Ralph Chubb
1892–1960 · British poet, painter, illustrator and printmaker
Ralph Chubb (1892-1960) was a British poet, painter, illustrator and printmaker, an unusual figure in English art between the wars. Born in Harpenden, he studied at Cambridge and at the Slade School in London, and his work drew on Whitman, Blake and the Romantics. Although he exhibited his paintings, they did not sell, and he came to devote himself mainly to printmaking and to producing his own books in very small editions.
After serving as an officer in the First World War, from which he emerged with neurasthenia, he settled in Curridge, near Newbury. From the 1920s he made books with woodcuts and, from 1929, lithographs, often hand-coloured. His 1930s works, such as Water Cherubs and The Secret Country, present youthful male figures and a personal mythology in which Ra-el-phaos, the child-god who would redeem Albion, appears.
His style is introspective and densely symbolic, peopled with angels, knights and child-gods. After the war he resumed printing with The Child of Dawn and Flames of Sunrise. His legacy is that of a marginal author with minimal print runs, whose graphic and poetic work was recovered after his death in 1960.