The colour woodcut class at Edinburgh College of Art

 

It has been believed for many years now that Frank Morley Fletcher taught a colour woodcut class during his time as principal of Edinburgh College of Art, a period that ran from 1907 to 1923. I want to try and lay this for to rest once and for all. He did not. And while I am at it neither did Mabel Royds. The reasons are different, but the outcome is the same.

In order to gain a teaching post at any state school in Britain, you needed a teacher's diploma. Royds had one from Chester, her husband, E.S. Lumsden, William Giles and Allen Seaby all had one from University College, Reading, S.G. Boxsius had one from Islington, Chica McNabb and Ian Fleming had theirs from Glasgow and Helen Stevenson from Edinburgh. The whole point of the state art school was to train teachers. It has been a famous and long-lived complaint that students went to art school to become artists and were subsequently told that was not why they were there. Fletcher never set foot as a student in any state art school. The myth may have come about because he taught a class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. But those schools were not run but the state. Rather they were the responsibility of new statutory authorities set up by the government and had the own independent boards of education. This meant that these vocational schools could employ working practitioners like May Morris and Edward Johnston. More likely, though, misconceptions about Fletcher are merely based on assumption.

If there appears to be a discrepancy, it centres round this fact. Many headmasters of art school came straight from what was effectively post-graduate study at the Royal College of Art in London. To Walter Crane, its first principal, the R.C.A. was 'a teacher mill'. (Nor did the chief agitator last long in the post.) It was taken for granted that a graduate would get a job as headmaster once they came out. John Platt (above, painted by Fletcher at Robin Fedden's house in France in 1922) went to Leek and Thomas Todd Blaylock went to Bournemouth. So, why was Fletcher eligible for the post at Edinburgh? Like Crane, he had no qualifications. I can only assume the post of principal involved no classroom teaching. But there were ways round the system apparently. Walter Phillips only taught in private school in Britain but did gain employment at the Technical Institute in Winnipeg.

So, why didn't Royds teach colour woodcut at Edinburgh? ('Edinburgh Castle' above is her only print showing the city). Because she was employed on the fine art course and colour woodcut was taught on the applied arts course where Platt was head of department for a few years. The only Scottish colour woodcut artist I know of who trained under Platt, was Stevenson. I have never come across anyone else, though I assume others may have studied the technique.

Going back to the Royal College, the most famous modern artist to have come out of the British system is David Hockney. He began at Bradford, then went on to the R.C.A. and Hockney, for all his Celtic exuberance, retains an academic feel to this day. Another popular and accessible artist is Eric Ravilious who trained at Eastbourne and only got into the R.C.A. by chance when a successful candidate dropped out. Unbelievably, there were no entrance exams as there were for the Beaux Arts in France. Instead, each school was allowed two places per year and if you didn't get in, that was it. Even then, Ravilious was assigned to the applied arts department not fine art.

In its defence, one of the great strengths of the British system was its draughtsmanship based on drawing from the model, although this was by and large imported from France by artists who has studied at the academies in Paris. This takes us back to Fletcher who not only studied in Paris, but went on to take a life class at the Central School.

Fletcher's legacy depends on this handbook published in 1916 (above) and which ran to three editions. Possibly in defence of Fletcher, Arthur Rigden Read said that everything he knew came from that man. This is unlikely to be entirely true, because he must have learned something from Urushibara, too. But it does suggest he learned to make colour woodcuts using Fletcher's book. How many others did? I know for certain that Steven Hutchins did in the 1980s. So, as you see, there was a class in Edinburgh after all and it went by the name of 'Woodblock printing'.