Sunday 9 August 2015

Away for the weekend with S.G. Boxsius

                                                                         

Even though I have been writing about him for a number of years now, it was not until I bought my house in Wales this summer that I began to realise what an individual take S.G. Boxsius had on the British landscape. I will be the first to admit that A Devon village (below) could easily fit into the generic view of the countryside made famous by the flat but fetching dust-jacket designs of Brian Cook. But then Cook's work is more likely to be a simplified version of the more subtle work you see here.


 Boxsius was a Londoner who infrequently depicted the city he grew up in. London from the roof  and Kew Bridge are exceptions. But even with Kew Bridge the sense of an outing to Kew isn't far away and what he sometimes did (especially when he visited the West Country) was present postcard views. Nothing exactly wrong with that but the places he visited were shown exactly as an informed visitor would see them. Every time I pass through Criccieth on Cardigan Bay on the train and see the ruined castle above the town, I am reminded of Corfe Castle. It's the neat build-up of buildings that does it, medieval overlaid with Georgian and Victorian and all put together with a stylish, intimate and crisp sense of perspective. They are so well-behaved and good-natured, we hardly notice the way Boxsius carefully takes us in and out of the shadows of a place or by how much these weekend-away views have the art master's visits to the National Gallery behind them.
                                                                                 
 
I have pointed out before that his exquisite Seaside used Georges Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres (acquired by the Gallery in 1926) as a model. I suppose what I am saying is that London isn't as far away as you might think. Many of his prints are architectural compositions and even when he depicted trees, as in the dashing linocut, Twilight, Winchelsea. At the time, Winchelsea was the home of Arthur and Kathleen Rigden Read and I assume that Sylvan and Daisy Boxsius were sometimes visitors because the town appears at least three times in his work but I think Boxsius must also have known the white fencing and orange rooftops from William Giles view of Rothenburg am Tauber made twenty years earlier. Even when he is at his most lyrical, bookishness is not so very far away and modern girls occupy their time with reading. If his holiday prints can look occasional as much as the pure colours, their literary feel makes them something more telling. You just have to try and work out or guess what he had been looking at but look he certainly did.

                                                                                     

Time and again as the trains runs from Machynlleth through Barmouth and Harlech and on to Criccieth and Pwllheli, you see not only the neat towns but the same delicate views that Boxsius uncovered for himself. I don't think anyone, not even much better artists, were capable of the meticulous sense of distance that he had, the way the light picks out a skein of fields and woods and brings them closer. Ironically it appears composed and artificial. What my frequent journey along Cardigan Bay has shown me is how far Boxsius chose his subjects and revealed himself. Unfortunately, it's where he is at his palest and most subtle and generally beyond what a monitor screen can reproduce all that well. The view across the estuary in Autumn is one classic example that I know but the distant view of the town in Old Whitby gives a good idea of what I mean. In Boxsius the foreground is often nothing more than a prelude to what is a long way off and less obtainable, it's the classic view of the batsman to the boundary.

9 comments:

  1. I can certainly see the influence of Seurat on Boxsius' "Seaside" print, but I find the print very appealing, both for what it borrows from Seurat as well as for how it deviates from "Bathers, Asnieres." It's a matter of taste, but I prefer it to the other humanless landscapes you have posted by Boxsius, though maybe I'd revise that opinion if I saw them in person.

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  2. I tend to think it was not so much the figure that interested Boxsius as shape, in the way that it interested Rigden Read and Seurat. Obviously, Seurat was a modern master and they were not but it is the shapes of the figures in 'Bather's Asnieres' that are so compelling and it is fascinating to see Boxsius make such a well-considered variation. Boxsius also recognised in Seurat a sensibility like his own. I don't think you would ever say that about Bartlett. If you think about what he did with 'A Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte', Boxsius gets closer to the spirit of Seurat.

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    1. I agree about Boxsius. His humans are not interesting as human figures per se or as true individuals, but as shapes. But there is still something appealing in Boxsius' composition because it is not merely a dry, static landscape. In a different setting, he could have achieved a similar effect with, say, cows. (That said, I usually have a problem with prints that try to make humans the center of the design because they tend to be so poorly rendered in the woodblock print medium. But detailed realism fortunately isn't the point with "Seaside.")

      I'm not quite sure what point you are making about Bartlett. (You expected me to come to his defense, I know.) It's not evident in Bartlett's woodblock prints but I own a number of his drawings and paintings that are indeed pointillistic in technique. He had to have had a knowledge and appreciation of Seurat, and it dates as far back as his time at the Royal Academy. Moreover, when it comes to light and shadow, compare Seurat's "Un dimanche après-midi à l'Île de la Grande Jatte" with Bartlett's "Silk Merchants, India," "Peshawar," or "The Golden Temple, Amritsar" prints where again Bartlett's debt to Seurat is palpable. While the "shapes" of figures in Bartlett's figures are generally are less important that the degree to which they impart local color, "shapes" are far more important in these three named prints than in most of his woodblock print output.

      Bartlett was,of course, extremely skilled in portrait painting, and there are some figures in some his etchings that are first rate. He was nonetheless smart enough not to try to depict "individuals" in his prints because of the limitations of the medium. Read's "Lady In Black" in your next post is the exception to the rule.

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    2. I think Boxsius did something unusual for Boxsius with 'Seaside' and included people he knew as well as himself. They may not be portraits but I suspect the man on the right is SGB and the woman centre is Daisy Boxsius. It was John Platt who started this ball rolling but William Giles had also made a covert portrait of Ada Shrimpton and himself in 1907. Giles avoided the difficulty of portrait with woodcut by having the figures seen from behind but it also reflected the way they had married in Venice without telling anyone. But I like Boxsius's treatment very much here, how simple it is, and the way he turned out a postcard-size Seurat.

      As for Seurat, 'Bathers, Asnieres' and 'La Grande Jatte' are very different pictures, so perhaps my remarks about Bartlett were superficial. I take what you say about 'Peshawar' and I suppose a number of the prints draw on the later Seurat picture in particular but I still think Boxsius gets closer to Seurat's disposition of figures, use of perspective and purity of colour. But in the end, it doesn't matter so very much; it's either a good print or it isn't.

      Read's use of models is more candid but is just as complex as the other two in the way he draws on other artists and types of colour print, both Eastern and Western, and personally this makes him more interesting to me than someone like Bartlett who was working within the old workshop system. And also, Bartlett was just out of it. He was over in Japan or Hawaii or wherever while the rest of them in Britain were obviously having a great old time cross-referencing, cribbing and trying to outdo one another. The sense of something happening isn't there in Bartlett and surely that is partly what prints are about.

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    3. To compare Bartlett with Platt, Giles, etc., isn't going to be particularly fruitful because one is a shin hanga artist and the others are what the Japanese would call English sosaku hanga artists. And if Bartlett had stayed in England, I doubt if he, like Brangwayn, would have produced anything other than black and white prints (though I could see him working on color prints with Urushibara). But while Bartlett was "out of" the exciting developments of color woodblock printmaking going on in England, the vast majority of Bartlett’s prints were made between 1916 and 1922, an equally exciting time in 20th Japanese printmaking when Watanabe's carvers and printers were at their technical zenith. Their work was just as experimental, only in different ways, not only because the Japanese carvers and printers were trying to express western art conventions in the Japanese medium, but also because they were developed and trying new printing techniques. There's light years of difference between the prints Watanabe produced in the teens and those produced by the Japanese 10 or 20 years earlier at the nadir of late Meiji printmaking.

      If Bartlett had come along in the 1930s, his prints wouldn't have been printed nearly as well, nor appeared particularly revolutionary. But you need to keep in mind that serious, established Japanese artists wouldn't work with Watanabe in the beginning; they viewed woodblock prints as beneath them. That's why Watanabe initially worked with foreigners like Fritz Capelari and Bartlett. If Bartlett's prints hadn't been so successful, the shin hanga movement might have been stillborn. Instead, it lead to Ito Shinsui, Kawase Hasui, and other Japanese artists entering the field. To modern eyes "something" isn't happening in Bartlett's prints, but it is. He was part of the collaborative process, even if a lot of the credit has to go the Japanese carvers and printers involved.

      You'll probably have more affinity for the early sosaku hanga artists like Yamamoto Kanae and Tobari Kogan who are going it alone in the same time period. Apples and oranges. They achieved certain things that Watanabe's people couldn't and vice versa. But it was an exciting time for printmakers everywhere in the world.

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  3. How did it interest Rigden Read?

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    1. If you look at the outline of the shapes he made and sometimes with the watercolours, you can see the way he changes the shapes as he goes along. 'Roses' is like that but there isn't a good image online. I have a lithograph of an iris which has a similar outline. Also 'Market in Languedoc' where he had all the different baskets along the bottom of the picture. And the basket in 'May morning'. I think it's just an aspect of his work.

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  4. Hello Haji-b, I just thought I would register my appreciation of your blog, as I believe from some of your comments that you like readers to come out of the shadows and announce themselves, so you know we are here. I find your posts very interesting and informative and it is lovely to see such a range of images from so many artists working in woodcut, many names being new to me. Your comments on the photos of James Ravilious are fascinating too. I have just returned from my holiday in Eastbourne (which always puts me in mind of the woodblock print....) and thought I would check to see if you had posted anything recently - so glad to find you had! I have chosen "anonymous" from the drop down menu as the other words meant nothing to me, a computer illiterate. Jacky

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    1. Much appreciated, Jacky, and nice to hear you've been in Eastbourne. I lived there for a short while in 1972 and as you correctly say the Sussex seaside light gives the town all the enjoyableness of a colour woodcut. As you will see from the latest post on Arthur Rigden Read, we are learning from one another.

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