Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs

1876 - 1938 English

Romantic etcher of idealized medieval England

Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs RA RE FSA was an English etcher, architectural draughtsman, illustrator, and early conservationist, associated with the late flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswolds, centered in Chipping Campden. He was one of the first etchers to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy, and was part of the final phase of the Etching Revival in Britain. He was elected the Master of the Art Workers' Guild in 1934. Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he worked as an illustrator for the Highways and Byways series of regional guides for the publishers, Macmillans. In 1903 he settled at Dover's House, in the market town of Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds, and went on to create one of the last significant Arts and Crafts houses at 'New Dover's House'. There he set up the Dover's House Press, where he printed late proofs of the etchings of Samuel Palmer, amongst others. He collaborated with Ernest Gimson and the Sapperton group of craftsmen in architectural and design work in the area. 'Fred' Griggs converted to Roman Catholicism in 1912 and set about producing a body of etchings, 57 meticulous plates in a Romantic tradition, evoking an idealised medieval England of pastoral landscapes and architectural fantasies of ruined abbeys and buildings. His best-known etchings include 'Owlpen Manor' (1930), dedicated to his friend, the architect Norman Jewson, 'Anglia Perdita', 'Maur's Farm', 'St Botolph's, Boston', 'The Almonry', and 'Memory of Clavering'. Collections of his etched work are held in the Ashmolean Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Boston Public Library, and in major public collections worldwide. Griggs was one of the finest and most respected etchers of his time. He was an influential leader of the British etching revival in the Twenties and Thirties, and "the most important etcher who followed in the Samuel Palmer tradition" (K.M. Guichard, British Etchers, 1977). He occupies a pole position in the Romantic tradition of British art: he links the world of Blake, Turner and Samuel Palmer to a younger generation of neo-Romantic artists, including Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Robin Tanner and Joseph Webb.