The Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House
Christmas at Broughton House
November 28/29, December 5/6, 12/13, 19/20 – 10:30am to 5:30pm
This Christmas especially we assume our friends and regulars will be looking for inexpensive presents, so we are offering many things under £10, as well as good value prints (Andy English, Marie Hartley and Gail de Cordova). As a sequel to the highly successful Gwen Raverat desk calendar for 2009 we have published a Gwen Raverat desk calendar for 2010 (£6.95). The three books about her work also make good presents:
- GR Wood Engravings of Cambridge and surroundings (£11.95)
- GR in France (£12.95)
- GR A Miscellany (£11.95)
If you missed the Helen Birmingham Darwin commemorative buttons we have a few left over.
For children we have the lovable Barefoot mice and animal backpacks from Sri Lanka and a whole collection of books on art at bargain prices.
Hannah Davies returns with a new range of silver jewellery and a selection of her recent (small) paintings. Althea has had new ideas for her slumped and fused glasswork in glorious colours. Sally Reilly has supplied us with a new range of domestic pottery – cups, bowls and plates.
Reaching into the depths of our storecupboard several treasures have emerged, which are for sale, including a couple of leftovers from the Henry Rothschild show (sadly he died this year).
Finally we are pleased to have new watercolours, oils and mixed media work by David Page, David Wood and Helena Green.
About the gallery
For 20 years the Broughton House Gallery has been showing 9 exhibitions a year of the work of living artists. For the last 7 years we have also been the home of the works of Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin and one of the most famous wood engravers of the 20th century. Not only have we managed the Archive of over 500 different engravings printed by herself, but we have under the Broughton House Books imprint, published three books reproducing her engravings (Gwen Raverat: Wood Engravings of Cambridge, Gwen Raverat in France and Gwen Raverat: A Miscellany).
We have also put on exhibitions of work by other members of the Darwin family: Sophie Gurney (Gwen’s younger daughter), Lucy Raverat, Nelly Trevelyan and Emily Pryor, her three granddaughters. In 2001 we celebrated the publication of Frances Spalding’s biography Gwen Raverat: Friends, Family and Affections, by an exhibition including oil paintings by Gwen and her husband, Jacques Raverat, never seen in public before.
The gallery has become known as the place to go and see and buy her engravings and where all the books about her of featuring her work as an illustrator can be found. It is appropriate that it should be in Cambridge, where she was born (in Newnham Grange), spent all her early years and the last 11 years of her life (in The Granary), both now part of Darwin College.
We have decided to end our 9 exhibitions a year, build on these Darwin and Raverat associations and turn the gallery into the Gwen Raverat Gallery at Broughton House, open by appointment and invitation. The change took place in April 2008, in good time for the celebration of the 150th anniversary (2009) of the publication of The Origin of Species.
The Gwen Raverat Archive will now be permanently accessible by appointment and invitation only.