LEIGHTON, Clare

Clare Leighton (1898-1989) attended the Brighton School of Art (1915), the Slade School of Fine Art (1921’23) and the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Her incredibly productive career includes engravings, paintings, bookplates, illustrations and stained glass. Her twelve plates for Wedgwood, New England Industries, 1952, are amongst her best-known work. In the early 1930s, as the world was gripped by the Great Depression, the artist began work on a sequence of wood engravings depicting traditional farming in England over the course of a year. Leighton was encouraged to illustrate each of the twelve months with wood engravings. The result was The Farmer’s Year, published in 1933 in Britain and North America, to great acclaim, running to three impressions by early 1934. This was the first book that Leighton wrote, illustrated and designed and remains her most celebrated work, a unique and beautiful record of the toil and triumphs of farm workers before the Second World War and mechanisation changed the countryside for ever. She exhibited with the SWE in London (1923) and at the 1934 Venice Biennale ‘ attaining full membership to the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in the same year. She also made several tours of the United States, becoming a naturalised citizen in 1945. By the time of her death, Leighton had authored twelve books and made over 840 prints.