Stephen Gooden, original line engraving print, bookplate for Mona Gooden, 1926

Size: 5 x 6 cm to platemark. Frame 23 x 22 cm

Condition:  Some foxing or staining as per the image. Good used frame and mount.

This is a bookplate engraved by Gooden for his wife whom he married in 1925.  It is number 138 in the catalogue"An Iconography of the Engravings of Stephen Gooden", Campbell Dodgson, 1944.  The print is an original (not a copy) from a line engraving on copper plate.

This impression is mounted on a piece of laid paper printed with  "best wishes from Mona Gooden Christmas 1956" with a handwritten "To Hilary & family, Love &" in front of it (see image).

Stephen Gooden (1892-1955) was a pioneer of the revival of line engraving in England in the early 1920s - in fact his work predated that of others such as Stanley Anderson and Robert Austin. He studied at the Slade School of Art but his career was interrupted by service in France duing the First World War..   From the early 1920 he specialised soley in line engraving (engraving on copper plate using a burin), an art which had given way to wood engraving and etching for a century or so.  Gooden designed particularly for illustrated books and bookplates, often for famous names.  He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1933 and a Fellow of the Royal Academy in 1946.  He was created a Commander of the British Empire in the 1942 Birthday Honours. Gooden's work can be found in the collections of the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA.