Edward Bawden - Early Life and Studies

Early Life and Studies

Edward Bawden was born in Britain on 10 March 1903, at Braintree, Essex, the only child of Edward Bawden (ironmonger) and Eleanor Bawden (née Game). His parents were Methodist Christians. A solitary child he spent much time drawing or wandering with butterfly-net and microscope. At the age of seven he was enrolled at Braintree High School, and began studying or copying drawings of cats by Louis Wain, illustrations in boys' and girls' magazines and Burne Jones's illustrations of Malory's Morte d'Arthur. Later his parents paid for him to attend the Friends' School at Saffron Walden, and there, when he was fifteen, the headmaster recommended him to study for one day a week at Cambridge Municipal Art School (now Anglia Ruskin University). On leaving school in 1919 he attended the Cambridge School of Art full-time (1919 to 1921). Here he became interested in calligraphy and in the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Doyle, William Morris and other Victorians. This was followed in 1922 by a scholarship to the Royal College of Art School of Design in London, where he took a diploma in illustration until 1925. Here he met his fellow student and future collaborator, Eric Ravilious; the pair were described by their teacher, Paul Nash, as "an extraordinary outbreak of talent".