William Giles: modern printmaker

It was 1976. I had just bought my first colour woodcut, John Hall Thorpe's bland and beautiful Marigolds, which I was very pleased with untill a friend came round who had done a course in printmaking and damned it with one cruel word 'misregistered'. By that point in the C2oth most printmakers had achieved a professional cleanliness and a sin such as misregistration had been consigned to the dim & dirty past. Fortunately for him, the later work of William Giles (1872 - 1939) like Rainbow, Island of Jura (Hebrides), above, is in some ways, more 1976 than 1922. (I need to credit William P Carl Fine Prints for this one + one of the others). If it weren't for the Arts & Crafts WG, at first glance it would be hard to tell apart from the innumerable colourful nonentites that were churned out from around 1976 onwards. He differs from all that tosh in the claims that he makes: for all the vividness of the colours he employs, this was something he experienced, and that he is presenting us with the facts about the light you can find on the isle of Jura.



It certainly says something about his constant experimentation, first with woodcut in the Japanese manner, then with a combination of etched zinc plates and wood without a keyblock, before he finally left tonality behind and returned to pure woodcut in the mid twenties, that he achieved something that looks both like Romantic watercolour and the iridescence of contemporary etching. His exact titles of course owe a good deal to JMW Turner who also insisted that what he was representing were 'stern facts', albeit not the kind of facts that many of us are used to.

He was born in Reading, studied at the local art school before moving on, first to the Royal College of Art and then Paris. He then came home to Reading to learn the art of the colour woodcut from Frank Morley Fletcher in 1901. His subjects, or rather his excuses, were of the nymphs and shepherds variety, but as you see from Midsummer Night (1919) what he really wanted to do was improve the standards of British printmaking and show exactly how colour prints could convey both light and experience in ways that monochrome could not. This was a man with a mission that led him and his wife, Ada Shrimpton, to give many fine prints to the British Museum.

September Moon from 1901 must be one of his first colour woodcuts and although the sheep and poplar trees and general atmospherics are in line with Fletcher and the French school, and even though in many ways his imagery remains much the same for 25 years, he is already on a bold course of his own that led to he and his wife taking up metal plates from 1912. He wasn't content to find a craft that he could excell in, he wanted to achieve the best effect that he could. I would certainly think that this was the attitude that led an artist with the skill that Ada Collier possessed to go to him for instruction when she wanted to take up woodcut.

The last glow, central Corsica and particularly The last glint of a summer's day, Vejle Fiord, Denmark (1920/21) see him stretching the medium as far as it will go before he returned to colour woodcut, pure and simple, after about 1927. The pink and purple strain our credibilty but only perhaps because we are now so well-used to the outlandishness of so many 1920's colour schemes. But then we have to remind ourselves how far he travelled - to Jura, to Denmark and Corsica - to see just how peculiar light could be. He is no Engelbert Lap with his technicolour Tirol; what we see here is not so much the last glint of a summer's day but a man of very considerable energy and intensity seeing just how far that energy would go.