Artist of Earth and Sky

Despite the aspirations Gwen Raverat expressed in her classic childhood memoir Period Piece (‘O happy Mrs Bewick!’ she declares at one point) and all the drawings in the book, many of its enchanted readers have discovered with apparent surprise that its author was an artist of some importance. Yet this may not be so remarkable; little had been written about her later life until Frances Spalding’s full biography in 2001, though Gwen and her husband Jacques did feature in Paul Delaney’s The Neo-Pagans (1987) as central members of the Cambridge circle surrounding Rupert Brooke. My own journey was in the opposite direction from most people’s. I knew Gwen Raverat as an artist long before I discovered Period Piece.

She seems to me to be perhaps the only artist in my own medium of wood engraving to whom the adjective ‘great’ could be applied. Obviously, if greatness consists in producing grandes machines, as those vast French exhibition pieces like The Raft of the Medusa are called, she is out of the running, for few of her works measure more than four or five square inches. But if greatness may consist in distilling and communicating with rare intensity and consistency the individual vision which most artists only attempt to define, then she might be in there with Rembrandt (whose etchings she kept beneath her pillow as a child) and Samuel Palmer. Gwen Darwin took up wood engraving before and quite independently of the schools which promoted it in the 1920s; she taught herself to engrave in 1909 while she was at the Slade School of Art, in London. In 1911, she married Jacques Raverat, the English-educated and Anglophile son of a French industrialist. He had studied mathematics at Cambridge, where they met, but turned to the crafts as a printer, and then to art as a painter, on his doctors’ advice. I suppose they thought that, for an invalid, it was less intellectually taxing. Needing to make a life, though with his private income not a living exactly, they lived and worked as artists in various places; and in 1920 moved to the south of France for the sake of his seriously worsening health. He died there of multiple sclerosis in 1925. Gwen returned to Cambridge and brought up her daughters there. She wrote perceptive art criticism for Time and Tide and, largely avoiding the darker themes in the younger work she did with Jacques, focused her engraving on landscape and on illustrating children’s books. The most personal of these, The Runaway, has been reissued by Persephone. Period Piece was not written until she was 64, after a stroke had stopped her engraving – she continued to paint sturdily from her wheelchair. Gwen Raverat could be seen as the linchpin of many of the interlinked literary and artistic movements which have fuelled British biography for the past thirty years. John Maynard Keynes was her brother-in-law. Her father and Virginia Woolf ’s father Leslie Stephen were friends. Virginia visited Gwen’s home when seeing her brother at Cambridge, and when Gwen went to the Slade she visited Virginia in London. She was the first secretary of Virginia’s Friday Club, in at the start of ‘Bloomsbury’, just as she had been at the heart of Rupert Brooke’s Cambridge set. Virginia Woolf called her a ‘monolith’, a well-made phrase she liked to return to, as writers will. Certainly, Gwen saw herself as less intellectually clever than the Bloomsburies; certainly, she had a strength that enabled her to nurse Jacques and still (with the domestic help her background provided) to paint for ten hours a day while doing so. But ‘monolith’ simply does not recognize her sensibility. And both as a person and as an artist, she remains relatively unknown today. The ‘little grain of me’ she wrote of in Period Piece remains hidden – even perhaps from her own biographer. To find it, you have to look at her work. A definitive selection of her engravings was made by Reynolds Stone and published shortly after her death in 1957. It is long out of print. In 1989, when Faber declared no interest in reprinting it, it was reissued by Silent Books of Cambridge with several pages of additional engravings and a thirty-years-on postscript. That too is out of print. But Joanna Selborne and Lindsey Newman’s substantial Gwen Raverat, Wood Engraver, published in 1996, is now available in a British Library edition. Two popular selections, Wood Engravings of Cambridge and Gwen Raverat in France, are published by Broughton House Books, based at the Broughton House Gallery in Cambridge, which holds the Raverat archive. Returning to biographies, Frances Spalding’s is now in paperback; and Raverat’s grandson, William Pryor, has published a well-illustrated volume of the letters between his grandparents and Virginia Woolf. In this joyous yet thoughtful exchange, chiefly between Virginia and Jacques, their remarks about Gwen as though she isn’t there form the running joke of the correspondence. Gwen was, in fact, very much there, taking Jacques’s dictation from his sickbed but herself remaining almost silent. Two long letters from her, written after his death, begin to balance Period Piece, showing her in her maturity, in her own words. The limits of words, the immediacy of painting and Virginia’s desire to get that quality into her writing are some of the things Virginia and Jacques discussed. Jacques’s death was a defining event for Gwen. ‘There are some things in life’, she wrote to Virginia, ‘that some of us know about but that it is indecent to write about – some kinds of pain, I think. . . Like the Goya etchings . . . Nobody takes any notice of them or of what they mean because they daren’t I suppose.’ Though she retired to emotionally safer ground in the second half of her life, something of the same intensity of feeling permeates a great deal of her work, making it indeed almost ‘indecent’ to look at. When love – in her case mostly love of place – is very strongly expressed one turns one’s eyes away from it, as from pain, in a kind of self-protection. Yet Gwen Raverat is so very far from being naïve that one cannot dismiss her intensity as gush. Maybe this is partly why she remains unseen. Even Virginia, whose goodness shines from her letters, never quite ‘saw’ Gwen as an artist, though she valued her deeply as a friend. She could be both cutting about the soulless, dumpy Darwins (Gwen looked not unlike the French peasant women she engraved) and yet overcome with admiration for the granite of which, she came to see, Gwen was made. For her, she says, Gwen and Jacques had represented what love is. Yet the work which I think defines Gwen’s stature and which all her other work rises towards and falls away from, was made in this second part of her life. The current selections of her work present her as an artist of views and rural life. That is true (and some of her Cambridge townscapes are major works) but it is not the whole truth. One work mainly, the Ashendene Press edition of Daphnis and Chloe, shows her in quite another light. Ashendene was the private press of St John Hornby, owner of W. H. Smith, the man who hired Eric Gill to paint the lettering on his shop fronts. The book was actually Daphnis et Chloé, a translation into Renaissance French of the Latin pastoral by Longus, just the sort of rather recherché thing private presses printed then, and sometimes still do. For one of the major ‘press’ books of the twentieth century, it is small, and surprisingly archaic in its design. The engravings sometimes seem squeezed in alongside the type, where today we might prefer an airier page. But it is what they are that matters. They show a world embraced by light. The dark, symbolist, ballad-inspired engravings of Gwen’s student years had given way, in the early years of her relationship with Jacques, to a formalized, black-line style. This starkness had been broken open in its turn by the effects of French light, as their paintings also show. The forms in Daphnis et Chloé are lapped in light, moulded and softened by it. Few of these miraculous images appear in any of the current selections, except for the Selborne & Newman study, but even that, its fine print first edition based on the availability of original blocks, does not present any of the full-page ones. Daphnis represents the opposite pole of wood-engraved illustration to, for example, Eric Gill’s The Four Gospels, another of the great books of the century. Gill’s engravings are made of firm black outlines; they partake of the character of type. Raverat’s are little worlds of feeling. She rings in the modest medium of wood engraving a Titianesque note, evoking the luxuriance of the bacchanal and, at times, the colder world of the Venetian’s later work. It has been suggested that Eric Gill influenced Gwen, but it is almost certainly the other way round. In 1913 she and Gill and Jacques and Stanley Spencer planned a Gospel book together, foreshadowing The Four Gospels which in fact appeared eighteen years later, in 1931. Gill had hardly begun as an engraver in 1913 but Gwen was well established in the art, as he was the first to acknowledge. He offered himself as a sort of kitchen maid to the project, doing the tidying up and the lettering, though it was his insistence on using a text approved by the Catholic Church that eventually caused the project to founder. The images were to be designed by Jacques and engraved by Gwen. The designs owe much to the medieval sculpture of Vézelay, near Jacques’s home in Pontigny, as well as to the characteristic, hard-edged clarity which is seen in all his work. Here too, Gwen was in at the beginning of things and at the heart of them in ways which history has not fully recognized. Though much of Gwen Raverat’s work was bespoke illustration, she was not just an artist who put her talent at the service of whatever story she chose or was asked to illustrate. Her images are anchored in a larger sense of how the world is, a vision of how space and form relate and how human life is lived: something more than just a style or an accent, what in a writer would be a ‘voice’. This peaks and becomes recognizable in Daphnis et Chloé. The new books of the letters and of the French engravings reproduce several of her drawings; how good, how classic, how sensitive and strong they are. The student of her work begins to recognize themes – moments or subjects she chose for personal yet universal reasons. The pupil of Rembrandt here, rather than of the anecdotal Bewick, she evokes an essence of life, in the body, upon the earth, with a simplicity that is the hardest thing to achieve. As an artist of earth and sky she stands with Millet. Period Piece is a delightful and enduring book; it can lead one fairly directly to the domestic and rural side of Gwen Raverat’s work as an artist and it preserves for all time her humour and her personal charm; but it was an afterthought, peripheral to what she was really about, a bubble on the deeper stream of another sort of purely visual achievement, which is very much worth investigating.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 9 © Simon Brett 2006