Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt
Wilfrid Jasper Walter Blunt, known simply as Wilfrid Blunt, was an English art teacher, writer, artist and a curator of the Watts Gallery in Compton, Surrey, from 1959 until 1983.
Life
His parents were the Rev. Arthur Stanley Vaughan and Hilda Violet Blunt, of Paris. Blunt was born at Ham in Surrey and educated at Marlborough College, where he was a scholar, leaving in July 1920 for Worcester College, Oxford, where he was an exhibitioner, finally at the Royal College of Art.
He was art master at Haileybury College and then at Eton College and helped modify the hand-writing of British school-children, using the fifteenth-century Italian Cancellaresca script as a basis, although one of his students at Eton reminisced that after being taken off Art to improve his handwriting, Mr Blunt failed to make it any more legible.
For his book The Art of Botanical Illustration in 1950 he was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal by the Royal Horticultural Society. This book was considered the first comprehensive review of botanical illustration in Europe. Subsequent editions provided coverage of more of the world and the twentieth century.
The sixth international exhibition of botanical art and illustration held in 1988 at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, USA, was dedicated to Blunt. He had been a member of the Advisory Committee to the Institute since 1964.
He died in Guildford on 8 January 1987.
His brothers were the numismatist Christopher Evelyn Blunt and Anthony Blunt, art historian and spy for the Soviets. His namesake Wilfrid Scawen Blunt was a distant family cousin.
Books
Haileybury Buildings ; 2nd edition Desert Hawk: Abd el Kader and the French Conquest of Algeria The Art of Botanical Illustration with William T. StearnTulipomania from the King Penguin Books seriesBlack Sunrise: The Life and Times of Mulai Ismail, Emperor of Morocco 1646-1727 Sweet Roman Hand: Five Hundred Years of Italic Cursive Script Pietro's Pilgrimage: A Journey to India and Back at the Beginning of the Seventeenth Century Sebastiano: The Adventures of an Italian Priest, Sebastiano Locatelli, During his Journey from Bologna to Paris and Back 1664-1665 Great Flower Books, 1700-1900: A Bibliographical Record of Two Centuries of Finely-illustrated Flower Books, Sacheverell Sitwell, Wilfrid Blunt and Patrick Millington Synge, Atlantic Monthly Press A Persian Spring Lady Muriel; Lady Muriel Paget, her husband, and her philanthropic work in Central and Eastern Europe Of Flowers & A Village: An Entertainment for Flower Lovers Cockerell; Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, friend of Ruskin and William Morris and director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge Isfahan, Pearl of Persia Omar: A Fantasy for Animal Lovers illustrated by John VerneyJohn Christie of Glyndebourne The Dream King, Ludwig of Bavaria The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus Captain Cook's Florilegium The Golden Road to Samarkand On Wings of Song; a Biography of Felix Mendelssohn England's Michelangelo: A Biography of George Frederic Watts The Australian Flower Paintings of Ferdinand Bauer The Ark in the Park: The Zoo in the Nineteenth Century Splendours of Islam In For a Penny: A Prospect of Kew Gardens The Illustrated Herbal Married to a Single Life: An Autobiography, 1901-1938 Slow on the Feather: Further Autobiography, 1938–1959