The Wood-Engravings of Gertrude Hermes

Gertrude Hermes RA (1901-1983) was well-known for the range and diversity of her work. She was a sculptor as well as a wood-engraver, and she also produced colour prints, both lino and wood-cuts. This book, however, concentrates on her work as a wood-engraver, reproducing in a generous format virtually the whole of her output. In the opinion of Simon Brett, who is one of the contributors to this volume (the other is Bryan Robertson), 'her prints stand in the history of British modernism alongside the paintings of Nicholson and the sculpture of Moore and Hepworth'. The influences on her work included artists such as Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska and Leon Underwood, the tensions in her own life, and the organic world about her (plant forms, fishes, birds). Many of her engravings were used to illustrate expensive volumes published by private presses; others appeared in the Penguin Illustrated Classics, sold in the late 1930's for sixpence. The artist's daughter has edited this volume, and in her biographical notes and careful cataloguing of the works she explains much about Gertrude Hermes that needs to be known for a fuller understanding of the engravings.
But in one sense the illustrations can be enjoyed without further commentary - for their presence, scale and size, and sheer romance. The volume offers a visual feast drawn from an artist who preserved a marvellous balance between warmth, imagination and vitality on the one hand, and spareness and austerity on the other.