Clare Leighton

Printmaker, illustrator, and author Clare Leighton was instrumental in the revival of wood engraving in the twentieth century. Born in London to parents who wrote popular fiction, Leighton received private art lessons from an uncle before attending the Brighton School of Art in 1915. Her first noteworthy work, a portrait of her brother Roland, served as the cover image for her mother's book memorializing his death in World War I. From 1920 to 1923, Leighton studied painting with Sir Henry Tonks (1862–1937) at London's Slade School of Fine Art; she also studied illustration and wood engraving with Noel Rooke (1872–1953) at the Central School of Art and Crafts.

Throughout her career, artists, publishers, and critics admired Leighton's prints depicting people working in rural settings in England and abroad. Her images featured country folk tending livestock, plowing and harvesting fields, or engaged in village trades, among other daily labors. In 1928, the Society of Wood-Engravers admitted Leighton as a member and, facilitated by her relationship with political journalist H. Noel Brailsford, she made a lecture tour of the United States, the first of many visits. The following year, she received her first major book illustration commission: Thomas Hardy's Return of the Native. In 1930, she won top prize at the Art Institute of Chicago's international print exhibition and the first monograph about her work appeared in London. Leighton traveled to the United States again in the winter of 1930–31; an excursion to Canada to observe its lumber industry resulted in her "Lumber Camp Series."

During the 1930s Leighton created illustrations for works by Thornton Wilder, Emily Brontë and others in addition to authoring and illustrating her own books, including The Farmer's Year (1933) and Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle (1935), inspired by the garden she and Brailsford created at the house they shared in the English countryside. She also wrote the manual Wood-Engraving and Woodcuts (1932), which influenced printmakers in both Britain and America, and Wood Engravings of the 1930s (1936). In 1934, when she attained full membership in the Royal Society of Painters, Etchers and Engravers, she also represented English wood engravers at Venice's Biennale international exhibition.

In 1939, Leighton left Brailsford and, with World War II looming, moved permanently to America, a transition recounted in her autobiography Sometime, Never (1939). After completing a book inspired by the American South, Southern Harvest (1942), she continued her prolific writing, book illustrating, and printmaking in her adopted country. From 1943 to 1945, Leighton taught at Duke University in North Carolina. In 1945, when she became an American citizen, she was elected to the National Academy of Design in New York City. After moving to Connecticut in 1951, she created designs for Wedgewood plates and stained glass windows for several New England churches. The Boston Public Library organized the first comprehensive retrospective of her work in 1977. By the time of her death at age eighty-eight, Leighton had authored twelve books and made over 840 prints. Along with Rockwell Kent and Fritz Eichenberg, she is regarded as one of America's masters of wood engraving and an agent for the revival of the medium in the mid-twentieth century.