If you had ever wondered why the roofs are different colours in S.G. Boxsius' linocut called 'Autumn', I can at least tell you that Boxsius intended the colour to be red though as you see there are different shades here. The design came up at auction in Colchester and shows yet again how carefully the artist planned his prints. Nonetheless, the individual impressions here make it obvious, the image was cut with a spontaneity that is lacking in the original design.
I would be fairly certain the design is a combination of linocut and gouache and that is by the artist simply because it is marked 'No 1' in Boxsius' neat handwriting. We have already seen the original drawing that he made while in Devon or Cornwall. Now that we have the colour design, it all begins to look incredible. Very little preparatory work for British colour prints have survived. Some of Allen Seaby's remain in private hands and as you will know, preparatory work by Boxius also remains in private hands. The fact that a drawing and a colour design survive for a single woodcut from the late twenties, is astonishing.
As you will know, the woodcuts made for British Belting and Elastic were so numerous, others helped with the printing. I assume some were his pupils at Bolt Court in London. Why 'Autumn' should have so many variants is another matter, but they keep turning up, with some better than others, such as the orange impression, where the orange works so well with the grey-blue of the sky and the straw colour of the grass. I hope I shouldn't need to add how necessary it would be for any half-serious collector of the artist's work to find and purchase a comparable impression and not consider the price. You will notice a similar use of rich tones in the excellent impression of 'Houghton Bridge' (one of the many prints belonging to a reader in the United States). As I say, with an artist like Boxsius, the variants and the impressions are important.
You read it here.
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