20 Facts About Gwen Raverat

Gwen Raverat was the granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin and a first cousin of poet Frances Cornford.

Gwen Raverat married the French painter Jacques Raverat in 1911.

Gwen Raverat is buried in the Trumpington Extension Cemetery, Cambridge with her father.

Gwen Raverat was one of the first wood engravers recognised as modern.

Gwen Raverat 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.

Gwen Raverat was influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists and developed her own painterly style of engraving.

Much of Gwen Raverat's work was for friends from Cambridge and appeared in books with small editions.

Gwen Raverat found a wider public with the London Mercury which reproduced many of her engravings.

Gwen Raverat spent a year producing 29 wood engravings for an edition of Les Amours de Daphne et Chloe by Longus.

Gwen Raverat illustrated A Sentimental Journey by Laurence Sterne for Penguin Illustrated Classics in 1938.

Gwen Raverat illustrated a number of books with line drawings, including Over The Garden Wall by Eleanor Farjeon, Mustard, Pepper and Salt by Alison Uttley, Red-Letter Holiday by Virginia Pye, Crossings by Walter de la Mare, Countess Kate by Charlotte M Yonge and The Bedside Barsetshire by L O Tingay.

Gwen Raverat played a significant part in the wood engraving revival in Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Gwen Raverat 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.

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

Gwen Raverat's work was part of the painting event in the art competition at the 1948 Summer Olympics.

Apart from her studies at the Slade and the period from 1915 to 1928, which covered her life with Jacques and early widowhood, Gwen Raverat lived in or near Cambridge.

Gwen Raverat went on to design costumes, scenery and programmes for some ten productions, mostly for the Cambridge University Musical Society.

Gwen Raverat met one of her close friends Elisabeth Vellacott, in the society's production of Handel's oratorio "Jephta".

When she was 62 Gwen Raverat started to write her classic childhood memoir Period Piece, which she illustrated with line drawings.

Gwen Raverat was a founding 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.