Paul Vincent Woodroffe was an occasional illustrator for wood engraving, painter and stained glass artist. He was born in Madras (India), and later moved to England. He specialised in book decoration, covers and end-papers in the style of his friend Laurence Houseman and lived and worked in Chipping Campden. Reference: The British Museum
In November 1892 he sat and passed the entrance examinations for the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, but in that year there were more successful applicants than places available, and he enrolled instead as a full-time student at the Slade School of Fine Art in Bloomsbury. At this time the family lived in Alton Castle in Alton in Staffordshire, sharing it with another Catholic family, the Moorats. Joseph Samuel Moorat (1864–1938) was an accomplished writer of songs, and his music was said to have been the inspiration for much of Woodroffe’s work as an illustrator.
Woodroffe’s first illustrated book, entitled Ye Booke of Nursery Rhymes, was published in 1895 whilst he was still at the Slade, and on leaving the Slade he concentrated on further book illustration and then stained glass, and was to work with books and windows for the rest of his life. In the later 1890s he worked as a pupil of Christopher Whall. His earliest commission for stained glass is thought to be in 1901 for St John’s Catholic Church at Alton in Staffordshire. Like all of Woodroffe’s windows prior to 1905, this window would have been made in the workshop of Lowndes and Drury of Park Walk in Chelsea. Woodroffe made full use of “slab glass”. Reference: Wikipedia
Paul Vincent Woodroffe (British, 1875-1954) Ariel Signed, inscribed and dated ‘Paul Woodroffe, Campden, Glos, March.21.07’ and further inscribed with a quotation from the Tempest, on verso Watercolour, pen and ink heightened with white 16.5 x 26cm.
Sold for £ 600 inc. premium at Bonhams in 2010
“The Fairy Ship”―Page Design
This design was made for a 1912 publication containing music by Joseph Moorat and illustrations by his brother-in-law Paul Woodroffe. After studies at the Slade School, the latter joined the Art Workers’ Guild, then became part of the circle of Charles Robert Ashbee, whose Guild of Handicraft and Essex House Press had moved to Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire from London in 1902. Moorat already lived in nearby Westington and, when Woodroffe bought an adjacent cottage in 1904, Ashbee supervised the renovations. Working at the heart of the Arts and Crafts community, and aware of predecessors and contemporaries, Woodroffe here represents a magic ship captained by a duck with a crew of white mice, the images contained within bubbles.
Reference: The Metropolitan Museum of Art
