Gwen Raverat

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

Meaning they gained mainly as a woodcut artist and co-founder of the British Society of Wood Engravers.

Gwen Darwin was about her father George Howard Darwin grandson of Charles Darwin. She married in 1911 the French painter Jacques Raverat; both were members of the Bloomsbury Group, before they moved to France. They lived then near Nice in southern France and had two daughters together. Gwen Raverat created a series of woodcuts illustrating several books; their works are popular to this day.

In 1927, two years after the death of her husband, Geoffrey Keynes asked them to design the sets for a ballet based on images of William Blake on Job and that should remind us of Blake's centenary. The music for the work which was titled Job, a masque for dancing came from Rave Council Cousin Ralph Vaughan Williams. The miniature model of the stage, which she had made ​​, still exists and is preserved in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Finally settled back in Cambridge, where she mentioned the 1952 memoirs written. Her grandson William Pryor was 2004, the correspondence between Gwen and Jacques Raverat and Virginia Woolf out. The Darwin College, Cambridge has named one of its dormitories after Gwen Raverat.