Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections

by Frances Spalding

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Genres: Biography

438 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Frances Spalding CBE, FRSL (née Crabtree) is a British art historian, writer and a former editor of The Burlington Magazine.

Reviews

[Jane · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this capacious birth-to-death biography of Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin and artist, daughter, wife, mother, and friend. She lived in a day when large families had large circles of acquaintances and everyone documented everything in letters and journals. Gwen also lived (1885-1957) in a period rich in artists, thinkers, academics, publishers and thus the reader will meet briefly or at length: Rupert Brooke, Andre Gide, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Paul Valery, as well as Toynbees, Cornfords, Keyneses, and Darwins galore.
Gwen led a rich life, beginning and ending in Cambridge, with a long stretch in the south of France. The sense of place is vivid, captured in the affection felt and the art produced. Through it all there’s the presence of Gwen, who is kind, humorous, wise, imaginative. Both she and her art deserve to be much, much better known.

[Myra Leysorek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully illustrated with works by Gwen Raverat. I skimmed this biography and enjoyed it overall. I thought the author, trying to put the antiSemitism of her subjects in perspective, might stray into attempting to excuse the inexcusable. But much was of interest, descriptions of Vence, France, and Cambridge. I was interested because I visited Cambridge and read Period Piece recently, and this recalled those places and people.

[Rita]

Review in WRB Jan 2002

Raverat [1885-1957] was a British artist esp known for wood engravings, later doing themfor book covers

I would probably like to look through prints of her woodcuts.

THis biography has quite a few of them

[Josephine · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not bad, you understand; in fact it was quite the reverse! It's a well-written biography of a very interesting woman...but just a bit too academic for my desired reading at the moment.