Vivien Gribble

Gribble studied art in Munich and at the Slade before joining Noel Rooke's class at the Central School in 1912 as one of his first wood engraving pupils. In the same year she was singled out by Rooke to illustrate Three Psalms, produced and printed by J. H. Mason the first book to be illustrated by a member of the new school of wood engravers.

At the start of the First World War she joined the Women's Land Army and won a prize for drawing in its journal, The Landswoman. In 1919 she married a barrister, Douglas Doyle Jones. From 1921 to 1925 she exhibited ten prints with the Society of Wood Engravers, though she was never invited to become a member; she also exhibited with the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society. Her family donated a collection of her work in 2000 which is available for research.

Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, included two of her prints in his seminal Contemporary English Woodcuts (1922), and commissioned a cover design from her. Further commissions followed from the publishers, Duckworth's, including SixeIdillia of Theocritus (1922). A fascination for Isadora Duncan's free dancing style is evident from some of the classical figures used as headpieces to Keats's Odes (1923). Her most distinguished book illustration was for Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Macmillan, 1926), the portraits of Tess and Angel Clare being of herself and her husband. She died of cancer in Higham, Essex, in 1932.
Author: JS