Biography

Frederick Landseer Maur Griggs was an English etcher, architectural draughtsman, illustrator, and early conservationist, associated with the late flowering of the Arts and Crafts movement in the Cotswolds. He was one of the first etchers to be elected to full membership of the Royal Academy.

He worked as an illustrator for the Highways and Byways series of regional guides for 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.

Griggs converted to Roman Catholicism in 1912 and set about producing an incomparable 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.

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 1920s and 30s , and "the most important etcher who followed in the Samuel Palmer tradition". He occupies a leading 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 and Robin Tanner.