Gwen (Gwendolen) Mary Raverat

1885 - 1957

The daughter of astronomer Sir George Howard Darwin and granddaughter of the naturalist Charles Darwin, Gwen grew up at Newnham Grange, Cambridge, which was later incorporated into Darwin College. She recorded her youth in a widely read memoir, “Period Piece”. Gwen went to the Slade School in 1908, alongside Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and David Bomberg, and became active in the Bloomsbury Group. She became a friend of Virginia Woolf, and a member of Rupert Brooke's Neo-Pagan group, before moving with her French husband to the south of France, where she lived in Vence, near Nice, until his death. Influenced by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, she developed her own painterly style of wood engraving, and became known as one of the first truly modern wood engravers, alongside Eric Gill, whose work was an influence on hers. Raverat was a founding member of the Society of Wood Engravers. Most of Raverat's commissions for book illustrations date from the 1930s, including a number of books for children. She became the house artist and resident art critic of "Time and Tide", the prominent feminist magazine, from the late 1920s.