I realise selling prints not made from the original block is a contentious issue. My defence of adopting this method is: 1) Gwen did not number her editions and only signed some of them; 2) her prints were made from 103 to 63 years ago; 3) there are no original prints left of some of most beautiful images; 4) the family is resolute that Gwen’s images deserve to reach a far wider audience than the world of wood-engraving devotees (there is talk of getting the PoD service into Amazon!). I am encouraged in this by one of my brothers in law, Philip Trevelyan, son of Julian and step-son of Mary Fedden. He unashamedly allows some of Julian and Mary’s images to be licenced for any reasonable use, including tea towels!On top of all that – and I am nervous of bringing this subject up in this august company – a Print-on-Demand (PoD) site is being built by the people who provide such facilities for most of the national museums and galleries, including the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge who look after all Gwen’s blocks, sketchbooks and some drawings. This site will provide high-resolution digital gicklée prints on a variety of media of most (some of the book illustrations are too small) of Gwen’s images. Eventually each image on the Original Print site will be linked to its equivalent on the PoD site, if it is there, and vice versa.
Now I have introduced you to the project, I can begin to articulate what my grandmother’s images mean to me and where her art stands, or could stand in the art world. I agree with Simon Brett that Gwen was neither a “minor but exemplary British artist” nor “small-scale, but charming” as Paul Delaney described her work in his book about Rupert Brooke, The Neo-Pagans. For me she was every bit as powerfully evocative as was her second cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams (his grandmother was Charles Darwin’s sister) with his later symphonies. His music, like Gwen’s art, was quintessentially English, lyrical, angry, tragic, startling, grand, mythic. In The Origins of the English Imagination, Peter Ackroyd writes: “If that Englishness in [his] music can be encapsulated in words at all, those words would probably be: ostensibly familiar and commonplace, yet deep and mystical as well as lyrical, melodic, melancholic, and nostalgic, yet timeless.” A lovely description of why Gwen’s work engages so readily.
Small though they are, her best prints (and there are many) are finely tempered expressions of a love of humanity and its landscape. “The regard she turned upon reality – upon landscape, figures in landscape, sometimes the incidents of story – sees all things together,” wrote Simon Brett in his postscript to the Silent Books edition. “Her vision is to do with seeing (that is not as obvious as it sounds). In this primacy of seeing, interpretation, expression, storytelling or imagination are gathered up into statement: this is how it is. The ease with which the figures lie, at one with their being and the world around them, thereby stands comparison with the etchings of Rembrandt that were her childhood pillow-book, or with the idylls of Titian or Seurat.”
Brett is echoing a point Gwen made herself. She wrote of wood engraving that it was “hard, tight, definite” with “no possible room for vagueness”. It is the looking, the seeing that matters. William Carlos Williams, when explaining his poetics, said that there are no ideas but in things.
Gwen had to re-invent herself after the death of her husband Jacques in 1925. She returned to London and as well as making more and more wood-engravings she turned her hand to art criticism. She wrote so simply and with no need for pomposity. Take this from Time & Tide in 1934: Painting is the product of the thing seen (whether with the inner eye or the outer eye makes no matter) and the passion felt about it. Representational art is on the whole greater than abstract art, partly because it is difficult to have so primitive and passionate a feeling about a cube as about a cow; but also because the eye turned outwards constantly replenishes and enlarges the symbolic imagery of the mind; while the abstractist, his eye turned inwards, allows his images to grow poorer and fewer by inbreeding.
But it does depend how you see. Gwen describes her perception as a young woman thus: Of course, there were things to worship everywhere. I can remember feeling quite desperate with love for the blisters in the dark red paint on the nursery window-sills at Cambridge, but at Down there were more things to worship than anywhere else in the world.
In 1924, stressed with looking after two small girls (my mother and aunt) and her dying husband Jacques, Gwen still felt it a matter of life and death to not lose hold of her creative process, her way of transcending the ordinary. She wrote to her cousin Nora Barlow: [It is] a matter of life and death to keep going at [my wood engraving] as much as I can and not lose hold. I feel I’ve got something in me of which I only get a millionth part, partly from lack of time and leisure of mind (by my own unregretted choice in marrying and having children), partly from things in one’s own self getting in the way and in between…
In writing of the creative process, she said: All good painting is religious in that it is done in the religious spirit: that the painter feels it is the most important thing in the world: a thing worth doing for itself, even if no one were ever to see it. In this sense art is religion. But it is not the subject of a picture which matters, it is the feeling with which the subject is approached.
Gwen’s most elegiac and languid blocks capture the same nostalgia her friend Rupert Brooke put into words:
I only know that you may lie
Day long and watch the Cambridge sky,
And, flower-lulled in sleepy grass,
Hear the cool lapse of hours pass,
Until the centuries blend and blur
In Grantchester, in Grantchester.…
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? … Oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?
(from Rupert Brooke’s The Old Vicarage, Grantchester)
They were bohemians, these artists and writer friends in search of a path: Gwen, Jacques, Rupert Brooke, Stanley Spencer, André Gide, Eric Gill, Paul Valéry, Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf. As Virginia wrote to Jacques: I feel that for us writers the only chance now is to go out into the desert and peer about, like devoted scapegoats, for some sign of a path. Gwen’s path (so well chronicled by Frances Spalding in her biography of Gwen) involved marrying the son of a vegetarian French silk merchant who was friends with Gide and Valéry; becoming one of Rupert Brooke’s “Neo-Pagans”; designing the costumes and sets for Job, a ballet for which Vaughan Williams wrote the music; and writing and illustrating one of the most loved of memoirs, Period Piece, still in print nearly 60 years after its first publication.
There was a moment, no doubt under the spell of Virginia and to some extent Rupert, that Gwen thought she might be a writer. She started a novel. It wasn’t very good, but does convey that bohemian spirit, nay meme, that my sister and I have tried to uphold. She could be writing of my teenage years of intense, dope-filled boho-ism (Hubert is clearly Rupert and George, Jacques):
We met, we found we had many ideas in common; we found that we could talk. And so we talked from morning to night and from night till morning, and for the first two years we did practically nothing else. We had been shy and diffident; we had wondered if anyone had ever had such ideas as ours before; we had wondered if they could possibly be true ideas; if there was the remotest chance that we could be worth anything. Now, when we came together many of our doubts disappeared; we were passionately convinced of the truth and splendour of our thoughts; we felt that we were quite different from our fathers; all our ways of thinking and our opinions seemed bold and new. And though each of us alone might still doubt his own powers, we each thought that never before had there met together a group of such fine and intelligent young men. I think that we each thought ourselves singularly happy in having such wonderful friends. …
I remember those first two years as long days and nights of talk; talk, lying in the cow parsley under the great elms; talk in lazy punts on the river; talk round the fire in Hubert’s room; talk which seemed always to get nearer and nearer to the heart of things. It was best of all in the evenings in Hubert’s room. He used to lie in his great armchair, his legs stretched right across the floor, his fingers twisted in his hair; while George sat smoking by the fire, continually poking it; his face was round and pale; his hair was dark. We smoked and ate muffins or sweets and talked and talked while the firelight danced on the ceiling, and all the possibilities of the world seemed open to us.
For a time we were very decadent. We used to loll in armchairs and talk wearily about Art and Suicide and the Sex Problem. We used to discuss the ridiculous superstitions about God and Religion; the absurd prejudices of patriotism and decency; the grotesque encumbrances called parents. We were very, very old and we knew all about everything; but we often forgot our age and omniscience and played the fool like anyone else.
I think she would have agreed with James Baldwin when he said, “The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by the answers”.
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