The legacy of Reynolds Stone

Reynolds Stone was born in 1909, and had a strong attachment to Dorset

He could be the most famous Dorset artist you have never heard of.

Painter, engraver and letter cutter Reynolds Stone has designed the Queen's head on stamps and five and ten pound notes for the Bank of England.

His work also includes The Times newspaper masthead, and the coat of arms on every UK passport.

In the hundredth year since his birth, an exhibition at Dorset County Museum commemorates the iconic work of a Dorset artist and engraver.

High profile commissions

Reynolds Stone was born in 1909 and his work as an engraver led to high profile commissions.

Coat of arms originally designed in 1955 and still used on British passports

He engraved the Royal Arms for Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953 and the official coat of arms for Her Majesty's Stationery Office in 1955 - still seen today on the British passport.

His design work included corporate clients such as Shell, book publishers Oxford University Press and Penguin, and even the design of a new font, called Minerva.

He also engraved the memorial stone of former prime minister Winston Churchill that lies at Westminster Abbey, and the memorial stone of literary figure TS Eliot at Poets' Corner, also at the Abbey.

A modest man

Despite the high profile nature of some of his work, Reynolds Stone's daughter Emma, the youngest of his four children, indicates he was a modest man.

Reynolds Stone found the landscapes of Dorset hugely inspirational

She said: "My father very much saw himself as the inheritor of a craft tradition in engraving [rather than being 'proud of' his work].

"He would have been happy enough to be thought as good as one of the Victorian trade wood engravers of the 1860s that he so admired."

Passionate about his work, he would engrave onto blocks of wood which would form a template, from which the final piece of work could be produced.

Jon Murden, director of Dorset County Museum, said: "He's an interesting artist because not many people have heard of him but everyone will know something he has done."

At the exhibition at the museum, Jon says it includes Reynolds Stone's printing blocks, including the one from which the last pre-decimal ten pound note was taken.

There are also drawings, watercolours, and many of his tools.

The Times masthead as designed by Reynolds Stone

Dorset childhood

Reynolds Stone lived in Litton Cheney in the county, having moved there with his family in 1953 from Berkshire.

Daughter Emma Beck, who lives in London and has curated exhibitions on her father's work elsewhere, says Dorset was 'in his blood':

She said: "His parents had a house in Walditch, and he had fond childhood memories of his early school days in Purbeck.

"As a boy and as a young man he made detailed models of the fishing boats he had seen at Bridport."

His time in Dorset inspired many of his engravings - its landscape features in much of his work.

Emma said: "The landscape seemed to suit him and his vision. The soft rounded hills and secret valleys, the lush greens, and perhaps above all the trees which feature so prominently in his engravings."

He was recognised for his work when he was made a CBE in 1953, a Royal Designer for Industry in 1956, and an Honorary Fellow of Magdelene, Cambridge - his former university.

Reynolds Stone died in 1979, aged 70, but his work continues to lives on, and much of it is instantly familiar.

Reynolds Stone's daughter Emma says his work 'is very distinctively his own'.

'He went against the grain'

Emma said: "He went against the grain of his times, ploughed his own furrow, so to speak, in his art.

"He followed no fashionable style, but rather went his own individual way interpreting his vision of nature, taking inspiration from a mixture of artists and craftsmen from the past but ending up with something that was uniquely personal to him.

"In the end his work is very distinctively his own.

"His importance also lies in his attitude to nature. He was a conservationist and an ecologist long before the words were in common use.

"His garden at Litton Cheney was a wild and mostly uncultivated place, which is how he liked it. He would suffer if even a branch was lopped from a tree."

An engraving from the book Boxwood, from 1957, of a Dorset scene.

Boxwood

Emma says she has many favourite pieces of her father's work, including a book called Boxwood.

She said: "This was an interesting case. My father had made a series of small engravings of mostly local Dorset scenes, and the Dorset author Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote poems to accompany the engravings.

"This of course is the reverse of the usual practice where an artist illustrates a poem.

"Here the pictures came before the words."

And every time she sees a passport Emma is reminded of her father.

She said: "I feel a vicarious pride, of course, every time I pick up my passport.

"His work is still used today because it does not seem out of date like other work from that period of the mid 20th century.

"I think it has a timeless quality."