Wood Engraving Wednesday
More on Freda Bone
Last week we posted some wood engravings by Freda Bone. We noted then that we could find very little on her life and career, and asked that if anyone had more information to please let us know. Well, one of our followers did indeed turn up a bit more information and passed it on to us (thanks follower!).
It seems that Freda Bone (1905-1991) was actually Scottish and not Irish as we identified in our previous post. She was the eldest child of the noted Scottish Commodore and successful author of nautical fiction Sir David William Bone (1874-1959), who received the Coronation Medal from King George VI in 1937, and was appointed a CBE in 1943. Freda Bone grew up and spent her early adult years in Helensburgh, Scotland, about 33 miles northwest of Glasgow, before leaving for Glasgow to marry John Sprott, also the son of a master mariner.
Bone’s paternal uncle Muirhead Bone was also an artist, and illustrated several of his brother’s novels. Freda Bone also illustrated at least one of her father’s novels, Capstan Bars, originally printed in Glasgow and published in Edinburgh by the Porpoise Press and in London by Faber and Faber in 1931. We don’t hold this book, but our library’s Music Collection holds the first American edition published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1932, which we have borrowed for this post (it’s in the Music Collection because it contains a series of essays on sea chanties). We suspect that only the first image presented here is a wood engraving while the rest are woodcuts.
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