The experimental Mr Batten: John Dixon Batten & British colour woodcut

 

John Dixon Batten's father, John Winterton Batten (above) had wanted him to be a lawyer and, like many of the young men of the time, including Frank Morley Fletcher, Batten went along with his father's plans for him. He gained a degree in law from Trinity College, Cambridge, was called to the Bar and promptly gave it up for a course at the Slade School. There he encountered the debonair Frenchman, Alphonse Legros, who was professor of fine art. Legros believed he had wasted his life teaching young artists but Batten's approach to art depended on the example set by Legros. Unlike Mabel Royds who had studied at Chester before she went to the Slade, the school and Legros was all Batten had to go on. It was probably enough because from engraving on cornelian to theatre design, Legros had a broad range of skills he could impart to the students and his attitude to colour was obviously one of them.

   

The role Legros played in preparing the way for British colour woodcut has never been considered except on Modern Printmakers. A good deal has been made of the example of Japanese ukiyo'e prints but far less of the influence of European artists. When Walter Crane went to Rome with Legros, he was astonished his friend spent all his time there copying the corner of a fresco by Raphael. As it happens, I recently come back from Florence where Masaccio and Masolino's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel are undergoing their second modern restoration (above). I told the guide it was like Prada and she said, 'Prada want to come here and look at these colours'. But it was not only colour. Legros had looked so carefully at the Raphael cartoons in the V&A, it could show students like Batten the difference between Raphael's hand and those of his two assistants.

    

What this amounted to was a serious interest in graphic design and colour and both played a part of what Batten did in The centaur. This was made in 1921 twenty-two years after The tiger (below) the first print he made more or less independently of Frank Morley Fletcher. Batten had a great admiration for the work of Hokusai and was not beyond pinching good ideas from him like his hobyahs, but what he borrowed was always translated into a European idiom and what is best about European tradition is here. It may not be to contemporary taste but Batten was simply being true to the central tenets like perspective, realism, the nude and respect for past art but providing students with a practical way of making colour prints. 

He knew what a struggle it had been for Fletcher and himself. It also knew how easy it was to be led astray. By 1921, the post war revival of colour woodcut had begun and new artists on the scene like Frank Brangwyn and Yoshijiro Urushibara were heavily influenced by Japanese style and subject matter and Batten had never believed that was the way to go. Nor was he alone. Mabel Royds had never showed any interest but more canny artists like Ian Cheyne went to Japan for  sense of chic. It was all in the interpretation. The centaur was made that year in two versions, one using four blocks and suitable, he said, for a portfolio or illustration and a second with six blocks like the one above and suitable to be framed and hung on the wall where it would need more impact. He was trying to be open-minded and suggest there was considerable potential for printmakers as the New Year card designed for his parents suggests.

    

Another development that mattered to Batten was the growing reaction of important traditionalists like the etcher, Sir Frank Short. (The shadowed valley 1927, above). Short had been put in charge of the etching class at the Royal College of Art in 1891 two years before Batten began to try out colour woodblock (below) and, as he was there until 1926, remained very influential and was able to uphold what he saw as a tradition that went all the way back to Mantegna, Durer and Rembrandt. The problem was this view of tradition was partial. Italian and German artists had made colour woodcuts well before Rembrandt was working and W.R. Lethaby went so far as the suggest colour print had been introduced to Japan from Europe. So far as he was concerned, it was all down to method and as Fletcher had written in 1916, 'Batten... had attempted, and partially succeeded in making, a print from wood and metal blocks with colour mixed with glycerine and dextrine... As the Japanese method seemed to promise greater advantage and simplicity, we began experiments together... ' and the rest is history. Fletcher not only became a proponent of Japanese colour but of Japanese style and was as unrelenting as Short.

                                            

A Studio lithograph on ebay: John Dickson Batten's 'The tiger'

                                                                                       

John Dickson Batten is having his day. Within only days of two postings about him (on Modern Printmakers and on The Linosaurus) here we have another Studio lithograph of one of his prints, this time his first original print called The tiger. I hasten to add that what you see above is an original proof owned by the British Museum and donated by Batten himself in 1920. Below is the lithograph that has just been passed over on British ebay. (It was up at the OK price of £3.50). But no doubt you can tell the difference.
                                                                                

First the story. Batten worked with Frank Morley Fletcher on two colour woodcuts then made this print in Fletcher's first class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts 1897/1898. I don't know whether Batten ever said in print why he allowed lithographs to made of his early prints. He did say that what he wanted to with colour woodcut was to avoid mechanical means of reproduction and I assume the reason behind The Studio publishing images of both Eve and the serpent and The tiger was to gain extra publicity for the whole colour woodcut project and not to pass them off as original prints. They are reproductions and nothing like the lithographs being produced by Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon at the time.

Would I buy one? No I would not. I did once buy a lithographic reproduction of a watercolour by Arthur Rigden Read on ebay and I treasure it because it is a fine example of the technique of lithography by Read's fellow students and adds a good deal to the little I knew about Read's early career but I paid only a few pounds for it. And it's what ebay can do well - allowing people to exercise their eye and to make use of what they know to pick up something interesting for a few quid. Going on about what some Studio lithograph might be worth takes the excitement out of everything.

John Dickson Batten's 'Eve and the serpent', 1895

                                                 
                                                                             

There has been some discussion over at The Linosaurus about John Dickson Batten's well-known colour woodcut, 'Eve and the serpent' and also the mechanical reproduction of it published by The Studio in February, 1896. This is the best documented of all British colour woodcuts with all the documentation available somewhere online and I have to say I think it is surprising that so many errors keep on resurfacing about this particular print. Both the British Museum and the Hunterian at Glasgow agree that the correct date is 1895, basically because that is what Batten said.
                                                                               

The image at the top is readily available online and shows the proof from the collection of the Hunterian and is annotated by Batten as number 42. Obviously quite a few were printed, all of them, it would appear, by Frank Morley Fletcher - certainly this one was. Batten said that after a period of experimentation Fletcher found that using Japanese technique provided the most satisfactory results. Even so, the Hunterian point out that one of the six blocks was made of metal. This was the same approach adopted by George Baxter earlier in the C19th. It was not until Batten and Fletcher made a second print together that Fletcher adopted a pure Japanese manner and with the keyblock closer to ukiyo-e prints rather than the Kelmscott Press type of woodcut.
                                                           

Japanese method or no, Batten's models for the print were purely British. Compare The Forest, the very subtle tapestry designed by William Morris, Phillip Webb and John Henry Dearle in 1887. By 1895, the year that Batten and Fletcher worked on 'Eve', Dearle was chief designer at Morris and Co was responsible for a lot of the foliage and flowers in the background of tapestry and stained glass designed by Edward Burne Jones, another obvious model. It is less obvious perhaps, but what also attracted Batten was the co-operative manner of work at Morris and Co. He was not the type of man to roll up his sleeves and have a go like Morris who tried everything from vegetable dying to glass-blowing and it was not until Fletcher began taking a class in woodcut at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1897 that Batten learned how to make a colour woodcut but he was keen to work with others when developing new methods of work.

It has been noted that his second oil painting, The Garden of Adonis - Amoretta and Time (1887) used a series of glazes laid over pure colour in true Pre-Raphaelite fashion. What he wanted to achieve with woodcut was perhaps similar, some way to print in opaque colour without using the mechanical means employed by people like Baxter. This is exactly why not too much value should be placed on The Studio image. It was there to draw attention to the making of a colour woodcut that Batten had been reporting on for some months before he and Fletcher had any idea  they could make the project work. Again it was an open-ended and co-operative effort and quite remarkable for that and the beginning of what Fletcher went on to call 'the movement'.

John Dickson Batten and the hobyahs

 

 

Alphonse Legros used to tell his students at the Slade School in London that if they were going to rob anyone they should rob the rich. John Dixon Batten took him at his word when he came to draw his hobyahs for More English Fairy Tales.

Striking, really, that he should turn to Hokusai when he was need of protean figures. Hokusai had both humour and creativity in abundance. Striking, too, just how much Batten put his own mark on his hobyahs. An admirer of Japanese art, he had no real use for Japanese aesthetics and believed Western artists had to adapt what they had learned from it.

                                                                         
Not surprising if you consider how far his professor at the Slade was steeped in the Western tradition, the kind of man whose idea of what to do on a trip to Italy was copying frescoes by Raphael in the Vatican. You can how much he learned from the Old Masters in the drawing a Greek man.

 

But then if you compare the line of the man's back and the line of the hobyah's back, you can see how much Batten learned from Legros and how much both Legros and Batten had behind them and in the end the training he received was to well-grounded for an artist as good as Batten to dress his work up with bits and pieces of ukiyo-e.

                                                                                  

                                                                              

 

 

Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953): a sort of magic

AW Seaby was a sort of late Victorian. A Londoner by birth, he must have trained as a painter but where no one seems to know. What is certain is this: he moved to Reading in Berkshire where he fell under the spell of Frank Morley Fletcher (1866 - 1950) who was a teacher at the university college. Or he may already have trained under Fletcher, who was only a year older, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. It wasn't the classic student/teacher relationship, which says alot about the rapid development of colour printing in Britain at the time. Like Ethel Kirkpatrick, he started as a painter but understood the opportunities that colour woodcut provided.

Fletcher is the ghost in the machine - both for this blog and others. He is famous for reading T Tokuno's article 'Japanese wood-cutting and wood-cut printing' (published by the Smithsonian in 1894) and then joining up with John Dickson Batten, to teach themselves how to make woodcuts using the Japanese method himself. This involved using cherry wood blocks, applying a watercolour based ink with a brush, printing without a press etc but neithern were so keen on Japanese style. If Morley Fletcher was quick to adapt, like other Londoners before him, Seaby had a good eye for character. In his case, he leant his considerable printmaking talents to birdlife. Personally, I've never been keen on his birds in flight but the secretive, searching behaviour of the ones here appeal very strongly. But then he was a naturalist. He knew them what they were like.

He obviously worked very hard and was well-thought of because by 1908 many of his early prints had been bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 'Printmaking' as he put it, 'is a sort of magic very captivating to many minds'. This is true of his work. A Seaby impression in good condition has a brilliant, subtle surface and it isn't hard to imagine his own wonder as he pulled the prints. I have chosen close-ups because they show the sheer quality of his brushwork and the almost casual details. This makes him very much the late Victorian aesthete.

After becoming professor of Fine Art at Reading in 1920, he began to write. He obviously knew a great deal about different subjects. In one of is early books, 'Colour printing with linoleum and woodblocks' (1925) he says this about the making of colour prints: 'Wood is obviously superior to linoleum in many ways... Those who wish to take the craft seriously as a means of artistic expression should certainly use wood'. You have to assume that if he knew what the fashion department at the Vienna Workshops or, even worse, the members of Die Brucke were up to (see previous post), he chose to ignore it. He was an individualist and emphatically not a modernist. Interesting as well that his own grandson, Robert Gillmor (b 1936) is a notable contemporary linocutter. It's even more interesting that many of his books were for children, or teachers. Gillmor describes the memorable experience of seeing his grandfather at work in the studio and he had learned enough to publish his own work at the age of sixteen. Seaby's prints, like his birds, are innocent.

He observed children. As he says himself, the prints here are the very opposite of what they tend to do. His birds fill up the picture space in the way Japanese birds do; children are in the habit of drawing little people in big worlds (my paraphrase). He's the high art paternalist but can we blame him when he produces such beautifully sensational images as these? And from 1928 onwards, he began publishing his four volumes of 'Art in the life of mankind'. I have to say it sounds more Germanic than Japanese. In fact, when he draws or paints there is nothing Japanese about him at all. And when he tries figure subjects, the results are not always good. He produced an 'Adoration' where the attitudes of all concerned are very hackneyed indeed.

That image is stuck on my old pc - fortunately, in many ways - otherwise I would have shown it in the next post. Because I haven't finsished with AWS and his varied career just yet. There is more to him than birds. There are also rabbits and ponies.