Philip Hagreen

Philip Hagreen (12 July 1890 to 1988) was a wood engraver who was active at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers. He was closely associated with Eric Gill and was a member of the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic at Ditchling.

Hagreen was the only child of Henry Hagreen, the drawing master at Wellington College, Berkshire. He studied at the college, but his education was disrupted by ill-health. He studied art in Cornwall, under Norman Garstin and then Harold and Laura Knight, and then entered the New Cross Art School. He enlisted in the army at the beginning of the First World War. He was a reluctant soldier, but felt that it was his duty. In 1918 he married Aileen Clegg; they had three children, John, Mary Bernadette and Mary Joan.

In 1923 the family joined Eric Gill at Ditchling, and moved with him to Capel-y-ffin in 1924. The climate proved too harsh for Hagreen and he moved to Lourdes with his family, where he stayed until 1932. He returned to Ditchling until 1959, when the Hagreens moved to Lingfield in Surrey. In 1973 they moved to a nursing home at Ifield Green.

Hagreen was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920, and exhibited with them from 1920 to 1922. It was Hagreen who suggested that a society be formed, and the first meeting was held in his studio. He was at his most active in the early 1920s and virtually all his wood engravings proper, as opposed to woodcuts, date from this period.

He contributed seven wood engravings, the most by any engraver, to Change I and Change II (1919), a short-lived review that set out to capture the developments of the moment.

In 1922 he contributed a wood engraving to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Duckworth and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote about him in his introduction to the book: Mr. Hagreen and Mr. Dickey are among the engravers who rely very much upon the effective use of white lines and spaces.

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