Early Life and Education
Born in Redruth, Cornwall, in 1890 to mining engineer William Pellew-Harvey and artist Elizabeth Hichens, Pellew spent his early childhood in Vancouver before his family returned to England in 1901. Raised in Blackheath, London, he attended the Slade School of Fine Art from 1907 to 1911, where his fellow students included Paul Nash, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer and Ben Nicholson
Wartime Convictions, Faith and Family
A formative trip to Italy after Slade instilled in him a lasting devotion to Roman Catholicism. During World War I he declared himself a conscientious objector and was interned at Dartmoor Prison. Upon release in 1919 he married Emma Marie “Kechie” Tennent—herself a Slade-trained painter—and the couple settled in rural Norfolk (Overstrand, then Southrepps), making regular sojourns to Bavaria’s Lake Starnberg region, a landscape that recalled Pellew’s Canadian youth
Artistic Career and Themes
Although he painted landscapes and religious scenes, Pellew’s renown rests on his wood engravings. Beginning in 1923 he exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers (notably in 1923, 1930 and 1932) and showed oils and prints at the New English Art Club, the Royal Hibernian and Scottish Academies, and the Goupil Gallery. His 1931 engraving “Mother,” modelled on his wife, remains a touchstone of his emotive, precise line[].
Exhibitions, Collections and Legacy
After his death in 1966, Pellew’s work was championed in posthumous shows at Norwich (1967) and Oxford’s Ashmolean (1987), with a revival at London’s Michael Parkin Gallery in 1990. Today, examples of his wood engravings and paintings reside in the collections of Hove Museum & Art Gallery, the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Council and Glasgow’s Hunterian Museum
Selected Bibliography
– Anne Stevens, Claughton Pellew Wood Engravings, Ashmolean Museum (1987)
– James Methuen-Campbell, Ploughshare & Hayrick: The Life and Work of Claughton Pellew and Kechie Tennent, The Fleece Press (2019)

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