HASSALL, Joan. ~ Six vignette wood engravings for A Child's Garden of Verses.
Two of the wood engraved vignettes are titled in pencil by the artist: ‘Envoy’ (a bird carrying a book in its beak), ‘Foreign Children’ (an Inuit fishing) and ‘The Flowers’ (two small figures passing huge flowers) and ‘My treasures’ (soldiers, a chisel, and a flute in a nest), the other two are of a small pine bough and ‘The End’ with a boy playing with his toys.
All of the vignettes are inscribed in pencil by Joan Hassall to Sydney C Cockerell using their initials and are variously dated 23.3.49, 19.6.49 and 22.6.49.
Together with the book in which they appeared: A Child’s Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson. First edition with Hassall’s 51 wood engravings. 8vo., original cream linen, with the original dust jacket. Spine slightly faded, otherwise very good. Edinburgh, The Hopetoun Press, 1947.
Joan Hassall engraved the illustrations for a 1947 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verses published by the Hopetoun Press which was later reprinted by Blackie in 1958 and 1961.
Hassall had a benefactor in Sir Sydney Cockerell, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum from 1908 to 1937. They had met in 1948, a year before she inscribed these proof engravings to him. Joan Hassall became one of the group of women who helped care for him in Kew in his old age, a group he called “Angels”. He financed her trips to Europe and gave her two valuable Holbein books which she used as security to raise a loan to repair her house in Kensington Park Road. She often sent proofs to him inscribed SCC and on his death in 1962 they were returned to her and many of them are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Joan Hassall was also notable for being the first woman Master of the Art-Worker’s Guild in 1972 which had stayed closed to women until 1964.