Eleanor Vere Boyle

Eleanor Vere Boyle (née Gordon; 1 May 1825 – 29 July 1916) was a Scottish artist of the Victorian era whose work consisted mainly of watercolor illustrations in children's books. These illustrations were strongly influenced by the Pre-Raphaelites, highly detailed and haunting in content. Love and death were popular subject matter of Pre-Raphaelite art and something that can be seen in Boyle's work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, called her work "great in design."

However, even though she was one of the first woman artists to be recognised for her achievements, she did not exhibit or sell work often, as it was not acceptable given her family's aristocratic background. Thus, she signed her works "EVB" to obscure her identity and quickly became one of the most important female illustrators in the 1860s.

Life

Eleanor Vere Gordon was born in 1825 in Scotland, at Auchlunies House in Maryculter, Kincardineshire, (now Aberdeenshire), the daughter of Alexander Gordon of Ellon Castle, the illegitimate son of George Gordon, 3rd Earl of Aberdeen. Her mother, Albinia Elizabeth Cumberland, was the granddaughter of the dramatist Richard Cumberland and George Hobart, 3rd Earl of Buckinghamshire. The youngest of nine children, she was raised in the Scottish hills above the River Dee. The diplomat George John Robert Gordon was her elder brother. She later moved to England and married Hon. Richard Cavendish Boyle, son of the 8th Earl of Cork and chaplain to Queen Victoria.

Boyle's fascination with nature strongly influenced her later work, which primarily consisted of garden books after her husband died. However, during her lifetime, up until she died in 1916, she produced, and was praised for, work for children's books. Eleanor had written or illustrated twenty-one books in about a fifty-year time-span. All these works were inspired by many things in which Eleanor was fascinated: nature, but also fate, dreams and flowing water. Some of the most highly acclaimed illustrations from this book include: "The Snow Queen," The Wild Swans," "The Ugly Duckling," "The Little Mermaid," "Thumbkinetta," "The Garden of Paradise," "The Fellow Traveller" (which inspired Tolkien's The Hobbit) and "The Angel." Ros Rosarum Ex Horto Poetarum is subtitled "Dew of the Ever-living Rose, Gathered from the Poets' Gardens of Many Lands". It is one of the most highly acclaimed works by scholars and claimed to be culturally important.

Boyle continued to write, with a focus on nature, as she wrote and illustrated garden books. In the last thirty-two years of her life, she wrote and illustrated four: Days and Hours in a Garden (1884), A Garden of Pleasure (1895), Seven Gardens and a Palace (1900), and Garden Colour (1905). Her last work came eight years prior to her death: The Peacock's Pleasaunce (1908), a collection of twelve essays (considered belles-lettres) accompanied by eight of her own illustrations.

Other works A Child's Summer (1853) In the Fir-Wood (1866) A New Child's Play (1877) A London Sparrow at the Colinderies (1887) A Midsummer-Night Dream (1887) Sylvana's Letters to an Unknown Friend (1900)