Mabel Charlotte Alleyne (31 March 1896 – 15 August 1961) was a British wood-engraver. She studied wood-engraving at the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography in Bolt Court, London, where her teacher was R. John Beedham, and exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers. [1]
Alleyne was born in Southampton in 1896, the daughter and only child of Bouverie Colebrooke Alleyne, part of a wealthy family originally from Barbados, and Ada Clements. She studied at Goldsmiths College and the Royal Academy Schools. She appears not to have married.
Alleyne exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers in 1933, 1936 and 1938. Her wood engravings were reproduced in the London Mercury; the September 1933 issue reproduced Night, and the July 1934 issue Flower Study. The 4th edition of Beedham's Wood Engraving (1935) reproduces Autumn Rain.
In 1926 the Saint Loup Press, San Remo, published an edition of 100 copies of Nursery Rhymes, written and illustrated by Alleyne with hand coloured wood engravings. In the 1930s she wrote, illustrated and printed The Angry Cheese and Other Queer Fancies; this was a very Private Press production with some 18 wood engravings, some hand coloured. She also presented to her friend Elizabeth Rivers a hand printed illustrated poem entitled Ethne.
She produced a colour dust jacket for The Way the World is Going (1928) by H. G. Wells, colour illustrations for Ivor Macleod's The Old Views and the New Vision (1929) and illustrations for The Singing Farmer: a translation of Vergil's "Georgics" (1947).
She also produced colour lithographs and oil paintings. [2]
Mabel Alleyne is a minor figure in the wood engraving revival at the beginning of the twentieth century. She is almost invisible in the literature, and is recorded in the records of the Society of Wood Engravers, and in the credits in the London Mercury, as M. Alleyne rather than Mabel Alleyne.
Catherine Greenaway was an English Victorian artist and writer, known for her children's book illustrations. She received her education in graphic design and art between 1858 and 1871 from the Finsbury School of Art, the South Kensington School of Art, the Heatherley School of Art, and the Slade School of Fine Art. She began her career designing for the burgeoning greetings card market, producing Christmas and Valentine's cards. In 1879 wood-block engraver and printer Edmund Evans printed Under the Window, an instant best-seller, which established her reputation. Her collaboration with Evans continued throughout the 1880s and 1890s.
Sir John Gilbert was an English artist, illustrator and engraver.
Walter Crane was an English artist and book illustrator. He is considered to be the most influential, and among the most prolific, children's book creators of his generation and, along with Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway, one of the strongest contributors to the child's nursery motif that the genre of English children's illustrated literature would exhibit in its developmental stages in the later 19th century.
Gwendolen Mary "Gwen" Raverat, was an English wood engraver who was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers. Her memoir Period Piece was published in 1952.
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Agnes Miller Parker (1895–1980) was a Scottish engraver, illustrator and painter in oil and tempera. Born in Ayrshire, she spent most of her career in London and southern Britain. She is especially known as a twentieth century wood-engraver thanks to her collaboration with H. E. Bates, which resulted in two outstanding wood engraved books: Through the Woods (1936) and Down the River (1937), published by Victor Gollancz.
Joan Hassall was an English wood engraver and book illustrator. Her subject matter ranged from natural history through poetry to illustrations for English literary classics. In 1972 she was elected the first woman Master of the Art Workers' Guild and in 1987 was awarded the OBE.
May Anne Smith was a New Zealand painter, engraver, textile designer and textile printer. Smith was part of a movement of women who were instrumental in bringing new artistic ideas to New Zealand and influencing the art of the country.
Edmund Evans was an English wood-engraver and colour printer during the Victorian era. He specialized in full-colour printing, a technique which, in part because of his work, became popular in the mid-19th century. He employed and collaborated with illustrators such as Walter Crane, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Richard Doyle to produce what are now considered to be classic children's books. Little is known about his life, although he wrote a short autobiography before his death in 1905 in which he described his life as a printer in Victorian London.
Lady Mabel Marguerite AnnesleyHRUA was a wood-engraver and watercolour painter. Her work is in many collections, including the British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Gallery of Canada and the Museum of New Zealand. She exhibited in the Festival of Britain in 1952.
Chromoxylography was a colour woodblock printing process, popular from the mid-19th to the early-20th century, commonly used to produce illustrations in children's books, serial pulp magazines, and cover art for yellow-back and penny dreadfuls. The art of relief engraving and chromoxylography was perfected by engravers and printers in the 19th century, most notably in Victorian London by engraver and printer Edmund Evans who was particularly good with the process, producing a wide range of hues and tones through color mixing. Chromoxylography was a complicated technique, requiring intricate engraving and printing for the best results. Less expensive products, such as covers for pulp magazines, had to be produced with few colours, often only two or three, whereas more intricate and expensive books and reproductions of paintings used as many as a dozen or more colors. For each colour used, a separate woodblock had to be carved of the image being reproduced.
Noel Rooke (1881–1953) was a British wood-engraver and artist. His ideas and teaching made a major contribution to the revival of British wood-engraving in the twentieth century.
Ethelbert White was an English artist and wood engraver. He was an early member of the Society of Wood Engravers and a founding member of the English Wood Engraving Society in 1925. He also worked in oils and water colour. He was a member of the Royal Watercolour Society, and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy.
Vivien Massie Gribble Doyle-Jones was an English wood engraver who was active at the beginning of the 20th century. She was a pupil of Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited regularly with the Society of Wood Engravers.
Muriel Blomfield Jackson was an English wood engraver who was active at the beginning of the twentieth century. She was a pupil of Noel Rooke at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and exhibited regularly with the Society of Wood Engravers.
Ralph John Beedham (1879–1975) was a British wood-engraver. He occupies a unique position in the history of twentieth-century wood-engraving because, being a formschneider, he was probably the last person in Britain to serve an apprenticeship as a professional reproductive wood-engraver.
Marie Françoise Catherine Doetger "Fanny" Corbaux (1812–1883) was a British painter and biblical commentator. She was also the inventor of kalsomine (calcimine), whitewash with added zinc oxide.
Henry James Richter (1772–1857), artist and philosopher, was born in Middlesex, possibly at 40 Great Newport Street, Soho, on 8 March 1772 and baptised at St Anne's Church, Soho, on 5 April at that same year.
Suzanne Cooper (1916-1992) was a British Modernist painter and wood-engraver. Her 1936 oil painting "Royal Albion," at the Auckland Art Gallery (NZ), is noted for the "artist's use of simplified blocks of form and colour." She grew up in Frinton-on-Sea and studied at the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in London. Between 1935 and 1939, she exhibited her oil-paintings and wood-engravings at the Redfern Gallery, the Zwemmer Gallery, the Wertheim Gallery and the Stafford Gallery, and with the National Society of Painters, Sculptors & Print-Makers and the Society of Women Artists. The influential collector Lucy Wertheim, in addition to exhibiting her work, bought two of Cooper's oil paintings.
Nellie Marcia Lane Foster later Marcia Jarrett, (1897–1983), was a British artist notable as a printmaker, portrait painter and book illustrator.