Margaret Wolpe

Commissions were particularly welcome. A few years ago, for instance, she was asked to carve a copy of a 10ft walnut serpent, covered with tiny scales, to replace one from the 17th century that had been stolen from a Bedfordshire church. Her only hesitation was whether it would fit on her workbench.

For much of her life she worked a full day, and in her seventies and eighties she still worked every morning. Yet this was more than professionalism. Money, status and image could not have meant less to her. Making things by hand for people she knew was her way of being herself. Whether it was a carving of her daughter wearing jeans, a Romanesque panel painting or a sculpture both entirely abstract and obviously female, it would be a thing of accomplished craftsmanship.

Noticing the intricate gleam of discarded computer components, she once made three necklaces using them as amulets. Typically, though, she used idioms from past centuries, with the effect of self-abnegation: what T. S. Eliot called the artist’s “continual extinction of personality”.

Margaret Leslie Smith was born in Plumpton, near Lewes, Sussex, in 1919, but lost her mother, a dog breeder and Crufts judge, when she was 5 or 6. Her father, a fourth or fifth-generation farmer- butcher, was too busy to look after her, but she was not short of colourful relatives. One aunt received the first ticket for speeding; another was alarmed in her camping shower in India by a prowling tiger which then obligingly licked the soap off her but fortunately did not take a bite.

Margaret, however, lived mainly with a grandmother, who took a dim view of her artistic spirit. It was a restless childhood, and sometimes she would come home from school in Bexhill to find that they had moved house.

Graveyards fascinated her, and when she was about 10 she watched a monumental mason so closely as he incised a stone that he gave her a piece to cut for herself. Later she was given lettercutting lessons after school.

She needed little further encouragement in finding her vocation, though she was perhaps aware of the artistic community clustered around Eric Gill near by at Ditchling. Her crowned figures of the Madonna and Child may have been influenced by pieces such as Gill’s bronze of 1912, and an early alphabet of hers cut in a 3ft stone tablet uses his letterforms and numbers.

Her first big stone carving was of St Christopher, done when she was 17. Shortly afterwards, being too impatient to wait for a place at university, she ran away to the Westminster School of Arts. In 1938 she won a medal for memorial stonework, but the commissions she then hoped to take up were curtailed, and the art school itself was requisitioned and did not survive the war.

She was a firewatcher during the Blitz. For the RAF she designed field patterns to camouflage runways, and she never forgot feeling airsick in the gun turret of a steeply banking Wellington as it flew over to give her a bomber’s eye view.

Berthold Wolpe, a refugee, had been one of her art school teachers, and they were brought together again when the London art dealer William Ohly began organising social events, with gramophone recitals and tea and buns as distractions from the bleakness and blackouts.

They were separated, however, when Berthold was sent to Australia as an enemy alien. On the boat, it became apparent that there were true Nazis on board, and ugly scenes looked likely. With a shrug the captain handed over the prisoner list and allowed them to segregate themselves.

Margaret, meanwhile, was welding aircraft parts and taking small dressmaking commissions. Fortunately, Bert-hold’s exile did not last long, thanks to the advocacy of Stanley Morison. He returned to London in 1941 and joined Faber, and in the November he and Margaret were married.

Each of them was to remain essentially self-contained, although their work has a striking family resemblance. Berthold had trained originally as a metalworker, and had made tapestries and jewellery as well as inscriptions. Even his typeface Albertus, one of the most distinctive of the 20th century, has a slab-like solidity. Margaret’s work in three dimensions is satisfyingly chunky in the same way, and many of her paintings — including portraits — have an archaeologist’s feel for layerings.

After the war she resumed her studies at the Central School and then the Chelsea School of Art, where she was taught sculpture by Henry Moore and printmaking by Graham Sutherland. During the 1950s and early 1960s she taught at the Hampshire School in Knightsbridge.

Her four children grew up in a household where things were made every day. Outings in London were to museums and galleries. In the summer she would take them to stay in their cottage in Lewes, where they saw a lot of Trekkie Parsons and her artistic circle. Or they would be out scouring ploughed fields for flints and shards, collecting driftwood or looking for glacial boulders. The object that could be touched, held and examined was paramount.

At Faber, Berthold’s jobs were dispatched quickly and instinctively. Occasionally Margaret was asked to provide a dustcover drawing or illustrations. There were commissions, too, from other publishers, and she exhibited jewellery at Bedford Museum and in London.

The couple travelled extensively in the Middle East and Turkey, and on lecture tours which Berthold undertook in the US. After his death in 1989, the family were concerned that she might feel isolated, but she became nominally a student once again at Morley College, which gave her social contacts, excellent facilities and the chance to show pieces in friendly surroundings.

Thanks to her son-in-law, a conservator, she was given several commissions for National Trust properties, ranging from delicate mouldings to bold swags and drapes. She is survived by two sons and two daughters.

Margaret Wolpe, artist, was born on April 23, 1919. She died on July 16, 2006, aged 87.