Clare Leighton

Clare Marie Veronica Leighton, sometimes Clara Ellaline Hope Leighton or Clare Veronica Hope Leighton, was an English/American artist, writer and illustrator, best known for her wood engravings.

During the late 1920s and 1930s, Leighton visited the United States on a number of lecture tours, emigrating to the US in 1939. In 1930, the Art Institute of Chicago awarded her with the Mr. And Mrs. Frank G. Logan First Prize ($100). She lived in Baltimore for a while and became friends with H. L. Mencken. Leighton became a naturalized citizen in 1945. From 1943 to 1945 she was a member of the Department of Art, Aesthetics, and Music at Duke University. In 1945 she was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1949.

Over the course of a long and prolific career, Leighton wrote and illustrated numerous books praising the virtues of the countryside and the people who worked the land. In 1932, she was the first woman to produce a book on wood-engraving, Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts. This played an important part in popularizing the medium. During the 1920s and 1930s, as the world around her became increasingly technological, industrial and urban, Leighton continued to paint rural working men and women. These included a 1938 poster design for London Transport promoting weekend walks in the countryside. In the 1950s she created designs for Steuben Glass, Wedgwood plates, several stained-glass windows for churches in New England and for the transept windows of the Cathedral of Saint Paul (Worcester, Massachusetts).

The best known of her books are The Farmer's Year (1933; a calendar of English husbandry), Four Hedges - A Gardener's Chronicle (1935; the development of a garden from a meadow she had bought in the Chilterns) and Tempestuous Petticoat; The story of an Invincible Edwardian (1948; describing her childhood and her bohemian mother). Autobiographical text and illustrations are available in Clare Leighton: The growth and shaping of an artist-writer, published in 2009. One of her most notable illustrative endeavors was creating 16 woodcuts for Thornton Wilder's illustrated edition of The Bridge of San Luis Rey (Longmans, Green and Company 1929). Examples of her work were included in 'Print and Prejudice: Women Printmakers, 1700-1930', an exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London during 2022 and 2023. Three of Leighton's woodcuts for H. R. Williamson's The Flowering Hawthorn (1962) were selected by Adam Stout to illustrate his 2020 book on the Glastonbury Thorn.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023