Nicolete Gray (1911–1997)

Nicolete Gray, née Binyon, was born in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. Her parents were Cicely and Laurence Binyon, a poet and literary critic who worked at the British Museum. She was named after the heroine of the medieval French tale Aucassin and Nicolete. She grew up in the Chelsea district of London, where her parents hosted many of the leading artists and writers of the day. Nicolete also was able to spend hours at the British Museum as well as at numerous art galleries and bookshops. She attended St. Paul's School, and at graduation in 1929 won a scholarship to read history at Oxford University. There she befriended Myfanwy Piper and others who shared her interests in the arts and literature. In 1932, she was awarded a scholarship by the British School at Rome to study post-classical inscriptions in Italy. She traveled the country on her own, going from town to town, monastery to monastery, to make papier-maché molds of the ancient inscriptions. The following year, she returned to England and married Basil Gray, then an assistant keeper in her father's department of the British Museum. Her growing expertise on lettering enabled her to write several chapters in her husband's 1937 book The English Print, although her name does not appear on the title page. In 1936, she organized a large-scale art exhibition entitled "Abstract and Concrete," which exposed many British people for the first time to paintings by contemporary artists such as Kandinsky, Miro, and Mondrian, sculpture by Giacometti, a mobile by Alexander Calder, and constructions by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo. Her first book, Nineteenth Century Ornamental Types and Title Pages, published in 1938, became a classic work and was revised and reissued in 1976. By the middle of World War II, Gray and her husband had five children. They spent the war years at Oxford, where they had been evacuated from London, while she worked for the Ministry of Food. Despite the overwhelming workload, she was able to publish Rossetti, Dante and Ourselves in 1947. In the 1950s, as her children grew up, Gray was able to devote more time to her investigations of lettering. She went on "inscription crawls" in the British Isles and abroad, returning with large number of photographs. In 1953, Nikolaus Pevsner asked her to contribute articles on lettering to Architectural Review. These essays were collected and published in book form in 1960 as Lettering on Buildings, acclaimed as a definitive study. Over the next several decades, she created a number of notable works, including the wall of writers' names at the Stratford Shakespeare Centre, the facade lettering of Sotheby's, several works for Westminster Cathedral, and the tombstone of Agatha Christie. In 1964, she began teaching lettering at the Central School of Art and Design, continuing until her retirement in 1981. She also founded a major archive, the Central Lettering Record. Her last book, A History of Lettering: Creative Experiment and Letter Identity was published in 1986 to wide acclaim.