Woodcuts

I was in the most south-westerly pub in Britain, the Turk’s Head, on the Scilly island of St Agnes (population: 75) when I noticed a poster advertising a local exhibition of the work of ‘renowned artist and birdwatcher Hilda Quick, 1895-1978’. I had never heard of her, but her work on the poster, ‘The Pursuit of Art’, was compelling. A stylish wood engraving from the 1920s, it showed female art students drawing a male life model. This was the new equality Hilda Quick would have discovered when she left her native Penzance to attend the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London in 1919.

Coronavirus has cast a dampener over this year’s Mayflower 400 celebrations due to a hidden enemy with which the Pilgrim Fathers were all too familiar: within months of their arrival in America more than half of them had died of a disease whose principal symptom was violent coughing. There was no official artist on the Mayflower. Its ragtag party of Separatist Puritans had only been granted a charter on condition that their religious affiliation, banned in England, was not formally recognised.