1

Hester Sainsbury is yet another of the lost female artists of England between-the-wars. Successful and acclaimed in the 1920s, she vanishes from view following her marriage to the Vorticist painter, architect, and publisher Frederick Etchells in 1932. Writing in the Print Collector's Quarterly in 1934, Douglas Percy Bliss lamented, "Hester Sainsbury, once so clever with the multiple-tool, has disappeared." Hester Sainsbury, The Prayer of Manasses Wood engraving, 1929 The multiple tool is described by Joanna Selborne in her British Wood-Engraved Book Illustration 1904-1940 as "like a small chisel with a multi-grooved belly which cuts several parallel lines at a time." Hester Sainsbury used one to create the kneeling figure in her wood engraving The Prayer of Manasses, contributed to the Cresset Press Apocrypha in 1929. She was ahead of her time in her use of a multiple graver, anticipating the style of another important female wood engraver of the period, Mary E