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From the preface of the 1998 exhibition booklet:

New Hall is holding this exhibition of the work of Gwen Raverat to mark the 50th Anniversary of the admission of women to degrees of the University of Cambridge in 1948. The College is not itself directly involved in marking this Anniversary as it came into being only in 1954, but it is clear that the movement which led to its foundation was greatly strengthened by the interest in and sympathy for the higher education of women which had shown itself in the 1947 vote. The University is marking the Anniversary by celebrating the women who graduated before that date. This exhibition celebrates the achievement of a very Cambridge woman (although not herself a graduate of the University) in a field which is of great interest to New Hall, that of the visual arts. There are also special connections between the College and Gwen Raverat because the Darwin family to which she belonged and the house in which she spent her final years are part of its earliest history. New Hall began in Silver Street, close to the Old Granary where Gwen Raverat in her wheelchair was a familiar figure to the first generation of New Hall undergraduates. After her death in 1957 the College leased the Old Granary, a particularly beautiful house overlooking the river and the millstream. The generosity of the Darwin family in giving New Hall the Orchard in Huntingdon Road led the College in 1965 to its permanent home at the top of Castle Hill.

The first print by Gwen Raverat to enter the Fitzwilliam Museum's Collections was Gypsies, given by Mrs Laurence Humphry in 1925. Then in 1933 the artist herself gave a representative group of her woodcuts: 23 miscellaneous examples from 1909 to 1932, and a complete set of The Months, Daphnis and Chloe, The Cambridge Book of Poetry and the programme for The Oresteia. In 1949 five more came with the Campbell Dodgson Bequest, and one each in the Yule Bequest of 1951, the Martland Bequest of 1962 and the Brownlow Bequest of 1972. In 1974 the artist's two daughters, Mme Elisabeth Hambro and Mrs Sophie Gurney, gave 327 woodblocks cut by their mother and 687 prints. In 1975 they gave two electrotypes and in 1981 Sir Geoffrey Keynes gave one further woodblock. To this munificence was added, by gift of Sir Geoffrey Keynes in 1973, five watercolour designs for Job, together with a group of cut-out figures for the ballet. In 1975 Mme Hambro and Mrs Gurney also gave 770 drawings, mostly for book illustrations. To these were added in 1994 by Mrs Gurney 102 oil sketches, watercolours and drawings and a magnificent group of 70 sketchbooks and 128 further prints, thereby ensuring that the Fitzwilliam has by far the most important collection of Gwen Raverat's work. Two volunteers have worked on the cataloguing of the collection: Mrs Vivian Tubbs who put in order the gift of 1975, and Mrs Gillie Coutts who has concentrated on the cataloguing of the sketchbooks. These are full of material related to the prints and have been of great use in clarifying some of Raverat's chronology. The present exhibition is the fruit of Mrs Coutts' work on all the Raverat material in the Fitzwilliam's care.

We should like to thank in particular Mme Hambro and Mrs Gurney, Milo Keynes, Felix Pryor, Frances Spalding, David McKitterick, Adam Perkins, Jeremy Maule, Maggie Hayward, Group Captain Andrew Thompson, Craig Hartley and the staff of the Cambridge University Library. We are grateful to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library for permission to quote from their Gwen and Jacques Raverat papers. Mme Hambro and Mrs Gurney have also kindly given permission to quote from papers in their possession.

Anne Lonsdale, President, New Hall
David Scrase, Keeper of Paintings, Drawings and Prints,
Fitzwilliam Museum