SANDFORD, Lettice

Lettice Sandford (1902–1993) was a draftsman, wood-engraver and watercolourist. She was the wife of Christopher Sandford of Eye Manor, Herefordshire, proprietor of the Golden Cockerel Press, for which she provided wood-engravings.

Sandford studied at the Byam Shaw and Vicat Cole School of Art, and later, with an interest in book illustration, at the Art Section of the Chelsea Polytechnic. Here she worked under Percy Jowett, who had earlier taught her at her boarding school in north London. She was taught to engrave on wood by Robert Day, and etching by Graham Sutherland. With her husband, Christopher Sandford, ran the Boar’s Head Press, whose books were printed at the Chiswick Press, of which Christopher was a director. Her engravings for their first two books, published in 1931 and 1932, were plainly early work, engaging things, but somewhat amateur in style. Then she saw a copy of Blair Hughes-Stanton’s Comus with its fine white lines engraved into solid black backgrounds, and for the next couple of years his style was all-important to her: the engravings for Sappho (1932) are among her finest.

In 1933 Christopher Sandford bought the Golden Cockerel Press from Robert Gibbings, and, though he transferred the printing to the Chiswick Press, was able to maintain the very high standards of book production that Gibbings had achieved working at home in Waltham St Lawrence. The finest of engravers continued to work for him – Gibbings himself, Eric Gill, Hughes-Stanton, Eric Ravilious, John Buckland Wright, almost everyone of consequence – to produce a series of finely printed illustrated books that are now too often outside the range of ordinary collectors.

(Source : The Independent)