The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller Parker
Ian Rogerson
- Page Count: 320
- Size:
- Format: Casebound with dust jacket
- Publication Date: May 2006
- Price: $125
- ISBN: 978-09762245-4-9
Agnes Miller Parker (1895-1980) was primarily an illustrator who achieved a prolific output of wood engravings. This beautiful book is the most comprehensive compilation of her work to date and contains more than 900 examples of her wood engravings and linocuts, cut between 1926 and 1969. She studied art at the Glasgow School of Art and taught in London during the 1920s. She worked at Gregynog Press with her husband and her former tutors, Gertrude Hermes and Blair Hughes-Stanton. After leaving Gregynog she produced her most acclaimed work, illustrating Grey’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and then Through the Woods and Down the River by H.E. Bates. After the Second World War she moved to the Isle of Aran and in later years became increasingly reclusive.
The sumptuously printed engravings, including 8 color plates, demonstrate the range of Agnes Miller Parker’s ability with the burin, from the drama-filled faces of such classic literary characters as Thomas Hardy’s Tess or Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus to the renderings of bucolic scenes cast in nuanced shadow and light. In the words of George Macy, founder of the Limited Editions Club, “It may not be true that she is the finest wood-engraver in the world today, but there are dozens of competent authorities who say she is.”
Ian Rogerson was a professor and librarian at Manchester Metropolitan University until his recent retirement. He has curated and studied the work of Agnes Miller Parker since the early 1970s, making his thorough text that much more illuminating.
Black and White with Color Plates
