#Clare Leighton

[kafkasapartment]

Lovers In the Wheat field BPL 570, 1944. Clare Leighton. Original Woodblock (discolorations from handling).

[abwwia]

Clare Leighton, Bread Line, New York, 1932, wood engraving on paper, image: 11 7⁄8 x 8 in. (30.3 x 20.2 cm), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Bequest of Frank McClure, 1979.98.146

[tomoleary]

Clare Leighton (1898-1989)

[hitku]

by Clare Leighton

[historicalreusedcostumes]

This lovley green costume with broderi flowers and leafs on is worn on Daisy Waterstone as Clare Leighton in Testament of Youth (2014) and later worn on Gillian Anderson as Jean Milburn in Sex Education (2020)

[arinewman7]

Woman with Flowers

Clare Leighton

Woodblock, 1937

[topcat77]

A Lapful of Windfalls

 Clare Leighton

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

CLARE LEIGHTON

We return once again to one of our favorite 20th-century wood engravers, the English/American artist, writer, and illustrator Clare Leighton (1898-1989), this time with engraved illustrations for Thomas Hardy’s novel Under the Greenwood Tree, printed by R. & R. Clark in Edinburgh and published in New York (and simultaneously in London) by the Macmillan Company in 1940. The text is from Hardy’s second novel originally published in 1872, and this edition was published to commemorate Hardy’s birth in 1840, for which Clare Leighton produced more than 60 engravings. Of Leighton’s work, the dust jacket notes declare:

Miss Leighton has won a place among England's outstanding artists: “a rural Rembrandt” is the title given her by Ernest Rhys, who, in the Observer, stresses “her uncanny mastery of light and shade.” Henry Seidel Canby, writing in The Saturday Evening Review of Literature, has remarked on “the great pictorial beauty of her extraordinarily strong and dramatic engravings.” She has been called “one of the finest of contemporary wood engravers.” 

Both as artist and as one who knows intimately the country of Thomas Hardy’s novels, Miss Leighton has made this illustrated edition one which should appeal equally to art lovers and lovers of Hardy’s work.

The blurb isn’t wrong.

View more posts with work by Clare Leighton.

View more posts with work by women wood engravers.

View more Women’s History Month posts.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[americanmodern]

Clare Leighton, woodcut

[coltonwbrown]

Picking Strawberries, from Four Hedges: A Gardener’s Chronicle Clare Leighton

[mightyflamethrower]

Clare Leighton

[kafkasapartment]

Snow Shovellers, New York, 1929. Clare Leighton. Wood Engraving.

[elysianfeels]

CLARE LEIGHTON / (1898 – 1989) / The Lovers

[tomoleary]

Clare Leighton (1898-1989) “Week-End Walks” London Transport (1938) Source

Clare Leighton (1898-1989) “The Country Now” London Transport (1938) Source

[mybeingthere]

CLARE LEIGHTON (British/American, 1898-1989), A Lapfull of Windfalls, 1935, Woodcut engraving on paper.

[arinewman7]

The Lovers

Clare Leighton

Woodcut engraving on paper