F. L. Griggs

Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs RA RE FSA (30 October 1876 – 7 June 1938) was an English etcher, architectural draughtsman, illustrator, and early conservationist, associated with the late flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswolds, centred in Chipping Campden.

[1] Born in Hitchin, Hertfordshire, he worked as an illustrator for the Highways and Byways series of regional guides for the publishers, Macmillans.

'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.

[2] 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'.

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.