The Wood Engravings of Agnes Miller Parker (review)

The name of Agnes Miller Parker (1895–1980) is perhaps not as well known as it should be even amongst admirers of British wood engraving of the twentieth century. While Clare Leighton, Gwen Raverat, Robert Gibbings, and Paul Nash all demand and obtain regular admiration and critique, it has taken a long time for a similar treatment to be accorded to Miller Parker, at least where an easily obtainable trade book is concerned. Ian Rogerson has worked on the artist for many years and the present volume owes much to his previous essays, not least to Agnes Miller Parker: Wood-Engraver and Book Illustrator, 1895–1980 (Wakefield: The Fleece Press, 1990) as well as to two other studies beautifully presented and illustrated and emanating from Gwas Gregynog, in 1996 and 1997. The link with Newtown is maintained here, for the book is both designed and typeset by David Esselmont in a typically distinguished manner, while it was printed by the National Press in Jordan.

The first part of the book is devoted to a life and an extensive discussion. We learn, somewhat surprisingly, that Miller Parker did not study under either Noel Rooke or Leon Underwood but imbibed her skill with the medium from those around her, notably Gertrude Hermes and her husband Blair Hughes-Stanton, who were both highly proficient.

She had married another artist, William McCance, in 1918 and there is little doubt that they both came under the influence of Wyndham Lewis: her first editioned prints made in 1926 reveal just how much she had taken in both of cubism and of vorticism, which he advocated so forcefully at the time.

In 1931 she was able to show the type of work that really suited her talents when Gregynog published The Fables of Esope, translated out of the Frensshe in to Englysshe by William Caxton. Miller Parker contributed thirty-seven wood engravings, with the initial letters supplied by McCance. There is little doubt that this book is a triumph for the artist and one can only agree with Rogerson's analysis. His comment that 'a previously undistinguished chrysalis emerged as a brilliant butterfly' is a particularly apt choice of words since her true skills are on display throughout her interpretation of the natural world. Bernard Newdigate, while expressing reservations about McCance's designs in terms of page layout, was impressed by the engravings, remarking in the London Mercury on 'the brilliantly executed wood engravings with which Miss Agnes Miller Parker has illustrated the Gregynog reprint of Caxton's Aesop'. 'Brilliant', employed more than once, seems again the precise word to encapsulate Miller Parker's wood engraving technique at the time, for, as Rogerson points out, 'the use of the fleck on the top of beautifully laid cross-hatching created a coruscation of light not seen before and introduced a distinct new element into the vocabulary of the wood engraver, although few of her followers were able to use it successfully'. Another fine book from the press, XXI Welsh Gypsy Folk-Tales (1933), sees the artist at her boldest with strong and fluent designs full of vigour and grace. Both this and the Esope were produced in editions of just 250 copies and, despite their manifest virtues, sold in painfully slow numbers, not least because of the depressed economic conditions at the time.

Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Miller Parker turned away from the private press movement towards the commercial publishers, and it was here that she was to produce some of her most distinguished books. While remarking that she found it 'difficult to get reconciled to the slap-dash style of mass production', she nevertheless drew some striking images for a most curious volume, The Forest Giant by Adrien Le Corbeau, which had been translated from the French by T. E. Lawrence, writing under the pseudonym of J. H. Ross. While Rogerson is not won over, I find her images...