The enigmatic E.A. Hope

Modern Printmakers is not short on women artists of the early C20th who have turned out to be hard to discover much about even though Hope herself was well-connected. Worse still, it is almost impossible to find her prints for sale though I did come across one in Australia where she was born. I should say here I was mistaken when I said in the first post I devoted to her that her father had been the governor of Australia. He was governor of the state of Victoria and returned home to become the Queen's chamberlain before returning to Australia in 1900.

  

Hope first studied at the Slade School of Art before moving to the London School of Art about 1908 and where the potter Bernard Leach and the Australian artist, Jessie Traill were fellow students. The School has been set up by Frank Brangwyn in Stratford Road in 1904. Brangwyn himself had never had any formal training and as sceptical about British art school as British art schools and art critics were about him. Like Claude flight at the Grosvenor School in the 1920s, Brangwyn had an inordinate influence on his students who tended all to end up looking like him rather than themselves. At some stage Hope went so far as to commission a bookplate from Brangwyn who produced this studied pose of a boy-girl figure filling a basket with apples. I could go on but I will resist the temptation to mock Brangwyn and can only add that Hope continued in much the same vein with her images of wicked fauns drinking wine from 1911.

The lush literary style had little in common with the faux naif woodcuts she eventually made but her work was shown at exhibitions organised by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art early in the century and a couple of works went into the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. But they all tend to seem remote from the kind of work that interest readers of Modern Printmakers. Yoshijiro Urushibara was also a student at the London School of Art about then and went on to make the Bruges portfolio with Brangwyn during the war but the small scale colour woodcuts have little in common with either artist apart from the nocturnal subjects they chose for Bruges.

I have now discovered the night scene (above) show the town and monastery of Subiaco south of Rome while a reader tells me the print at the top hangs in Gargunnock House near Stirling. This was not all that far from her ancestral home at Hopetoun House near Edinburgh and presumably the two families knew one another. (My reader tells me all the pictures on the wall at Gargunnock are associated with the house). The impression I get from Alan Guest's records and copies of catalogues I have is that in common with many other artists who began to make colour woodcuts, it all happened after the war. She exhibited Albi with the Graver Printers in 1928, followed by York and Sturminster Newton 1929 and went on exhibiting with them until 1938. 

Some of the prints like Albi, Boston market (1934) and Trotton Bridge (1936) can be seen first post I put up, 'Land of Hope and Glory: the colour woodcuts of E.A. Hope. The problem is only the photo taken by my reader and the one of Subiaco do Hope much justice and all I have been able to do here is offer some more of the story.