Painter, illustrator, teacher and potter, born in Calcutta (Kolkata), to Charles Bell Wood, a merchant and broker, and his wife, Emily Maria, an artist and teacher of drawing. In 1871, she was sent to school in Bromley in Kent, her parents and three brothers arriving in Britain within the next few years. In her late teens she attended Bromley School of Science and Art, where she was awarded certificates in ‘Freehand’ and ‘Model Drawing’. The family moved to Liverpool c.1885. Here she exhibited botanical drawings and in 1887 joined the Liverpool Naturalists’ Field Club. By 1891 the family had moved to Wallasey, where she taught botany and nature study at Wallasey Technical School, and by 1901 they had settled in Birkenhead, where in that year’s census Wood was listed as a ‘decorator of pottery’. At some date in the 1890s she had begun working for Birkenhead’s Della Robbia Pottery (established 1894). Although primarily a painter (and probably also acting as the Pottery’s bookkeeper), in 1896 she moulded and cast, to a design by Ellen Mary Rope, a terracotta relief plaque, The Word was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us and We Beheld His Glory, which was glazed and installed in the north transept of St Saviour’s Church, Oxton, Birkenhead. Her time at the Pottery came to an end with its closure in 1906 and on 28 October of the following year she died, aged just 42, having being unwell for some time. She is perhaps best known as the illustrator for C.T. Green’s Flora of the Liverpool District (1902).
Bibliography: K.C. Hawley, ‘The Lives and Works of the Women Artists at the Della Robbia Pottery Birkenhead in Late Victorian and Edwardian England’ (PhD, published on the internet as a PDF), Oxford Brookes University, 2001, pp. 151, 187–88, 199 n.92, 246; E. Morris and E. Roberts, Public Sculpture of Cheshire and Merseyside, Liverpool, 2012, p. 14; D.M. Wilkinson and J. O’Regan, ‘Emily Margaret Wood: Botany, illustration, nature writing and teaching in Liverpool at the end of the long nineteenth century’, British and Irish Botany, vol. 6, no. 2, 2024, pp. 116–32; Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead, 1894–1906, Birkenhead, 1981, p. 48; Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Della Robbia Pottery, Birkenhead, 1894–1906: an interim report, Birkenhead, 2004, n. p.
Terry Cavanagh, November 2025