Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt
Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt (1901–1987) was an art teacher, author, artist and curator of the Watts Gallery at Compton, Surrey (1959–83).
Life[]
The son of the Rev. A. S. V. Blunt, of Paris, Blunt was 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.[1][2]
He was art master at Haileybury College (1923–38)[1] and then at Eton College (1938–59) and helped to start a revolution in the hand-writing of British school-children, using the 15th-century Italian Cancellaresca ("Chancery") script[3] 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.[4][5][2]
For his book The Art of Botanical Illustration in 1950 he was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society.[citation needed]
His brothers were the numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt and Anthony Blunt, Poussin expert and Russian spy.[2]
Books[]
- Haileybury Buildings (1936)
- Desert Hawk : Abd el Kader and the French Conquest of Algeria (Methuen, 1947)
- The Art of Botanical Illustration (1950) with William T. Stearn
- Tulipomania (King Penguin, 1950) (see Tulip mania)
- Sweet Roman Hand (1952)
- Pietro's Pilgrimage (1953)
- 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
- 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)
- Haileybury Buildings, 2nd Edition (1966)
- 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)
- 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)
- 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[]
- ^ Jump up to: a b "Blunt, Wilfrid Jasper Walter" in Marlborough College Register 1843–1952 (The Bursar, Marlborough, 1953), p. 593
- ^ Jump up to: a b c "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.
- ^ http://www.fontscape.com/explore?6TG Chancery Scripts - Retrieved on 2007-01-08
- ^ Wilfrid Blunt, Dictionary of Art Historians. Retrieved on 2019-09-30
- ^ Wilfrid Blunt (1952), Sweet Roman hand: Five hundred years of italic cursive script, James Barrie, ASIN B0000CI87Z, OCLC 7078722
- 1901 births
- 1987 deaths
- English art historians
- English curators
- English artists
- Veitch Memorial Medal recipients
- New Naturalist writers
- 20th-century English historians
- British historian stubs
- European art historian stubs