Gwen Raverat

Gwen Raverat , née Darwin (born August 26, 1885 in Cambridge as Gwendolen Mary Darwin , † February 11, 1957 in Cambridge) was an English artist and writer. She is a granddaughter of Charles Darwin . Your childhood memories appeared in German under the title Eine Kindheit in Cambridge ( Period Piece. A Cambridge Childhood , dt.).

She gained importance primarily as a woodcut artist and co-founder of the English Society of Wood Engravers.

The house Reverat grew up in and was part of the University of Cambridge in 2009.

Gwen Darwin was the grandson of Charles Darwin through her father, George Howard Darwin. In 1911 she married the French painter Jacques Raverat; both belonged to the Bloomsbury Group before moving to France. They then lived near Nice in the south of France and had two daughters together. Gwen Raverat made a number of woodcuts to illustrate several books; their works are still popular today.

In 1927, two years after the death of her husband, Geoffrey Keynes asked her to design the set for a ballet based on images by William Blake from the book of Job, to commemorate Blake's centenary. The music for the work, which was entitled Job, a masque for dancing , came from Raverat's cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams . The miniature model of the set she made still exists and is kept in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

She eventually settled back in Cambridge, where she wrote the aforementioned memoir in 1952. Her grandson William Pryor edited the 2004 correspondence between Gwen and Jacques Raverat and Virginia Woolf . The Darwin College in Cambridge has named one of its dormitories to Gwen Raverat.

Web links

• Literature by and about Gwen Raverat in the catalog of the German National Library