Lopping: February, from The Farmer's Year,

1933

A London-born engraver especially known for her illustrations of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native (1929), Leighton was a devoted observer of the British pastoral. For that novel, she had traced the lives of Hardy’s characters onto the rolling hills of his native Dorset in southwest England. For The Farmer’s Year (1933), the first work that she both wrote and illustrated herself, she took Chilterns, an area northwest of London, as inspiration for twelve engravings of country life. With her characteristically adept use of darkness and light, she depicted local people at home, work, or play. Here, for February, she portrayed three men paring down tree branches, their bodies curving and twisting like the trees and hills in the foreground and background.