Lucille Oille

Who was Lucille Oille?

Lucille Oille was a sculptor, wood engraver and book illustrator born in Toronto, Canada. She studied with Emanuel Hahn at the Ontario College of Art and then attended the Royal College of Art in London, England.

Her sculpture was exhibited at the Ontario Society of Artists and the Royal Canadian Academy in the 1930s and early 40's.

However, after her marriage to journalist Kenneth McNeill Wells, she devoted most of her time to the wood engraved illustration of his books.

In the late 1940s Wells and Oille decided to escape Toronto and find a rural home. After searching the back roads of Simcoe County and its Medonte township, with a limited budget, they decided to salvage the timbers from an old log home and re-assemble it on a few acres of land purchased from a local farmer. While he wrote of the often humorous exploits of transplanted city folk for the Toronto Telegram newspaper, she began a series of wood engravings that were used in the hardcover collection of the articles known as The Owl Pen. This book, which went through many editions, was followed by four others written by Wells and illustrated by Oille, including The Moonstruck Two, a book about their trip down the Mississippi.