The Mint Museums recently received a collection of more than 180 woodcuts, watercolors and drawings by artist-illustrator, Clare Leighton (1898-1989), given by dedicated museum member and collector Gabby Pratt.

Pratt’s interest in collecting prints started in the mid-1980s after a visit to a gallery in Binghamton, N.Y., where a print by Thomas Nason caught her attention and purse strings. A subsequent Mint Museum of Art lecture by Sinclair Hitchings, keeper of the print collection at the Boston Public Library, fueled her curiosity in printmaking. About this time, former curator Jane Kessler organized a print study group, later known as the North Carolina Print & Drawing Society or NCPDS, to foster the study, appreciation and collecting of fine prints. She advised Pratt to focus her collecting on the work of one artist and suggested Clare Leighton.

Since her first purchase in 1984 of Leighton’s wood engraving “The Bean Planters,” Pratt has been a dedicated, focused and well-informed collector. She was attracted to the way Leighton depicted the motion and rhythm of pastoral tradition in her prints and thought, “Why stop at one?” As the organizer of the NCPDS “print fairs,” Pratt developed relationships with many of the print dealers and soon became known as the collector of Leighton’s work.

British-born Leighton is best known for her black and white wood engravings. The collection donated by Pratt not only contains examples of her intricate, finely detailed prints, but also numerous drawings and rarely seen watercolors, spanning Leighton’s career from 1923 to 1965.

Unique to this collection are 12 Wedgwood transfer-printed plates based on Leighton’s wood engraving series “New England Industries.” The donation also includes 12 books relating to Leighton’s career as author and illustrator.

Leighton, born into an artistic family, studied wood engraving in England before moving to the United States during World War II. Settling first in Baltimore, she moved to Chapel Hill in 1943 and served as a visiting art lecturer at Duke University in Durham, N.C., 1943-1945. During her career Leighton wrote 15 books and created more than 700 prints.

A future exhibition will focus on Leighton’s achievements in the field of printmaking through her images of preindustrial labor, advocating the virtue of hard work, love of the land and the rhythms of nature.

The Mint Museum of Art is at 2730 Randolph Road; the Mint Museum of Craft + Design is at 220 North Tryon Street. For Information, 704-337-2000 or mintmuseum.org.