Land of Hope & Glory: the colour woodcuts of E.A. Hope

 

The only reason the colour woodcuts of E.A. Hope have not been featured on Modern Printmakers before is because so few can be seen anywhere - until now, that is. I have a record of eleven colour woodcuts and six of them are here, enough to give readers a good idea of what she could do.

She was born in the Sydney suburb of Ryde in 1870 but the family's true home was Hopetoun House, an extensive Palladian mansion at South Queensferry on the Firth of Forth. Her father was  the Hon. Louis Hope, son of the Earl of Hopetoun who was serving as Governor of Australia. Hope moved to London where her mother lived in Chelsea. Hope herself lived in Fulham is an area that remains full of artists' studios. (Robert Gibbings was in the next street and John Hall Thorpe not far away either). She studied at the Slade but this doesn't make her  Stanley Spencer or Gwen John. She may only have been there for a term or two. She could have afforded more but that isn't the point. At the Slade she must have got to know Elsie Garrett Rice and Lucy Gill who went on to make colour woodcuts after the first war. Hope and Garrett Rice both made colour woodcuts at Boston in Lincolnshire (below) and one reader is not only lucky enough to own both  prints, Boston church by the river (1929) by Garrett Rice is inscribed to Gill and her brother, Edwin. (To be included in a second post).

This group of friends and her contact with Australia help to make Hope worth looking at. Like so many. she switched from etching to colour woodcut and, as with so many, the reason can be found in the work that Frank Brangwyn and Yoshijiro Urushibara did together. (Hope had Brangwyn design a bookplate for her as Edith Hope.) In 1915, Walter Sparrow-Shaw brought out A book of bridges illustrated with what appeared to be woodcuts by Brangwyn. Urushibara took the least exclamatory of these and with an inwardness and skill that was beyond his collaborator, transformed the small image into the magnificent Ruins of a Roman bridge of 1919. Along with Brangwyn's series of grandiloquent windmills, this bridge set a trend like no other. It meant that no colour woodcut artist seeing a nice old bridge could resist having a go and Hope was more successful than most. Trotton Bridge (1925) easily outperforms Phillip Needell's Pont d'Avignon (1925) and Eric Hesketh Hubbard's canal bridge.

I am  pretty certain this print gave S.G. Boxsius the idea for his early colour woodcut, Houghton Bridge, Sussex. I say this partly because around this time the Austrailian artist, Ethel Spowers, came over from Paris and made two colour woodcuts of bridges, including her 1926 print The Green Bridge showing the Kissing Bridge at Walberswick, quite obviously the basis for Boxsius' masterly At Walberswick from five years later. The people who try to write about the colour linocuts that Spowers made after studying with Claude Flight three years later, have missed all this and consequently the relationships between the artists making colour woodcut and colour linocut (and some times it was the dame people) have not been properly researched. (You read that here first.) Only look at the differences between The red tower (top) and the two prints below. First the history. The town is Albenga on the Italian Riviera (the print is sometimes simply called Albenga). Isabel de  B Lockyer often worked on the same coast and towers by the sea are often found in her work. By the time Hope made The red tower, the supporting outlines of the keyblock in the other two prints has been lost in the blue atmosphere. Its is not the conventional view of the town either. Hope instead looks inland from the sea to the light of dawn on the range of mountains beyond - and to anyone who knows the coastal towns of Italy, nothing could be more true of them. Here is a print that is linocut in all but name, a subtle blend of de B. Lockyer, Hokusai and perhaps memories of Australia that is unusual.

What holds all this work together isn't the motifs of towers and bridges so much as her sense of tone. This changes very much and is partly related to the different techniques she used. Albi (above) has a firm woodcut feel about it and emphasises the texture of the stone and rooftops. You can see immediately how far she had moved away from drawing and etching in The red tower and by how much Hope went on learning as other printmakers began making new images. She was also typical of the artists who began making colour woodcut after the wat in the way she never appeared to use brushes. Like Gill and Garrett Rice, the surface is mottled. She also makes patterns in the way a colour woodcut artist wouldn't. Th string of lights in her Italian town is prominent but the way the crowd in Boston Market or the team on Trotton Bridge introduce a similar rogue line is deftly done.

Significantly, Durham (above) was exhibited at a joint show of woodcuts and linocuts only thirteen miles away at Sunderland. This was December, 1931 when the first and second exhibitions of British linocut were blazing a trail through provincial municipal galleries. Her print York was also there, though this remains untraced (though I depend on readers to find one and let me know). I considered including work by all the others I mention here to put Hope in some kind of context, but as this is the only article to have appeared about Hope since Clive Christie wrote about her well over ten years ago on Art and the aesthete, I decided to avoid confusion.

The final  image is Market, Espalion.  The rickety style of drawing suggests she knew the work of French graphic artists like J.-E. Laboureur.  Hope had left Fulham for Kensington by the end of the war then eventually moved to a house called Byways at Steep near Petersfield in Hampshire and only a mile from Bedales where Garrett Rice had been a teacher. Work by Rice is even harder to come by but going by Boston Stump, she could pull it off. But that is for another post, another day.