Details

Name

Wilfred Crawford Applebey

Brief Biography

1889 - 1959, British / English

Occupation

Artist

Description

Wilfred Crawford Applebey (1889-1959) was a self-taught etcher, the youngest surviving son of Yorkshire commercial traveller George Applebey and Jane Elizabeth Crawford. His older siblings were Archibald, Winifred, Lillian, Bertha, George and Thomas, with younger sister Sarah (b. 1891) and brother Henry (b. 1905, d. 1905). From 1890 they lived in Kilmacolm, Renfrewshire, although by 1905 they had moved to Gairbraid Street in Maryhill, Glasgow and by 1901 11 Great George Street, in the West End of the city.

Applebey attended evening art classes at Kent Road Public School in Glasgow in 1907 and then studied architectural drawing and design at Glasgow School of Art, afterwards working in a sheet metal factory. In 1916 he married Christina Williamina Rintoul (d. 1941, age 52), a dressmaker. They had twins Wilfred Dudley Crawford and Christina Williamina Rintoul in 1919. By then he was an engraver foreman and was experimenting with etching. He returned to Glasgow School of Art to study modelling and architecture in the evening after work from 1917 to 1919. The family lived at ‘Carlotta’, Chamberlain Road, Jordanhill, Glasgow.

Applebey was a member of The Print Society, founded in 1919, and was featured in an edition of Scottish Country Life in December 1922. In 1924 and 1925 he was invited to speak about art and etching on the radio. He made many etchings, primarily of architectural subjects in Scotland, England, France and Italy, but also portraits, exhibiting at the Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, Aberdeen Artists Society and Royal Scottish Academy, often exhibiting beside keys figures in the Etching Revival in Scotland, D. Y. Cameron, Muirhead Bone and James McBey. He also undertook war memorials. His wife died in 1941, aged 52 and in 1944 Wilfred, now 55, married Frances Grace Allen, a head waitress, 17 years his junior. He died of pancreatic cancer on 28 January 1959 aged 69.