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Details
- Date
- (circa 1935)
- Media category
- Materials used
- wood engraving, printed in black ink on thin ivory wove card
- Edition
- unknown
- Dimensions
- 11.4 x 14.3 cm blockmark; 14.6 x 43.0 cm sheet open; 14.6 x 21.5 cm sheet closed
- Signature & date
Signed within block to print l.l. corner, "Elaine Haxton".
- Credit
- Purchased with funds provided by the Arthur Boyd Acquisition Fund 2009
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 479.2009
- Copyright
- © Estate of Elaine Haxton
- Artist information
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Elaine Haxton
Works in the collection
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About
During the period 1933–38, Haxton lived in England, where she worked for the advertising firm of J Walter Thompson. She undertook other freelance employment in advertising and as a designer, included work for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Strand Magazine and design of a set of playing cards for the P&O Line.
Whilst working she studied drawing part-time in the evenings at the Grosvenor School under Iain MacNab. This wood engraving (made for a Christmas card) dates from Haxton's time in England where she studied, worked and travelled between 1932 and 1938. She made sketching trips into the countryside whilst working in London; and it is presumably from one of these sketching trips that she drew inspiration for the subject of this Christmas card – from the characteristic conical shape of oasthouse roofs, with their tilted chimney-cowls. Oast houses (used for drying hops in the beer making process) are common in Kent, but also found in Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire. Haxton possibly learnt the technique of wood engraving through her work in the field of commercial art or her studies at the Grosvenor School of Art under Iain MacNab, himself a highly skilled wood-engraver.