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Overview
Winifred Austen (1876-1964) was an English illustrator, painter, etcher and aquatint engraver. Her favorite subjects were wild animals, and she was an accomplished book illustrator. At the Royal Academy in 1903, she exhibited The Day of Reckoning, a wolf pursued by hunters through a forest in snow. Austen was described as having great talent with the rare gift of sympathy with the animal world. Her early plates were overloaded with background, which the artist ultimately completely discarded, as in this middle period etching.
Austen was elected to the Society of Women Artists (1902), the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (1907), the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours (1933), and from 1903, she was a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society.
The title, The dodman, is the Norfolk dialect for a dodman, or land snail. Although this etching contains an obvious charm in its study of the miniature - a luckless, about to be decimated land snail in the grips of a rooster and hen, there is a more grim element of nature 'red in tooth and claw' in this nicely observed farmyard scene.
See: Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winifred_Austen
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art February 2018