The gospel according to Walter

 

Walter Phillips was never slow to give an opinion and often had the opportunity to do so either in his newspapers columns in Canada or in books he wrote like The technique of colour woodcut. Amongst  number of other things he had done, Phillips had been a journalist in South Africa and came from a family where literature and the Bible were important. He had also been a tutor in Latin at Great Yarmouth and he  knew how to write well. What was unusual about Phillips and what doesn't doesn't helps to sort out fact from fiction was the publication of a biography by Duncan Campbell Scott in 1947 when Phillips was sixty-three. I have not read the book but it has meant there has been far more of Phillips' biography available than there has been for comparable artists. The problem is that all the information appears to have come directly from the artist and as I read through some of his other writing, I soon became sceptical.

The only training Phillips ever received was the classes he attended at Birmingham School of Art as a schoolboy in Worcestershire. There was nothing unusual about that. Young people who had had to go to work at fourteen or fifteen often put in long hours at evening classes where they studied for national exams. Once he left school Phillips' working life seemed to have little plan. But then his upbringing has been unconventional. As a minister his father would move from one place to another on the preaching circuit and his family would follow and moving to Winnipeg may have been a way of finding a stable life his wife and young family as finding a satisfying way of making a living himself. Either way the most important thing for Phillps was to be self-sufficient in whatever goal he set himself whether it was making prints or writing books and in this respect he was quite a lot like Allen Seaby.

Many of his friends and contemporaries like William Giles and Yoshijiro Urushibara had had very thorough training and both had spent time working in Paris where he said he had always wanted to go himself. Giles had taken Frank Morley Fletcher's class in colour woodcut at Reading (at least for a while) as Seaby had and Urushibara had trained as a carver and printer with the firm of Shimbi Shoin in Tokyo. How Phillips came to make colour woodcuts is another thing and given all that we know about Phillips it has always perplexed me that we know so little about he began. That he learned to make very good colour woodcuts like Mount Rundle (top,1951) and Gloaming (above, 1921) I would not dispute but the story he tells about how he got there doesn't always add up.

He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1913 and he found a job as art master at St. John's College in Winnipeg. Up until then, he had been a water-colourist but when a friend went to serve in France, he left Phillips with access to his etching press, equipment and paper. Phillips made 29 etchings and then completely stopped in 1917 and suddenly began making colour woodcuts like Winter (above) instead. This was pretty good for a first colour woodcut and presupposes a lot of experiment before he could produce such an attractive print. The American curator and pioneering scholar, Nancy E. Green, said Phillips had had an epiphany; Phillips said he was at heart a colourist and that he was not very interested in line and for those reasons found etching unsatisfactory. But what did happen that was so important to him? Neither Green nor Phillips say but Modern Printmakers believes it has the answer.

Phillips himself confused the issue when he recalled a short piece about colour woodcut technique written by Allen Seaby for The Studio in 1919. He said he went back and looked at this article and it helped him improve his technique but this has never really rung true for me. Green says this was 'his first professional encounter with other woodcuts artists' but I wonder because the Seaby article was accompanied by no less than six of Phillips' woodcuts, including one in full colour. This must have been co-ordinated. Apart from that, you would hardly forget such an important breakthrough and the following year the National Gallery of Canada bought nineteen of his colour woodcuts, possibly as  result. I don't think Phillips was being disingenuous but I do think we have all been guilty of reading too much into what Phillips himself said about the matter. Facts count.

Phillips was not only hard-working, he was also a perfectionist and placed importance on being self-sufficient. Self-improvement was also high on the Victorian value scale and you would expect someone as productive as Phillips to make advances. All the same it is true that after 1919 Phillip's woodcuts became more proficient. By the time Phillips was writing, he and Seaby were friends and exchanged cards every Christmas. Seaby also owned three of Phillips' woodcuts and Phillip's as a friend naturally wanted to acknowledge a debt. What Phillips did acknowledge in 1919 was that Studio articles had already provided 'helpful stimulus'. Possibly the first was a mention of Ethel Kirkpatrick's Mount's Bay in a review in 1917. Colour woodcut was in the news. The previous autumn, John Hogg had published Fletcher's Woodblock printing, the first account in English of the Japanese method and in the next volume The Studio published Malcolm Salaman's article 'The colour print' accompanied by five illustrations including Giles Sand dunes, Denmark (above) and E.A. Verpilleux' Search lights, Trafalgar Square (above). These are the colour woodcuts Phillips saw in 1917.

Other prints included were Ada Collier's Venetian boats and Giles' A pastoral. I have never been able to track either of these down but have included Collier's image of a Venetian trabacola (above) as a useful substitute. These were the cause his epiphany (and I think Nancy Green was correct to place such emphasis on the moment) and puts the remark he made about Seaby into perspective. The Collier print and Gloaming have a good deal in common. The same can be said for the Giles print and Winter, especially in the detail of the background. Perhaps more importantly, Salaman says that Collier 'learned the craft of the woodblock from Mr. Giles.' Some time after this, Phillips began a correspondence with Giles and when Phillips explained that sizing the paper was presenting the most difficulty, Giles bought Urushibara in to give advice. So what happened here?

Phillips admitted he had never seen a Japanese colour woodcut when he began making them himself and it was not until he found a shop selling them on a visit to Chicago that he was able to buy any and start a collection. All he was doing here was following the contemporary art school method of giving the student a teaching example to follow as a model of good practice. But there would have been no need to have taken them home to study. The exceptional surface quality achieved by the Japanese printers would have been apparent to Phillips straightaway. This was so significant to him in 1925 Phillips went to Giles studio on the Kings Road in London to meet Urushibara who turned up with alum and brushes and proceeded to apply the size with the expertise that impressed everyone who was lucky enough to see him at work.

But there was even more to his epiphany than this. England did not have one school of colour woodcut, it had two. Salaman's article listed a number of artists who had studied with Fletcher, including Giles and it might have been as easy for Phillips to have written to Fletcher. At the time he had not heard about Woodblock printing and said he would have saved himself a lot of difficulties if he had. Nevertheless he eventually aligned himself with Giles and later joined in the criticisms that were made of Fletcher and the doctrinaire approach he took to teaching and to colour woodcut method. Salaman (whose sympathies lay with Giles) characterised Fletcher's followers as the Anglo-Japanese. Being more forthright, Phillips described colour woodcut as a cult. At face-value this looks surprising coming from someone who is now famous for colour woodcuts but it only shows how far Phillips was a creature of his time and perceived important differences that no-one today would bother about (unless you were studying the subject that is). But he said it nevertheless and one clue to what he meant is the judicious way Phillips used the key-block. Winter did not have one at all and even as he moved forward, the key-block never played the role that it did in the work of Fletcher, Seaby, Mabel Royds or John Platt. As the son of a non-conformist minister, Phillips would have been all too aware of cults. What I think he was talking about was the cult of the Japanese print followed by the Anglo-Japanese and which Salaman summed up as 'a local fetish'. These divergences of opinion and the coteries that gave rise to are lost on us today. We are all too busy with our own.