A catalogue of the colour woodcuts of Allen Seaby

I once tried to get hold of the exhibition catalogues owned by the writer on colour woodcut, Alan Guest, but was unsuccessful. I was told they were 'only lists' even though such catalogues are invaluable to anyone putting together a detailed catalogue of an artist's work. They form the basis for any scholarship and are no less important for the collectors who preserve the work itself. A number of catalogues for both American and British colour print artists have been published over the past ten years or so. Robert Meyrick's work on Sydney Lee was a model of its kind and of the books published in the U.S., Dominique Vasseur's Edna Boise Hopkins from 2008 is the most attractive and useable. A catalogue was beyond the scope of Martin Andrews and Robert Gillmor's 2014 book Allen W Seaby, art and nature but it was a missed opportunity nevertheless. To my knowledge there are at least eighty colour woodcuts made between 1900 and circa 1940. Mabel Royds was the only other artist making colour prints over that same period. She started out only about a year before Seaby and continued to work up until long before her death in 1941. Unlike Seaby we know what all of Royds' prints look like (though one or two may not have appeared online).

The main resource I have for Seaby is Alan's list of prints exhibited with the Society of Graver Printers in Colour between 1910 and 1938. Alan could be circumspect and how he came to see the exhibition catalogues he based the list on, I do not know. What the National Art Library in London have, I don't remember offhand. All I possess are photocopies of the six or seven catalogues owned by Seaby himself but from what I see on the internet, about eight exist which cannot be found on the main list by Alan Guest. None have titles and some of them would only appeal to a serious collector of Seaby's work. But they are all interesting. What is more you only need to look at Old English pheasants at the top to see what has been missed. If the image above can be identified as Porta Pinciana, at least we have a date. The pheasants find Seaby in the unfamiliar territory of the Scottish wildlife artist Archibald Thorburn who was old seven years older. As a general rule, Seaby appealed to the naturalist rather than the sportsman but here we have him giving the sporting print a go. It is a good print and one i would like to own but it may have been too genre for Seaby to exhibit. Without a catalogue with the relevant details, we can only make guesses about what his intentions were.

It was not until I began to try and sort out sundry lapwing woodcuts this week that I realised how much work still remained unaccounted for. It is not enough to say that Seaby was prolific; he was obsessively hard-working. Even so, it surprised me how little we knew. But judge for yourself. How many of you have seen these cows before? And does anyone know the title? I am sure this must be a very early work made before Seaby was competent with the keyblock. So far as I can make out, he has used silhouette and black-and-white instead and though few of us would rush out and buy it, it is very informative about the progress the artist was making with the medium But where exactly does it fit in? 1900, 1901?Without the catalogue, we just have no real idea. It has to be said, Seaby never made it easy for us. Few prints have titles and so far as I know none have dates. Nor was he beyond selling unsigned prints if he believed the standard of printing was inferior. This is why he took care to sign them in the block and again a catalogue would contain all the relevant information and it would be possible to say when the habit of signing in the block began.

Now you may be saying to yourself, why is he going on about Seaby when he could be telling us more about Helen Stevenson or Sylvan Boxsius? Good question. And I have an answer. If Seaby had made exceptional colour woodcuts for ten or fifteen years, it still would not have mattered so very much. The truth is Seaby is everyone's idea of a colour woodcut artist and is archetypal in a way no other artist could be. He was already forming his ideas about design by the late 1890s, a process that only came to an end when war broke out in 1939. This means his output lies at the dead centre of the story of British colour woodcut and that a full catalogue of his prints would be of much greater use than any of the ones we have including for John Platt, Yoshijiro Urushibara and Arthur Rigden Read. It does not matter how good those catalogues are, Seaby should have come first and the prints you see here tell us why. 

If this is the kind of work he did on an off-day or for some reason decided not to exhibit, how much does it say about the colour woodcuts he did put on show? What is important about Seaby is not only the standard of his work; the influence he had has not been assessed at all properly. It is easy enough to detect the influence of Hokusai or Koson on his own work. What is harder to ascertain is how far he set an example. I have to convince myself the beach scene actually is by Seaby at all, but for my money, it is where John Platt's famous The giant stride begins but again, without details, how can we say? The kingfisher was first exhibited in 1910 but by then Seaby had found his own way with the intractable keyblock. The kingfisher finds him struggling to make the bird stand clear of the confusing marks behind it. By the time he made the pheasants he had perfected the technique of experimental cutting where he kept taking trial proofs as he removed more wood from the background. By anyone's standards, The kingfisher is an expressive print but the background remains unresolved.

Many artists have been praised by Modern Printmakers but how many of them produced a body work you could follow through as I have just tried to do with Seaby? Seaby is all about identification. He was less concerned to encourage us to look at animals from the outside as Thorburn did; he wanted them to live in front of us. This exceptional gift is not found everywhere in his work. This does not make prints like Bay of Salamis from 1929 unimportant only less crucial. It has come up online recently but if you want to find Assisi (1928) The Parthenon (1928) Acropolis, Athens (1932) or Crossing the Nile at Luxor (1932) you will search in vain. I know surmise is often foolish but all I can say is he sold so few of them, none has have as yet come up for sale again. Bay of Salamis was itself bought up from the vaults by an academic from the University of Reading but has not as yet stood the money test like an unattractive print of The Adoration I remember going fairly cheap on ebay. Kings of Orient is much better but you will need to ignore the hackneyed figures if you buy it. Whether we like these prints or not, they help to suggest what his real strengths were.

No one could fault Seaby for not trying even if Lake Lucerne from the end of his woodcut career in 1937 is more of a watercolour than it should be. Taking a broader view, two remarks made about Seaby by his contemporaries come to mind. A reviewer of one of his books noted signs of deterioration in his drawing and wondered whether Seaby 'had drawn too much'. Another critic who went to see his second one-man show may have been the first person to say what we tend to take for granted, namely Seaby was at his best with birds. I have tried to suggest what it was about birds and their habits that meant so much. All the same we are still in need of perspective about his work and in the end a catalogue will be the only way we can find it.