Collection: Elizabeth Blackadder

These books and prints are the result of a unique collaboration between two leading practitioners in their fields, the poet George Bruce and the artist Elizabeth Blackadder.  

Dame Elizabeth Violet Blackadder was a Scottish painter and printmaker. She was the first woman to be elected to both the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Academy. She worked with George Bruce on Through the Letterbox in the year before he died. Her instinctive economy of style and her particular interest in Japanese art makes her the ideal illustrator for such a book.

Blackadder worked in a variety of media such as oil paints, watercolour, drawing, and printmaking. In her still life paintings and drawings, she considered space between objects carefully. She also painted portraits and landscapes but her later work contains mainly her cats and flowers with extreme detail. Her work can be seen at the Tate Gallery, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and has appeared on a series of Royal Mail stamps.