Four colour woodcuts by Patience Galloway

 

This week's sale of colour prints at Exeter has reminded me that Patience Galloway is overdue a re-appraisal. I suspect, she is Isabel Patience Galloway (1900 - 1979) from Blackheath, Kent but with family connections in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. I was unaware she had two prints in the sale at all until a reader tipped me off. But, as I said about the Boxsius linocuts, I saw the auction at Bearne's as a sign of the way the market is going and, as I suspected, prices are falling. Galloway is not a woodcut artist of the best sort, but if you don't pay too much, they are worth having. But £90 for two of them is a bargain.

The second print in the sale (above) usually has some fanciful title attached by a dealer or auction-house that declares the man to be a faggot-gatherer. If it sounds like tosh, that is because it is. No doubt this little piece of speculation has been derived from French genre painting. In my opinion the correct title is 'A Yorkshire woodman'. It was exhibited with the Graver Printers in London in 1938 and there is no record of a faggot-gatherer anywhere. With any re-appraisal, the first job is to get the title, date and medium right, so this is a start. Unlike many of her contemporaries, Galloway dispensed with a key-block and instead made use of deep shadow to model her subjects. This can make them look like lino and flat and rather generic. That said, she is strong on atmosphere and as this was the first time a good image of 'The old waggon' has appeared online, it provides an opportunity to have a second look. I think she comes out of it well. Not only are the haystacks, elms and the hayfield done well, the colours are lively and subtle, the waggon memorable. Mechanisation is implicit in the striped hay-meadow and the rugged grandeur iof the vehicle is self-evident despite having become somewhere for children to play.

The consensus of opinion is that some of the subjects are Welsh. Certainly, 'Moel Siabod' (above) is part of the Snowdonia range in north Wales. There are also watercolours, which auctioneers have described as showing lochs or tarns, but are more likely to be Welsh mountain lakes simply by association with Moel Siabod and another Welsh title.

One thing I like about Galloway is her consistency, both in the way she achieves a distinctive, subdued tone and the way she chooses her subjects. There is an unusual interest in mechanics. Both means of transport obviously work, one ancient, one brand-new. But there is a less obvious connection between the woodman and the waggon. As late as the 1930s, woodmen on large farms were also carpenters and were responsible for making and mending farm vehicles. Galloway's woodman may look like a toiling labourer but some of them were skilled. Note also the way she distinguishes between elm and beech and the way she describes the marks left by the reaping machine in 'The old waggon'.

It says in my notes that the yacht in 'On the Solent' (1937) is a Solent Sunbeam, a day racing-yacht designed by Alfred Westmacott and first built in 1923. I have no idea where this came from but as I know precious little about the artist, any information at all is worth having. But here we have a clue. In 1899, Westmacott had taken over a boatyard called Woodnutts (below) on the Isle of Wight not far from Bembridge. This was where our redoubtable sea-going twins, Concord and Cavendish Morton, went to live some years after they have learned to build boats and to make colour woodcuts. (See their post for further details). 

All I can add is two further titles - 'Llewedd' (1938) and 'Pines at sunset'.