'Laurence Binyon' a colour woodcut by Edmund Dulac

                                                                       

                                                                           

In the spring of 1910 the Tokyo firm of Shimbi Shoin sent two young craftsmen called Sugizaki Hideaki and Yoshijiro Urushibara to give demonstrations of woodblock cutting and printing at the great Japan-British exhibition at White City in London. If the intention was also to demonstrate just how fine their workmanship was, Shimbi Shoin were perhaps too successful because staff from the Department of Prints at the British Museum were so impressed, they offered to employ the two men themselves.

The wheeze was quite a simple one. Since 1903 the department had owned an early copy of an ancient Chinese scroll painting ascribed to the C4th artist Ku Kai-chih, which had been looted from the Imperial collection during the Boxer Rebellion and then offered to head curator Sidney Colvin and his oriental specialist, Laurence Binyon. The two men immediately paid £25 for it. Seven years later they decided tempt the craftsmen with the job of cutting and printing reproductions of the great Chinese scroll, which eventually went up for sale between 1912 and 1913 with a text by Binyon.

                                                                

All the portraits by the Toulouse artist, Edmund Dulac, seen here you date from about 1913 and after and all the individuals belonged to a circle of artists and writers that included Ezra Pound, William Rothenstein and Dulac himself who would meet at the Vienna Café on New Oxford St not far from the museum. The portrait of Binyon's assistant, Arthur Waley (above) imitates a brush drawing but I think is pen and wash while the witty and unforgettable portrait of Charles Ricketts (below, right) alongside his other half, Charles Shannon, dressed as Dominican saints, is in watercolour. But the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge describes the superb portrait of Binyon himself as 'woodcut, colour printing'. (Their print came from Ricketts' and Shannon's collection).

Binyon's face bought out the best in artists. William Strang produced one portrait of him that stands out against all of his many, many portrait etchings. Likewise Dulac was able to combine the unusual face and another aspect of Binyon's personality and interests in one masterful little woodcut. And wonderful draughtsman he may have been but was Dulac - or was any English artist - capable of reproducing their own design with such refinement in colour woodcut? I think the answer has to be no. Surely, only Hideaki and Urushibara (below) could have done anything so sophisticated as that.
                                                                                       

  

 

 

Three Scottish artists: Jessie Garrow's 'The wave'

 

 

I am starting to think that 'The wave' was the only colour woodcut that Jessie Garrow ever made. Like most people, I only know it from the illustration published by The Studio in 1924 but just on that evidence I would say here is the most professional and stylish colour woodcut made by any young Scottish artist at the time.

Born in Bearsden, East Dunbarton in 1899, she studied at Glasgow School of Art where she met a fellow stylist who she married in about 1920. This was Ian Cheyne. Garrow claimed that they had taught themselves to make colour woodcut. Certainly she had made The wave before Chica MacNab's woodcut classes began at the School of Art. Whether or not she had recourse to Frank Morley Fletcher's Woodblock Printing is another matter but she has little in common with Fletcher and keyblock outline, which he used freely, only appears along two of the women's arms. It was highly unusual to depend on so much white and on contrasting colours to create an image at the time. My first impression was how peculiar the figures looked with their white stockings and shoes but she was bowing to no conventions here, especially in the way she made figures central to a colour woodcut.
                                                                                         

It will not surprise you to hear that Garrow made her living as a fashion illustrator and writer and also illustrated books with the same spare line. But how could it be that such an original artist could leave so little work behind her? In her interests she is closest to Arthur Rigden Read who began making his own stylish woodcuts in 1922. But Read was a generation older. Like her, he didn't make a fetish of the keyblock, was mainly interested in figure subjects, and often used black, white and grey around this time (and just so you know what I mean I've included on of his own 1924-ish prints) but Garrow's sense of style was more acute than Read's. Just look at those overlapping feet on the pier - nothing if not ambitious for a one and only woodcut (and I would like someone to prove me wrong about that).

 

Three Scottish artists: Helen Stevenson's postcard from Arran

 

 

I know this is a rather duff image of Helen Stevenson's woodcut 'Goatfell' but it is the best I can do right now. It is also a bit larger than actual size which makes it remarkable for a British colour woodcut and shows exactly how well Stevenson could handle scale. The only other contemporary artist I can think of who made successful small colour prints was Sylvan Boxsius. More typical of Stevenson is the fine handling of colour and the consummate way she prints on japan. Perhaps less well known is how closely Stevenson followed the contours of the landscape she described. She took liberties, sometimes by foreshortening, but that only went to show what an informed eye she had in the first place. She knew a good view when she saw one but almost always organised the image in a superior way to photographers who show the same view.

Stevenson is less hard to come by than many of her contemporaries, especially the Scottish ones and I suppose I was lucky with this one. This is why two more women artists will be following on in this short series. Their work is almost impossible to find even in reproduction.

Steven Hutchins update

                                                             

                  

Quite a long time ago there was a post about the British woodcut artist, Steven Hutchins.  I believe he made only three colour woodcuts, all of them in the early 1980s. I think the Venetian scene must be the third one. Also included is his masterly Eggleston Abbey. Both different in style, you see that Hutchins wasn't a hard-and-fast traditionalist but was capable of accomplished work with and without the keyblock. In fact, the Venice image may even be a linocut.

                                                                       

I still find it odd that there seems to be no trace of Hutchins nowadays. But even stranger is the fact that someone with such printmaking ability could have disappeared leaving no more than three fine prints to his name.