Isabel de B Lockyer & the Islington Hoard

I came across Leigh Underwood in a guide where the gallery was described as specialists in colour woodcut and before not too long I was making my way to Camden Passage to see what they had. In the early eighties, Islington was having its moment in the sun and I soon discovered that 'specialist in colour woodcut' was hype. The truth was Leigh Underwood had come across a pile of colour woodcuts and colour linocuts they liked and framed them up to sell to the fashionable people thronging the High Street.

By the time I got there, they only had two left, namely what I think was a green version of Arthur Rigden Read's Valencia (and the red one is no better) and de B. Lockyer's The striped sail. Even by then, Sylvan Boxsius and Isabel de Bohun Lockyer were a cult waiting to happen. We were as beguiled by their improbable names as much as anything and, looking back, I now understand we were already followers of the little god of colour linocut, with all his glamour, chic and frivolity. I remember seeing Spring morning, Arundel on Alan's wall like an icon from another age.

Day nursery (top) comes from the Islington Hoard. It was last sold a couple of years ago in Eastbourne. A far cry from Islington but if you own it, at least you now know its history because de B. Lockyer signed and fully inscribed each print and in so doing created a precious object.

For a while, I saw her figure studies as mystifying. In fact, she is often interested in the human figure and the landscape prints she made between about 1923 and 1930 are more of a phase between her early book illustration (edited, second from top) and later prints like Day nursery (from 1935). Very unusually for one or our artists, we more or less have her own words to clarify what interested her. Following a six-month visit to Provence in 1921, she remarked on 'peasant women... of an almost Moorish type' in the country near St. Tropez. She had travelled there in a boat with her sea-going mother and father and returned to London for an exhibition at the fashionable Dorien Leigh Gallery. Here she exhibited her distinctive pen-and-ink drawing (below) of a remarkable figure, a professional mourner with a large candle walking through the streets of Toulon like an unexpected visitor from the past. She gave the impression of a countryside half gone wild again, full of boar and houses lacking sanitation. Ironically, her figure draws on an illustration from The yellow book with its unmistakeable sense of city life.