Paul Woodroffe

Paul Vincent Woodroffe (25 January 1875 – 7 May 1954) was a British book illustrator and stained-glass artist.

Woodroffe was born in Madras (present-day Chennai), one of nine children of Francis Henry Woodroffe, a judge in the Madras Civil Service, and his wife Elizabeth (née Dunman). The family returned to England in 1882 when his father died. In 1887, Paul was sent to Stonyhurst College.

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".

In 1902, Woodroffe was elected a member of the Art Workers' Guild. 1902 was a seminal year for Woodroffe as this was the year that Charles Robert Ashbee's Guild of Handicraft and Essex House Press moved from the East End to Chipping Campden in the Cotswolds where Woodroffe had been a frequent visitor from the mid-1890s when Joseph and Lilian Moorat had acquired a house at Westington, just outside Chipping Campden. While staying with the Moorats Woodroffe would use a small thatched cottage nearby as a studio. When the Moorats left Westington in 1904, Woodroffe purchased the cottage, employed Ashbee to enlarge and adapt it to include a small studio and he moved into the house in November 1904 and was to live there for more than thirty years.

...
Wikipedia