Allen Seaby colour woodcuts at Cirencester

 

It makes a change to have two lots of one colour woodcut each being offered for sale by auction instead of everything being included in one lot as happened with Ethel Kirkpatrick not long ago. This time it is the turn of Allen Seaby at Cirencester. On 8th March, Dominic Winter have Twins and a print of a lone rabbit sitting in a field of buttercups and daisies. No-one ever gets the title of the first print right although I must admit I have never known the title of the second. Seaby rarely, if ever, inscribed his prints with the title or the date.

So far as colour woodcuts alone are concerned, Seaby had a long career lasting from about 1900 to 1938. In all, there were at least seventy-two prints and the difficulty with buying Seaby is this. Over that complete period the interest and worth of the woodcuts varied. Seaby often did not know where to stop, which can make buying him an art in itself. At the outset when still a student at Reading, Seaby struggled with the Japanese method. Once he devised his own way of working, the masterpieces began to happen. Most of them were made before the war even if on a number of occasions there was a return to form though I have to say it was almost always with bird prints like Redwings calling (1925) and The cuckoo, also missing from my list. This was commented on at the time but Seaby never took the hint and tried everything from rabbits to ruins and back. The one big exception was the remarkable Trout from 1927 which won the Storrow Prize in Los Angeles in 1927 as was only right.

                                                                       

Twins is a good print but it is still not Seaby at his very best. His best work has a subtle and uncanny atmosphere unique in modern British printmaking. Like Trout or Redwings calling, one way or another they depend on suspension and in a telling phrase, Seaby went so far as to describe the new proofs floating off the block. By the time he made Twins, his method involved removing wood from the background and taking trial proofs till he was satisfied. I have seen a number of working proofs of both these prints and though I was unconvinced at the time, I can see the approach set the central image free of extraneous detail and left them to hover. Whether Twins achieved the necessary Seaby magic is another thing. As you will see, there were at least two different versions. At the top is the one up for auction in Cirencester while the one above is for sale at the McEwan Galley on Deeside in Scotland. Around that time, Seaby tried out a number of monochrome images which were largely successful though you tend to wonder what the point of it all was. You may wonder whether it is just faded. This is what is both good and bad about buying prints by artists like Seaby. In the end, there is no proper catalogue to refer to and you can sometimes get a bargain. 

At £450, Twins is not in that category. The Easter rabbit is probably not as satisfying but the array of buttercups and ox-eye daisies are pretty good and you will probably pay no more for it than the purchaser who had it from Garton & Cooke in 1988. In those far-off days, Robin Garton and Gordon Cooke had an ancient place in Lancashire Court off Old Bond St and had built up a reputation for selling modern British colour woodcuts at prices that took you aback. In 1986, Seaby's The Cuckoo had been on sale at the very modern price of £350 when a Helen Stevenson at £50 from Ayre's bookshop wasn't cheap. Now I only wish had bought two.