Geoffrey Heath Wedgwood


Geoffrey Heath Wedgwood, ARCA, RE was a British etcher and engraver, best known for his architectural etchings.

Early life and education

Born in Leek, Staffordshire, the son of Jane and Frank Wedgwood, an engineer, but brought up in Liverpool, Wedgwood attended the Liverpool Institute and then served with the British Army in the First World War. From 1919 to 1921 he studied at the Liverpool City School of Art Winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, he studied engraving there under Sir Frank Short and from 1924 under his successor Malcolm Osborne.
He was a Rome scholar at the British School at Rome, having won the Engraving Prize in 1925, the same year that Edward Irvine Halliday, a fellow Liverpudlian and also a former student at the RCA, won the Painting Prize. According to Edward Morris, writing in the Connoisseur, Wedgwood "reverted to architectural subjects; his line became harder and more precise; his effects clearer and sharper; less of his work was etched, more engraved; some of the credit for these effects must go to the printer, David Strang".
"In Wedgwood's architectural etchings", wrote Guichard, "the severity of the formal harmonies of square and rectangle in the roofs and walls of old buildings is relieved by gentle caricature in the small local figures that inhabit the scenes and are sympathetically observed."

Career

He later taught at the Liverpool Institute from 1932 to 1935 and at the Liverpool City School of Art from 1935 until his retirement in 1960.
He also worked as an illustrator. His etchings for menus were shown at the L.N.E.R. exhibition of poster art at Burlington Galleries in 1933.
Among various projects for Martins Bank advertising in the early 1950s, he was commissioned together with J. C. Armitage and F. G. Lodge, to do drawings of English stately homes.

Published works

Not complete
  • Roberts, Gruffydd Dewi, The House that was forgotten, illus. by Geoffrey Wedgwood. London: Lovat Dickson & Thompson Limited
  • Roberts, Gruffydd Dewi, Heron's Island, illus. by Geoffrey Wedgwood. London: Dent

Awards and honours

Exhibitions

Works in public collections