The official guide to Agnes Reeve

When Agnes Reeve decided on a series of colour woodcuts taking London monuments both old and new for its subject, it was obviously not an original idea. Many such prints had been made before. They had even been made using colour woodcut by Emile Verpeilleux before the first war while John Hall Thorpe had covered Piccadilly Circus. What was different was the way she included modern buildings like the new home of the B.B.C. at Broadcasting House in Marylebone and Shell Mex House, which were both built in a chunky manner in 1932. What she also displayed was a new-found confidence and skill that had been lacking in what she had made previously.

I could be wrong when I assume her colour woodcuts of Somerton and Lavenham in Suffolk were older work. Certainly they were nowhere near as good as the London series and neither were exhibited with the Graver Printers.  Fortunately for her current reputation none of them appear to be online any longer and I am going to leave it that way. I had forgotten I had a file on her and it contains some prints not up to the standard of the ones here. The odd thing is there were none of the better prints in my file except for the image of Tower Bridge (above). This means that work has been appearing in very recent years though as Scholten says in their sales chat, it must be rare because the editions are relatively small. Piccadilly Circus, 1934 (above) is thirty and Hyde Park Corner is only ten. It did not make all that much sense to do that though she was was not alone. Isabel de B. Lockyer did the same and may have wanted buyers to believe they were members of an exclusive club.

But as you all know, colour woodcut collecting remains a club to this day. How she became a bona fide colour woodcut artist is another matter. She may have taken lessons with someone like Urushibara or used Frank Morley Fletcher's Woodblock Printing. The places where she trained, including the Royal Academy Schools, the Slade and the Ros Byam Shaw School were not the kinds of places she would have come across colour relief printing and by and large the style and scope of her work is as conventional as her subject matter. Even so, the image of Tower Bridge (above and courtesy of Annex Galleries) is a accomplished both as a colour woodcut and a composition. It makes use of an unusual view from the Surrey Commercial Docks side at Rotherhithe, but the title may have been assumed by Annex because there is nothing on the print and no record of such a title. The cranes look awkward but the lighters in the left foreground are not only well drawn, they betray familiarity with Urushibara's work. All the prints here employ the strict Japanese manner but this one captures the subdued sentiment of so many of the best Japanese prints. 

The series may begin with Westminster in 1931 and go on to St James Park Station, evening and Warwick Street in 1932, The Thames from Horseferry Steps (1933) Piccadilly Circus (1934) London Bridge (1935) and reaches Hyde Park Corner in 1938. The colour woodcuts then come to an end as so many of them do. Reeve turned to colour linocut  after the war, but I have never seen any. I had intended to call this post ' Collector's corner' but that struck me as dismissive. Nevertheless, I do want to suggest what collectors ought to be looking out for (and will hopefully find before Scholten do). I reckon there are at least fourteen London subjects. The list I have from Alan Guest is based on Graver Printers catalogues, but even there is incomplete though it is still better informed than anyone else and includes In Majorca (1934) and Dalmatian Harbour (1938). 

I suspect if she was not already making colour linocuts herself, she was already influenced by them. Though not on Alan's list, Broadcasting House (top) must have been made after 1932 (when building work was completed) and by then colour linocut was being widely exhibited with the touring shows of the Exhibition of British Linocut. The print has the strong use of pattern and a close-up viewpoint you would associate with Grosvenor School work and, although Piccadilly Circus relies heavily on the use of a keyblock, the massing and rigid patterning are both Grosvenor conventions. The Graver Printers refer to her variously as 'Agnes Reeve', 'Mrs Norman Reeve' and 'Mrs Agnes Reeve', but that probably says more about them than it does about the artist and I believe she signed her work 'A. Reeve'. If you know better, let me know and, obviously, I will be disappointed if I now do not receive an email telling me 'I have one of Trafalgar Square I found in Oxfam.'