{"id":21714,"date":"2025-11-13T16:05:00","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T21:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/?p=21714"},"modified":"2025-11-13T16:05:00","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T21:05:00","slug":"the-art-of-the-everyday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/the-art-of-the-everyday\/","title":{"rendered":"The Art of the Everyday"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Over a decade ago, Kristin Bluemel found herself wandering down an unexpected rabbit hole. A professor of English who specializes in 20th-century British literature, children’s literature, and book history, Bluemel had been curious about what children in Britain were reading during the Great Depression when she came across a book full of enchanting wood-engraved illustrations depicting quaint countryside scenes. While flipping through it, a short passage caught her attention. It credited three women wood engravers\u2014Gwen Raverat, Agnes Miller Parker, and Joan Hassall\u2014as leading innovators of the art form.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIt sparked my interest, because … by the Depression, women had gone to college, had gone to art school, but it was very hard for women to launch professional careers. Yet here are these women who, for their generation, are mentioned in the literature as being the exemplars of a popular trend,\u201d says Bluemel. \u201cAnd I thought, \u2018Women haven\u2019t been acknowledged broadly as leading the forefront of any kind of art, ever.\u201d\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea that these women were recognized in their own time as cultural leaders, using wood engravings in children\u2019s books, poetry collections, nature guides, and classic fiction to shape British culture, captured Bluemel\u2019s imagination. That spark grew into years of research, culminating this winter in her new book, \u201cEnchanted Wood: Engraving a Place for Women Artists in Rural Britain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

Reviving a Lost Art<\/h3>\n\n\n

Wood engraving\u2014a painstaking process of carving images into the hard end grain of wood blocks, inking them, and pressing them onto paper\u2014was perfected in the late 1700s by British artist Thomas Bewick. His breakthrough allowed for fine detailing and, more importantly, made it possible to print images and text together on the page at the same time. This made illustrated books dramatically cheaper and more accessible to the growing middle and lower classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

By the late 1800s, however, his technique had nearly vanished with the rise of photography and industrial printing. Wood engraving retreated to elite private presses, valued mainly for its ornate, decorative qualities. Then, during the Depression, a curious thing happened: A new generation of rural women artists revived and popularized Bewick\u2019s technique. They turned away from the high-style aesthetic of the private presses and instead returned to a form that could reach a wider audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Power in the Pastoral <\/strong>

Joan Hassall, one of Thomas Bewick\u2019s most devoted acolytes, enchanted readers with this delicate wood engraving from the Scottish fairy tale \u201cRashie Coat,\u201d depicting the moment \u201cthe fairy cam again, and telt her to put on the coat o\u2019 feathers.\u201d The work exemplifies the expressive wood-engraving tradition that inspired Kristin Bluemel\u2019s forthcoming book, out this December. Illustration reproduced by permission of the estate of Joan Hassall\/Simon Lawrence. <\/em><\/mark><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

That accessibility, Bluemel says, made it a \u201csurprisingly modern medium,\u201d and one that allowed women living in rural areas to work professionally from home at a time when few female artists could earn a living. \u201cThey weren\u2019t doing fancy portraits or oil paintings\u2014they were doing these little, humble, everyday artworks for books … and they were commercially successful,\u201d says Bluemel. \u201cThey found a way to do their art in mass-distributed, mass-marketed trade books, which were priced for the people.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

The Cult of the Countryside<\/h3>\n\n\n

What made this movement especially interesting was that these highly trained women lived scattered across rural Britain, far from metropolises like London. Their work began in small towns and villages and made its way into urban markets\u2014the reverse of the usual artistic flow.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not only that, their engravings\u2014of birds, fields, and farmlands\u2014were expressions of a shared and intentional effort to celebrate rural life at a time when industrialization was rampant and the pace of modern life seemed to be reshaping traditional values. \u201cDuring the \u2018cult of the countryside\u2019 between the two world wars, people in England became fixated on anything having to do with the countryside,\u201d says Bluemel. \u201cWhich is weird, because England was the first nation to industrialize … so almost in reaction to that, in the \u201930s, there was an idealization of the countryside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bluemel argues that this revival also invites feminist interpretations like her own: By reclaiming an old technique and modernizing it, these women gave artistic value to ordinary life and the rural experience at a time of economic crisis and social upheaval. \u201cIt\u2019s interesting that this kind of illustration is progressive or modern or experimental in the eyes of the art historians, and yet most people look at it and they say, \u2018Oh, how quaint, how sweet, how old-fashioned,\u2019\u201d she says. \u201cSo, it\u2019s both progressive and old-fashioned; it\u2019s new and it\u2019s old; it\u2019s modern and it\u2019s antique.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

Reclaiming Rural Modernity<\/h3>\n\n\n

Bluemel\u2019s fascination with these engravers wasn\u2019t just academic. Raised in small-town New England, she understands the pull of the countryside and the misconceptions that often surround it. \u201cI was trying to argue that there was a modern reality experienced by women artists living in the rural places that they loved,\u201d she says. \u201cNobody gets it. It\u2019s like, \u2018You go to a rural area you\u2019re stepping into the past.\u2019 No!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Bluemel first began publishing articles on the engravers\u2014including a fourth, Clare Leighton\u2014she met resistance from reviewers who dismissed her premise. \u201cMy readers … said, \u2018These aren\u2019t feminists, they\u2019re old-fashioned,\u2019\u201d she recalls. \u201cThey couldn\u2019t believe and wouldn\u2019t see in the images of animals or fields and woods that there can be something modern about the countryside.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But she persisted, co-editing \u201cRural Modernity in Britain: A Critical Intervention\u201d in 2018 to lay the groundwork for her larger argument\u2014that rural life could, in fact, be a birthplace of modern art and culture. Her perseverance paid off: In 2022, she was appointed Leverhulme Visiting Professor at Newcastle University in England, where she continued her research in the very landscapes in which Bewick once worked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Soon after, she received a publication grant from the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center for Modern Art at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. \u201cI got a grant from the Met\u2014they bought the argument. They believed it!\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s significant.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bluemel now describes the engravers\u2019 work as intermodernist, which is a bridge between high modernist art and post-war popular culture\u2014and far from quaint. In other words, these artists proved that modern art didn\u2019t have to come from big cities or avant-garde studios. It could come from women carving birds into boxwood at their kitchen tables.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Bluemel, that realization still feels timely. \u201cThere\u2019s a kind of connection between what was happening about 100 years ago and what\u2019s going on now with AI and everything being so speedy and fast and electronic … people are yearning for these real experiences,\u201d she says. \u201cThinking about rural life and looking at pictures that are made of wood and paper … it is a connection to nature, and I hope some people discover the art and find it enchanting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kristin Bluemel\u2019s new book uncovers how women wood engravers in Depression-era Britain used a humble craft to carve out space for modern art\u2014and for themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":57,"featured_media":21717,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"image_focus":"{\"x\":57,\"y\":30}","hide_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[91],"class_list":["post-21714","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-currents","tag-alumni-student-faculty"],"thumbnail":"\"\"","catString":"Currents","issue":"Fall\/Winter 2025","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21714","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/57"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21714"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21714\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22068,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21714\/revisions\/22068"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21717"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21714"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21714"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.monmouth.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21714"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}