Errata slip inserted.


Sir (Alan Charles) Laurence Whistler CBE (b. January 21, 1912, d. December 19, 2000, always referred to as Laurence Whistler) was a British poet and artist, who devoted himself to glass engraving, on goblets and bowls blown to his own designs, and (increasingly, as he became more celebrated) on large-scale panels and windows in churches and private houses. He also engraved on three-sided prisms, some of them designed to revolve on a small turntable so that the prism's internal reflections 'complete' the image. The finest of these was done as a memorial to his elder brother Rex Whistler. His son Simon Whistler followed him as an engraver on glass.


LAURENCE WHISTLER lived and worked under a delicate but perceptible shadow: the memory of his brilliant and much-beloved brother, the artist Rex, killed in the Second World War.


Such volumes as Armed October (1932) or The Emperor Heart (1936) - he was, in 1935, the first winner of the King's Gold Medal for Poetry - pointed up Laurence Whistler's debt to the poet who had inspired himself and his brother as boys, Walter de le Mare. This charming poetry, redolent of false simplicity, acknowledging the 18th-century classics with a Romantic wistfulness, would not have earned him a place in history. Indeed, his writing often seems intended to be illustrative of his brother's drawings - which more often than not embellished Laurence's books - so replete are they with Augustan urns, garnered sheaves, and storm-tossed trees.