Memory of Clavering

Unlike many of Griggs’s other etchings, Memory of Clavering is based on an actual locale, a village in northwest Essex that he visited in 1919. But the lapse in time between the viewing of the scene and its depiction forced the artist to rely on his memory, which was subject to the same idealizing impulses that guided imaginative works such as The Ford. Griggs recognized that his etching was probably no longer an accurate representation of the village, "but none the less I’ve felt myself to be fairly faithful to the spirit of the place as I remember it." At a moment when the remembered forms of loved places were vanishing from the actual landscape, Griggs felt that the etcher’s special role should be to preserve the spirit of the disappearing subject—an achievement which the rival art-form of documentary photography could not match.