Artist of the day, December 26: Gwenda Morgan, a British wood engraver. (#874)

Gwenda Morgan ( 1908 – 1991) was a British wood engraver. She lived in the town of Petworth, West Sussex. Following school in Petworth and at Brighton and Hove High School, Morgan studied at Goldsmiths' College of Art in London, from 1926. From 1930 she attended the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Pimlico where she was taught and strongly influenced by the principal, Iain Macnab.

The Grosvenor School was a progressive art school, and the championing of wood engraving and linocuts fitted with its democratic approach to the arts.

Morgan was commissioned to illustrate a number of books published by private presses. For the Samson Press, she produced the frontispiece for Duke Hamilton's Wager in 1934 and Pictures and Rhymes in 1936. She illustrated four books for the Golden Cockerel Press.

The main body of her work drew upon the landscape and buildings around Petworth and the neighboring South Downs. Her work was inspired by that of Macnab, Percy Douglas Bliss, and the Sussex-bred Eric Ravilious.

Throughout the Second World War, she worked as a Land Girl. Her record of those years was published by the Whittington Press in 2002 as The Diary of a Land Girl, 1939-1945.

She was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers & Engravers, an Honorary Member of the Society of Wood Engravers, and a Member of the National Society of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers, and she showed work at their annual exhibitions. She also exhibited at the Royal Academy and at the Redfern Gallery.

Her prints are held in the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, among others. In 2015 an exhibition, "A Study in Contrast: Sybil Andrews and Gwenda Morgan", was held at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in Victoria, British Columbia, comparing and contrasting the fellow Grosvenor School artists.

Some of her prints are on permanent display in the Leconfield Hall, Petworth, to which Morgan gave a substantial bequest on her death. Original wood engravings by Morgan are being sold in aid of the Leconfield Hall by the Kevis House Gallery in Petworth, who holds the largest collection of the artist's work.

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1934, Summer Flowers

1937, Byworth

1937, Jenny and Jimmy

1938, Rainy Day, from a Little Place in the Country

1946, Hamlet

1946, Harvesting

1946, Home Coming

1946, The Churchyard

1947, East Dean

1948, Moonlight

1948, Park Lane

1948, The Cliff

1949, The Bell Inn

1952,  Apple Picking

1952, Dimple in the Pond

1953, Bookplate for Helen Austin

1953, Fittleworth

1954, Tobias and the Angel

1954, Winter Arrangement

1955, Christmas Morning

1955, Deep Peace

1956, Grimms Other Tales

1956, Private Wealth

1960, Cover Design for 'Petworth Deanery Review'

1960, It's a Short Walk to the Sea

1960, Sudden Storm

1960, Traveller's Joy, also known as Old Man's Beard

1962, Midwinter

1964-65, Pound Corner

1964-65, Summer Kaleidoscope

1966, Old Tree

1967, The Two Houses

1967-68, Willingly to School

1969, Around Haslemere

1970, Nursery Rhymes

Deep Peace

Morning, moon and night; 'Sudden storm

Roadside cottage; The seasons

​Midnight Madness