Daisy Boxsius, wife of the artist

                             

Usually married women who have careers as artists make use of their maiden name. Jessie Garrow (who was married to Ian Cheyne) is a good example and an even better example would be Ada Shrimpton who married William Giles when she middle-aged. Her drawing of a magpie is signed Daisy Tuff and has the impressed mark 'ESK' which means it was part of an exhibition of her work at the government art school at South Kensington in London. One she had qualified, she became a teacher and was still working when she married Boxsius at St James, Muswell Hill, in July 1917. Unlike his wife, Boxsius gave his profession as 'artist' even though he always earned a living as a teacher; and like Mary Batten, Daisy signed work with her married name.

So far as I know, this is the first article to be dedicated to her work, and with reason, because going by the few drawings I have been able to find, she was as good a draughtsman as her husband. Once they are married we can see them literally working side by side in the Arts and Crafts partnership of the kind exemplified by Mary Batten and John Dixon Batten. The viewpoint of the parish church of Stoke in Teignhead, Devon, is not exactly the same as the viewpoint taken in her her husband's linocut A Devon village (below); Daisy is higher, resulting in a more complex image, though it is obviously the same place. What both works have in common is the bold, faux-naif manner widely used by artists after the war

The inscription means we not only know the subject of A Devon village is Stoke in Teignhead, we can be sure the visit was part of a trip made in the summer of 1921 and provides further confirmation that S.G.B. made use of his sketchbooks for many years. No linocuts were made until the mid twenties and A Devon village was not exhibited until the early thirties.

This takes us back to the subject of her examination work. Magpies are notorious thieves and so are artists. S.G.B.'s apparent loans from his wife's sketchbooks are complicated by his disregarding of the facts. You will notice the shade of the roofs of the cottages at Stoke in Teignhead are the same as the roofs at Arundel (below). The problem is the Devon roofs are thatched and could not be pink. Nor could they be purple, the colour he used for another version. He simply decided he could try the same shade his wife had used because when he came to make his linocut Spring morning, Arundel, the shade of the same roofs is different from hers. 

Daisy is in the shade cast by a pub and looking over the bridge while her husband's viewpoint is from across the river and looking directly at the row of half-timbered buildings. Both the similarities and the differences are instructive. One remains a fine artist, the other has become a designer as so many other graduates of the Royal College of Art did, especially if they were not accepted onto the fine art course.

For Boxius, the castle was an opportunity to give the print a theatrical backdrop that makes it look like E.A. Verpeilleux, a shame because it remains one of his best-considered prints. I still remember my friend, Alan Guest, (who was fortunate enough to own it) describing the way Boxsius had combined colours to achieve a gradual sense of distance. Generally, it goes from warm to cool hence his decision to use orange rather than pink. Also, notice the way his wife introduces shapes without detail in the same way Boxsius does with the blue rooftops.

The final drawing is inscribed  'Shaldon Bridge from the sands August 27th 1921' so it was drawn during the same trip to Devon and judging by the date towards the end of their holiday. It shows if nothing else that Daisy was keeping her hand in and was still working with great attention even though her student days were behind her. The year before, Boxsius had been appointed Art Supervisor at Bolt Court but the couple were still living at 17, Station Parade at Muswell Hill. The house is still there but with unfortunate additions. They didn't stay there much longer and moved to handsome accommodation at The Gables in Fortis Green. 

Unfortunately, I can't lay my hands on the drawing Boxsius made at Shaldon showing the alley leading up to the yard of the Crown Inn. It provides the basis for the woodcut The Crown Inn, Shaldon but I can't track that down either. What is interesting about Daisy's work is that it isn't genre. There is no trace of the salmon fishermen who worked the river from the same beach. She doesn't disguise the fact that it is a holiday scene. It is a well-composed description of the facts. She left her husband to make things up.

S.G. Boxsius' original colour design for 'Autumn'

                                                                              

If you had ever wondered why the roofs are different colours in S.G. Boxsius' linocut called 'Autumn', I can at least tell you that Boxsius intended the colour to be red though as you see there are different shades here. The design came up at auction in Colchester and shows yet again how carefully the artist planned his prints. Nonetheless, the individual impressions here make it obvious, the image was cut with a spontaneity that is lacking in the original design.

I would be fairly certain the design is a combination of linocut and gouache and that is by the artist simply because it is marked 'No 1' in Boxsius' neat handwriting. We have already seen the original drawing that he made while in Devon or Cornwall. Now that we have the colour design, it all begins to look incredible. Very little preparatory work for British colour prints have survived. Some of Allen Seaby's remain in private hands and as you will know, preparatory work by Boxius also remains in private hands. The fact that a drawing and a colour design survive for a single woodcut from the late twenties, is astonishing.

As you will know, the woodcuts made for British Belting and Elastic were so numerous, others helped with the printing. I assume some were his pupils at Bolt Court in London. Why 'Autumn' should have so many variants is another matter, but they keep turning up, with some better than others, such as the orange impression, where the orange works so well with the grey-blue of the sky and the straw colour of the grass. I hope I shouldn't need to add how necessary it would be for any half-serious collector of the artist's work to find and purchase a comparable impression and not consider the price. You will notice a similar use of rich tones in the excellent impression of  'Houghton Bridge' (one of the many prints belonging to a reader in the United States). As I say, with an artist like Boxsius, the variants and the impressions are important. 

You read it here.

Frances Blairs's 'At the Trossachs'

 

I had a note from a reader telling me how how pleased they were to find Frances Blair's colour woodcut 'At the Trossachs'. I am not surprised. This stylish and very attractive print has not been seen online before and was sold only in July in St. Petersburg, Florida, so it has provided me with a good opportunity to let readers see another side to Blair. Very much in the Scottish tradition of art deco picnics, it is numbered 32/100 so Blair must have sold quite a few, leaving us all with hope we may find it, too, one day. 

Many thanks to the reader for tipping me off. I only wish I had got there first.

Colour linocuts by Anne Henderson

 

The only reason we have Anne Henderson's work on Modern Printmakers today is because Dominic Winter have one of her rare colour linocuts for sale later this month (above). I am not convinced either of the titles given are hers so I won't repeat them.  I think both are on tissue and artists tended to avoid inscribing their work on that type of  paper. The edition number is 1/20. Take from that what you will.

Very little is known about the artist and to be honest I have done no research of my own. She was from Trinidad and Tobago and came to London at the age of seventeen in 1927. There is the usual hopeful conjecture about her training at the Grosvenor School and although Claude Flight would have been taking his weekly class there when she arrived, neither of these prints have the conventional Grosvenor School dynamism.

 

She died in 1981 not long after the revival of interest in pre-war colour prints began.

Elizabeth York Brunton: the story so far

 

Nowadays, the internet is awash with all sorts of misleading information and misassumption that does lesser-known artists no justice. So far as Elizabeth  York Brunton goes, I will admit I am to blame for  not challenging this automated tosh and putting the record straight. Happily, the opportunity to make amends has arisen because a small group of colour woodcuts by Brunton has turned up in Glasgow, including Drei Zinnen (above) and the pair of birds (below) and these thrown new light on her career. Not all that much light, it has to be said, but enough of it to make a difference.

Brunton was born at Musselburgh in Scotland in 1880. She was the daughter of William Neilson Brunton and his second wife Louisa. At the time, Brunson was a building surveyor but went on to run a wire manufacturing business in Musselburgh. Typical of the age, the family was large and in 1910 Brunton decided to make provisions for his three unmarried daughters who  at the time were living together at 15, Regent Terrace, Edinburgh. 

It is likely she was a student on the teacher training course at Edinburgh College of Art by then. In common with almost all government schools of art, Edinburgh provided no training in fine art (and I don't know why Glasgow was an exception). No one knows whether or not she was introduced to colour woodcut there. Mabel Royds had trained as a teacher at Chester and was on the staff at Edinburgh before she left for India in 1914. All we can say is Brunton's colour woodcuts are in the Japanese manner adopted by many Scottish and English artists of the period and make use a full keyblock and inks applied with a brush. This is apparent in the sky and the brown rocks of Drei Zinnen and is no different from what Ethel Kirkpatrick or Mabel Royds were doing. 

But in many other respects, Brunton was different. Her principal training took place under the animal sculptor Edouard Nevallier at his studio in the southern suburbs of Paris and for many years Brunton used a flat on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. The difficulty is I know of only one surviving sculpture. This is a bronze bust of her father belonging to the museum at Musselburgh and although at least one other statue was exhibited at in the bust is all we have to go one at present. At one time, there was a little photo of it online but even that has disappeared so I must rely on my agent in Scotland to make further enquiries because I know my own got nowhere.

It goes without saying that over a career of at least thirty years, there were changes of subject and style, though animals and birds are constant throughout. The fact is so little is available, I can only note the influence of Scottish faux naif early on and Ohara Koson and art deco in the 1920s and assume many of her bird subjects were found in the Jardin des Plantes.

Considering I have a reliable list of twenty-two colour woodcuts by York Brunton, the group of twelve prints I know of in public collections and the four or five currently online is as discouraging as it is enigmatic. She exhibited widely and must have sold her work, so where is it all? Very little turns up, even in Scotland. The gateway was for sale in Scotland some years ago but was too uninteresting to buy and the top three prints illustrated here are coming up for auction at Great Western Auctions, Glasgow, on 13th June, 2026.

The check list draws on the research of a reader in Scotland and Alan Guest's unpublished list of prints. Alan made use of catalogues of the Graver Printers in Colour and the Colour Woodcut Society as well as the small collection held by  the British Museum. In addition, my reader made use of catalogues of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute.

I have assumed there are only two prints of Drei Zinnen.

The pig market, Montreuil 1911

The treadmill 1911

The pergola 1922 (Hoover Museum of Art, Cornell University)

The watchtower 1924

Les cochers 1924

Old gateway 1925

On the Dee, Kirkcudbright 1925

Drei Zinnen from Landro 1925

Sellagruppe 1926

Calendar with owls 1926 (Author's collection)

Tofana 1926

Demoiselle cranes 1927

Aigrettes 1928

Penguins 1928

Pedwell, Norham on Tweed 1928

Summer 1928

Chamaeleon 1928

(St Roch) Rhone 1929

Bullfinches 1935

Donkeys 1936

Monte Cristallo

Drei Zinnen from Lake Misurina

Java Finches

S.G. Boxsius 'October' coming up at Exeter.

Here is a colour linocut by S.G. Boxsius that has a lot to recommend it but leaves me feeling perplexed. It was first exhibited with the Graver Printers in 1931  and suspect it was originally designed as as the calendar image for 'Autumn' but the well-known image of the large trees on the Devon coast took it place. The great strength of the print is its use of colour and I also suspect Boxsius typically went to another artist for a starting-point.

So far as I know, it is the only flower-piece Boxsius made. I would think most of you would not even regard him as a flower artist. The leader of the pack was Yoshijiro Urushibara who first exhibited his Chrysanthemums at the Society for Original Woodcuts in Paris in 1922 but did exhibit the print with the Graver Printers until 1934. So far as I am concerned, the grey version is Urushibara's best print. It manages to combine the subtlety of Japanese printmaking with the western talent for perspective and description but I have posted already about this celebrated group of flower prints in 'Yoshijiro Urushibara visits Kew Gardens' so I have used the blue version here.

This all means I have assumed Boxsius saw the Urushibara print at his exhibition held at the Abbey Gallery in 1928. I do not have a catalogue but there were many prints in the show and it is likely to have been there. I say all this because it is instructive to compare the two different pieces. Without doubt, the Urushibara is austere and the Boxsius surprisingly approachable; one floats in a ambiguous way, the other is fixed inside the frame. It was unusual for colour print artists of the period to work outside the conventional print area but Allen Seaby pulled it off with Heron though the Boxsius leaves me wondering what the actual position of the vase of flowers is. He lets us know the light is coming from the right and leaving a reflection on the vase and casting a shadow on the left. But there is no sense the ginger jar is an important part of the picture in the way Urushibara's vase is, even though we can tell it is round and stands a little above us. That kind of thing would be too literal for a Japanese artist. For them, the vase is not a mere container and in a great masterstroke, Urushibara turned his vase into a wintry tuber. In terms of colour it is close to Giles and his pairs of peacocks, one brilliant, one drab.

What I do like about October is the crowded sense of fullness. What he gives us is a happy bunch not a sophisticated arrangement. What the background is I do not know. Nor can I explain why there is some much unused space above the flowers other than what I said about it being a calendar image. But all of those were woodcuts and this is not. It is lino used in a way it had not been used before. For all their buoyancy, the refreshing colours are arranged in a way no one was doing. With lino you necessarily paint with a broad brush or produce something schematic. Boxsius has managed both detail and expression in a satisfying way that is very different from the large scale detailed colour linocuts made after the second war. For all its occasional awkwardness, October was done with a light and carefree touch and this is what makes it worth buying.

You can do so at Bearnes, Hampton & Littlewood at Exeter at 10.00 GMT on 14th May, 2024. I have my own proof, so feel free. The one illustrated here is the one for sale. It is not in perfect condition as you can see, but is a lot better than the one I have. 

Chrysanthemums is for sale from Hilary Chapman at £700, but it is the blue version and I think the grey one is the best. 

Another side to Scarborough: the photographs of Nelson Dawson

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An old interest in the work of Nelson Dawson has been given a new lease of life by a conversation with a reader (and some helpful back-up emails). I remember seeing a lot of small etchings by Dawson at Craddock & Barnard on Museum St at more or less knock-down prices but I resisted the temptation to buy any and carried on with the pursuit of colour woodcuts.

I regret my lack of foresight now but even today (as my reader says) Dawson remains beneath the radar and this is even more so with his photography. You can take my surprise for granted when I came across the collection of photographs held by the National Museum at Greenwich. These were not only unexpected, he obviously knew what he was doing and I decided they would make a good introduction to a forthcoming post about his superb colour print Twilight at Scarborough. Nelson lived up to his name and, although he came from land-locked Stamford in Lincolnshire, his wife Edith was a native of Scarborough and they obviously spent a good deal of time there when they weren't working in France. 

Dawson was involved in artistic circles of the late C19th and early C20th century and as many of them did, spent time in all the usual places, including Chelsea and Etaples, though while everyone else went off to Whitby, Edith and Nelson made the very best of Scarborough and its port, harbour, castle and lighthouse. Like all good photographers, Dawson had a strong theatrical bent and, although many of the photographs are records made only just in time, they would have been less effective if he had been using colour instead of sepia. You could object and say he had no other choice, but I suspect he was well aware how much sepia had to offer. After all, he was essentially as artist who tacked between colour and monochrome and was obviously drawn to photography for various reasons including the way it creates atmosphere by restricting tones in the way etching does.

It would also be true to say these photographs stand on their own merit and I have not noticed him obviously using photographs as preliminary work for his etchings. But Dawson was very prolific and it would take someone with a much better knowledge of his work than I have to discuss any relationship between the photographs and the other prints. There obviously is one and I have no doubt further comments and opinions will be forthcoming. In the mean time, we can let the photos speak for themselves and, as I say, if you want to see more of them, have a look at the National Maritime Museum's collection where with luck you may also find the photo S.G. Boxsius used for his colour print The waterwitch.