Clare Leighton, Country Matters
These engravings are by the great English/American defender and illustrator of rural life Clare Leighton (1898-1989). They first appeared in her 1937 book Country Matters published in New York by Macmillan. We hold a first edition copy of that book, but these illustrations were scanned from reproductions in Clare Leighton’s Rural Life: An Anthology, published in Oxford by the Bodleian Library in 2023. This book was edited with an introduction by Leighton’s devoted nephew, David Leighton (1931-2022), who sadly did not live to see its publication.
The title for Country Matters alludes to the many tings that happen in the countryside, but Leighton makes clear that the title's real import is that what goes on in the country is important. She writes:
To balance the restless tug of modern civilization there stand the hills and the woods by day and the smokeless starlight by night. . . . If I am defiant in my defense of the countryside, it is because I know it is the last hope for sanity. . . . At no time has this been more needed, and at no time have we been at greater risk of losing it.
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