Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt

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Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt (19 July 1901 – 8 January 1987), known simply as Wilfrid Blunt, was an English art teacher, writer, artist and a curator of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, from 1959 until 1983.

Life[edit]

His parents were the Rev. Arthur Stanley Vaughan and Hilda Violet (born Master) Blunt, of Paris. Blunt was born at Ham in Surrey[1] and educated at Marlborough College, where he was a scholar, leaving in July 1920 for Worcester College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner, finally at the Royal College of Art.[2][3]

He was art master at Haileybury College (1923–38)[2] and then at Eton College (1938–59) and helped modify the hand-writing of British school-children, using the fifteenth-century Italian Cancellaresca ("Chancery") script[4] as a basis, although one of his students at Eton reminisced that after being taken off Art to improve his handwriting, Mr Blunt failed to make it any more legible.[5][6][3]

For his book The Art of Botanical Illustration in 1950[7] he was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society.[1] This book was considered the first comprehensive review of botanical illustration in Europe. Subsequent editions (by his co-author, Willian T. Stearn) provided coverage of more of the world and the twentieth century.[8]

The sixth international exhibition of botanical art and illustration held in 1988 at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, USA, was dedicated to Blunt. He had been a member of the Advisory Committee to the Institute since 1964.[1]

He died in Guildford on 8 January 1987.[3]

His brothers were the numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt and Anthony Blunt, art historian and spy for the Soviets.[3] His namesake Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a distant family cousin.

Books[edit]

  • Haileybury Buildings (1936); 2nd edition (1966)
  • Desert Hawk: Abd el Kader and the French Conquest of Algeria (Methuen, 1947)
  • The Art of Botanical Illustration (1950) with William T. Stearn
  • Tulipomania (Penguin, 1950) from the King Penguin Books series
  • Black Sunrise: The Life and Times of Mulai Ismail, Emperor of Morocco 1646-1727 (1951)
  • Sweet Roman Hand: Five Hundred Years of Italic Cursive Script (1952)
  • Pietro's Pilgrimage: A Journey to India and Back at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century (1953)
  • Sebastiano: The Adventures of an Italian Priest, Sebastiano Locatelli, During his Journey from Bologna to Paris and Back 1664-1665 (1956)
  • Great Flower Books, 1700-1900: A Bibliographical Record of Two Centuries of Finely-illustrated Flower Books (1956), Sacheverell Sitwell, Wilfrid Blunt and Patrick Millington Synge, Atlantic Monthly Press (1990) ISBN 0871132842
  • A Persian Spring (James Barrie Books, Ltd., 1957)
  • Lady Muriel; Lady Muriel Paget, her husband, and her philanthropic work in Central and Eastern Europe (1962)
  • Of Flowers & A Village: An Entertainment for Flower Lovers (Hamish Hamilton, 1963)
  • Cockerell; Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, friend of Ruskin and William Morris and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (1965)
  • Isfahan, Pearl of Persia (1966, with Wim Swaan)
  • Omar: A Fantasy for Animal Lovers (1966) illustrated by John Verney
  • John Christie of Glyndebourne (1968)
  • The Dream King, Ludwig of Bavaria (1970)
  • The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus (Collins, 1971, with William T. Stearn)
  • Captain Cook's Florilegium (1973, with W. T. Stearn)
  • The Golden Road to Samarkand (1973)
  • On Wings of Song; a Biography of Felix Mendelssohn (1974)
  • England's Michelangelo: A Biography of George Frederic Watts (1975)
  • The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer (1976, with W. T. Stearn)
  • The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century (1976)
  • Splendours of Islam (1976)
  • In For a Penny: A Prospect of Kew Gardens (1978)
  • The Illustrated Herbal (Frances Lincoln, 1979, with S. Raphael)
  • Married to a Single Life: An Autobiography, 1901-1938 (1983)
  • Slow on the Feather: Further Autobiography, 1938–1959 (1986)

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c White, James J.; Wendel, Donald E. "6th International Exhibition of Botanical Art and Illustration" (PDF). Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation. Retrieved 4 October 2021.
  2. ^ a b "Blunt, Wilfrid Jasper Walter" in Marlborough College Register 1843–1952 (The Bursar, Marlborough, 1953), p. 593
  3. ^ a b c d "Blunt, Wilfrid Jasper Walter (1901–1987), teacher of art and writer". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/53211. Retrieved 21 June 2021.
  4. ^ http://www.fontscape.com/explore?6TG Chancery Scripts - Retrieved on 2007-01-08
  5. ^ Wilfrid Blunt, Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved on 2019-09-30
  6. ^ Wilfrid Blunt (1952), Sweet Roman hand: Five hundred years of italic cursive script, James Barrie, ASIN B0000CI87Z, OCLC 7078722
  7. ^ Blunt, Wilfrid; Stearn, William T. (1950). The Art of Botanical Illustration (First ed.). England: Collins.
  8. ^ "Book Review: The Art of Botanical Illustration". Botanical art and artists. Retrieved 4 October 2021.


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