Turneyment of Knights (sic) is one of a series of wood engravings by artist and illustrator Agnes Miller Parker for the “epic” poem The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser. Edmund Spenser was a late 16th-century English poet whose marble memorial plaque on the south wall of Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey states “…THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM” (“…the prince of poets in his time whose divine spirit needs no other witness than the works which he left behind him”). The Faerie Queene was dedicated to Queen Elizabeth I.

Agnes Miller Parker was born in Ayrshire Scotland in 1895. She studied at the Glasgow School of Art during the 1910s and married fellow student and artist William McCance in 1918.

The couple moved to London in 1920 and were both influenced by Wyndam Lewis and the Vorticists. Agnes became best known for her wood engraving book illustrations in the 1930s including those for The Fables of Aesop, Through the Woods by H. E. Bates, and Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. She was also a teacher and oil painter.

Agnes Miller Parker and her husband both joined the Reading Guild of Artists in 1949 when McCance was head of the department of typography and book production at Reading University. They lived in Hambledon, Buckinghamshire. Parker exhibited oil paintings and wood engravings during the six years of her membership. Years later fellow RGA member Eric Watson would recall her “exquisite pictures of cats” which along with her other animal illustrations are truly beautiful and well worth looking up. In 1955 the couple exhibited for the last time with the RGA, the year they separated.

It can be noted, that although in the RGA catalogues her work was listed under the name Agnes Miller Parker, when included in the list of members, in brackets, it was always also stated (Mrs. McCance), perhaps a sign of women’s place at the time and influence on her work. Parker moved back to Scotland where she died in 1980.

This wood engraving, along with another of the poems’ illustrations The Perillous Bridge (sic) was exhibited at the Reading Guild of Artists Twenty-Third Annual Exhibition, Municipal Art Gallery Reading, May 2nd – May 30th, 1953. A wood engraving is a relief printmaking technique very similar to woodcut with the main difference being that the wood is often harder and is cut across the grain. This allows for more freedom as well as finer and more detailed work. The print is taken by applying ink to the surface, before applying pressure to transfer the image to the paper.