Experience
Recent Aquisitions
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| Title: Winnowers-Majorca Artist Name: Clare Leighton Artist Dates: 1898-1989 Artist Nationality: American, born Great Britain |
Oct 18, 2005
The Mint Museum recently received a very fine collection by artist-illustrator, Clare Leighton (1898-1989). The collection includes more than 180 woodcuts, drawings and watercolors, many of which portray scenes of agrarian life in both the American South and Great Britain. These works were donated by Charlotte collector Gabby Pratt, who also gave a set of 12 Wedgwood plates, titled New England Industries, for which Leighton designed the transfer-printed images, as well as 12 books relating to Leighton's career as an artist and writer. Leighton, a prominent figure in the revival of wood engraving and illustration in Great Britain and the U.S., illustrated her own writing as well as classic and contemporary literature.
Born to an artistic family, Leighton studied wood engraving in Great Britain before moving to the U.S. during World War II. Settling first in Baltimore, she moved to Chapel Hill in 1943 and served as a visiting art lecturer at Duke University in Durham, N.C. from 1943 - 1945. During her career Leighton wrote 15 books and created more than seven hundred prints. The natural world and her surroundings were a continuous source of inspiration. Her timeless images reveal an abiding interest in and respect for the earth and those who tend it, advocating the virtue of hard labor and the rhythms of nature. On the surface, the subjects of her work are simple working people - the ploughmen, the washer-women, the net menders - but Leighton portrays them and their labor with dignity and reverence.
Throughout her career, Leighton faced the challenges of bias against not only her gender but also the validity of wood engraving illustration as a legitimate means of artistic expression. Even against such challenges, Leighton persevered and strove to make her art original statements of spirit and aesthetic expression. A future exhibition, to be organized by The Mint Museum, will focus on the legacy she created within her art, her writings and her commitment to the field of printmaking.
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| Plowing from "The Farmer's Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry" Date Created: 1933 Materials: wood engraving Credit Line: Gift of Gabby Pratt Accession No.: 2004.79.139 |
Plowing from "The Farmer's Year: A Calendar of English Husbandry" Date Created: 1933 Materials: wood engraving Credit Line: Gift of Gabby Pratt Accession No.: 2004.79.139 |
The Bean Planters
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