The week on ebay plus arts & crafts in California

                            

                                                                           

I have to lead with the S.G. Boxsius woodcut Winter because it is so unusual to have a print begin with a low starting bid. This is in overall good condition apart from some foxing in the margin and into the image. Any white flecks you can see are intentional, there was never a pencil signature on any of this series and the hand-made japan he used here makes the print something special. The black is printer's ink but the rest of the water-based inks shimmer. Not typical of him but all in all Boxsius at his magical best.

From Germany we have Ilsa Koch Amberg's vibrant Zinnia's. Stylish, eloquent and original, it  has a lot more impact than Walter Phillip's depiction of the same flowers (above). Popular in the 1920s an 1930s as garden plants but not seen very much today, both prints of zinnias are good examples of the way a well-chosen subject helps make a colour woodcut work. The Phillips is one of a group of British, American and Canadian colour woodcuts at the California Historical Design auction of Arts and Crafts on 16th and 17th September and the catalogue is well worth browsing through even if you don't intend to buy

Also included is Dean Babcock's nicely-handled mountain scene Tamina Peak  The faux naif touch and all-over rugged values give it away as American rather than Austrian or German. I have no doubt it will not be cheap even though it will have less actual interest as a print than the Boxsius snow scene. By comparison, I think that will be better value but as a reader suggested American prints are going to attract American buyers.

It may be the same situation for Alfred Peter's colour woodcut bookplates. They are no longer the bargains they used to be. I bought this ex libris for O Bertschi when they only cost a few pounds. They are a bit more now but remain still well worth having if you like small works to put in portfolios. This one makes great use of only three colours and his trademark sense of design.

Nearer to home is the Birmingham artist Ivy Anne Ellis. Strangely enough two people have recently mentioned either Ellis or the Birmingham group of artists she belonged to. She was the most prolific but was not always as successful as she is here in Columbines. The other woodcut currently for sale on British ebay is not as good How she ended up for sale in California is another thing.

A well-made woodcut by Wilfred Rene Wood (above) of an English town at dawn has been been languishing on British ebay for some while now. At £150 it is not all that expensive but Wood was a late-comer to the roller-coaster colour woodcut scene and does not have a fan-base (and never will). The trade never learn that a colour woodcut is not going to sell simply because it is a colour woodcut. He was fond of architectural prints which made them long like this one. Unfortunately architecture does not have the same appeal it had in the twenties and thirties. I might buy it at half the price but other than that I suspect it is dead in the water.

The same goes for John Platt's The Vltava at Prague. £950 is a lot to ask for a print that is all skill and no content. Completed in May, 1930, it came at the end of a long series of meticulous prints depicting boats and water that began with The jetty, Sennen Cove in 1921 and came to a dead-end with Mullion Cove early in 1931. As such it is only for die-hard fans, which counts most of us out. It is no more than another detailed and clever work by John Platt. Frankly, I could not care less and if I remember rightly none of us could when this print came up for auction on ebay some years ago. All we were interested in was the price it would fetch and since then we have all moved on.

As I was singing the praises of Dagmar Hooch not all that long ago I should not miss her out this jolly but stylish print of nasturtiums. The different tones she used suggest it was a decorating piece intended to match a variety of colour schemes in the manner of John Hall Thorpe. The fussy vase lets it down but I suppose you can't have everything.

This brings me to  Hans Figura's evocation of boats with coloured sails moored along the Grand Canal at Venice. What this has is intelligence and panache. No colour woodcut artist in their right mind could resist such craft and they became almost a sub-genre to themselves with the most perceptive colour woodcutters. Ethel Kirkpatrick, Carl Thiemann and Ada Collier made prints as full of admiration of the Italian scene as this one. Nowhere ever had a better waterfront than Venice and no waterfront ever had more glorious boats than these. This is the heartland of our culture, a factor never found in John Platt.