Griggs is well known for his illustration in the Highways and Byways Guides, which he created from 1902 until his death in 1938.
He was born in Hertfordshire in the town of Hitchin. He was born in 1876 and lived to be 62.
He was well known for: Etching Illustration
Fred Griggs converted to Roman Catholicism in 1912 and set about producing an incomparable body of etchings, 57 meticulous plates in a Romantic tradition, evoking an idealised medieval England of pastoral landscapes and architectural fantasies of ruined abbeys and buildings.
His best known etchings include Owlpen Manor (1930), dedicated to his friend, the architect Norman Jewson, Anglia Perdita, Maurs Farm, St Botolphs, Boston, The Almonry, and Memory of Clavering. Collections of his etched work are held in the Ashmolean Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Boston Public Library, and in major public collections worldwide.
Griggs was one of the finest and most respected etchers of his time. He was an influential leader of the British etching revival in the Twenties and Thirties, and the most important etcher who followed in the Samuel Palmer tradition (K.M. Guichard, British Etchers, 1977). He occupies a pole position in the Romantic tradition of British art: he links the world of Blake, Turner and Samuel Palmer to a younger generation of neo-Romantic artists, including Graham Sutherland, John Piper, Robin Tanner and Joseph Webb.