Edward Gordon Craig, actor, theatre director, designer, wood engraver, critic, publisher and self taught artist. He started his working life as an actor in Sir Henry Irving's company, in which his mother, Ellen Terry, was leading lady. After a time the limitations of an actor's life began to pall, and he commenced to widen and develop his artistic talents. With dreams of creating a new kind of theatre, he expressed his visions in drawings and models for imagined theatrical productions. Craig's quest for revolution in the theatre was to occupy him throughout his life and bring him into conflict with the vested interests of the commercial theatre, but also to earn him the admiration and gratitude of the truly imaginative theatrical artists of his time, as well as the generations which have succeeded him.The possibilities of using light, of creating form through light surfaces on a darkened background, were an inspiration on his first introduced to wood engraving. It is as if his crusade to purify the theatre of its Victorian trappings of realism and sentimentality was echoed in his creation of simplified images out of planes of dark and light.He wrote many books on the theatre, produced over 500 wood engravings and designed for theatre throughout Europe and in Moscow. His work is contained in many meseum collections in Europe and America.

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