The Remarkable Pinwill Sisters

The Remarkable Pinwill Sisters: from ‘lady woodcarvers’ to professionals, Helen Wilson, Willow Productions, 2023, 300 pages, more than 350 colour and black-and-white illustrations.

Since Anthea’s Callen’s book The Angel in the Studio (1979), there has been an increasing recognition of the importance of women in the arts and crafts movement. If anyone needed reminding of this importance, they need only have visited the 2017 exhibition on the work of May Morris (Jane Burden and William Morris’s daughter) at the William Morris Gallery. Now hard on the heels of more recent works such as Zoe Thomas’s Women Art Workers and the Arts and Crafts Movement (2020) comes The Remarkable Pinwill Sisters. And remarkable they were.

These three sisters – Mary, Ethel and Violet – were born to the Reverend Edmund Pinwill, of Ermington, Devon, and his equally remarkable wife Elizabeth. A keen amateur woodcarver himself, it was the family relationship with the architect JD Sedding while ‘restoring’ the church at Ermington from the mid-1880s, and especially his architect nephew Edmund H Sedding, that prompted Elizabeth to have three of her seven daughters trained as wood-carvers while ‘still in the schoolroom’.

Their instructors were no amateurs but from the local firm of Charles Trask in Norton-sub- Hamdon, Somerset. The Seddings liked to train up their preferred craftsmen in their own sumptuous style of church decoration, and it was this full-fat carving employed at Ermington and elsewhere that the sisters came to appreciate, and soon develop under the appreciative eye of young Edmund.

So well received was their work that by the 1890s the sisters had established the firm of Rashleigh, Pinwill and Co, ‘ecclesiastical and art carvers’. They produced the whole gamut of architect- designed church furnishings in a free-flowing late gothic revival style, but with a naturalistic detail more arts and crafts than medieval in its character. Working almost exclusively in the West Country (with over 180 commissions identified in Devon and Cornwall alone), they became so successful that they soon had workshops not only in Ermington but also in Plymouth.

This is wood carving to wilt into, the kind that distracts you at Evensong, and draws you away from your devotions (whatever they may be) as the sun plays over the luscious carved surfaces. It is sensuous bordering on the sensual as the wealth of colour (and archive) photography in this enticingly written book demonstrates. At its best there are hints, but hints only, of the ‘naughty nineties’, of the ‘corruption’ of the renaissance, and of the exoticism of JD Sedding’s masterpiece, Holy Trinity, Sloane Square, about it – but all contained within a strict Anglo-Catholic framework.

The Pinwills were remarkable not only for being women working in a man’s world – they initially used Mary’s masculine middle name of Rashleigh for the company name to disguise their sex – but they did so as professionals, not amateurs. During the nineteenth century, taking up a craft became a female ‘accomplishment’, much like playing the piano or being a good watercolourist. Not only were the crafts a polite leisure activity among the daughters of the clergy, and the gentry, but also a means of securing husbands.

The more enthusiastic and capable young women passed on their skills through local educational classes organised under the umbrella of the Home Arts and Industries Association. At its best this enormous, but little-known, national organisation allowed the elevation of amateur pastimes to professional businesses such as the Keswick School of Industrial Arts, the Little Compton Pottery, Newlyn copper works, and the St Edmundsbury Weavers. One of the great success stories of the arts and crafts movement, it and its many tributaries, such as the Pinwills, deserve to be better known.

By 1908 Ethel and Mary had left the firm, leaving Violet in charge. Now also acting as a designer, she was not only managing the company but overseeing the workshops (which included many male workers), giving private tuition and teaching at Plymouth Technical College, which became a source of young apprentices for the firm that was still trading in the 1950s.

At 300 carefully referenced pages, this is a substantial book to have and to hold. With eight chronologically arranged chapters, and a useful chapter on the workshop (which examines production methods and employees), is a model of its kind and a work of scholarship to treasure.

This article originally appeared as ’Carving to wilt into’ in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 181, published in September 2024. It was written by Julian Holder who teaches architectural history at the University of Oxford.

See also: Violet Pinwill, woodcarver.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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