Four new linocuts by Laurence Bell

I know there is more than one reader who collects the colour linocuts made by Laurence Bell. These images may not be new to them but they are new to me so I decided to put them up to augment the examples that have already been posted on the blog.  The windmill above reminds me of the work of E.C.A, Brown and the clogs worn by the woman in the print below means the subject is French. (For readers who are not British, clogs were only worn in England in the 1920s by northern mill workers and I don't believe they were all wood like those in the picture).

The photos are not all square but the colours look right and the one above has a title The shepherdess. Sometimes it is not easy to work out what Bell was intending but the more we see of his work, the more it all starts to make sense. The titles do not always give very much away and the tones he uses are deceiving and make everywhere look like the veldt (though admittedly some prints are of South African subjects)

Russet and blue (above) is better known but is included here because for the first time we have a title for it. The one below I have never seen before and despite the high colour, I assume the subject is Sussex (in common with the one at the top) as the trees are English elm. His use of strong colour has the effect of making the places he depicts look generic but I have come to the conclusion Bell usually worked from the subject as he did with 'The Mermaid' tavern at Rye.

There are a number of tree prints that have a samey feel, including the one below sent to me only today by another contributing reader from Chicago and who did not hang around. If you only have one or two things by Belll, it hardly makes any difference how many elegant trees there are, though note the difference between the elms and the French poplars. This is a particularly good one and a good photograph as well. It presumably shows Chateau Gaillard and may have been online before but these things come and go, so it always a good idea to replace them when they do.

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A Christmas card by Laurence Bell

 

This is all starting to look like an end-of-term report. I have finally dug out my Christmas card designed by Laurence Bell for his publisher, Burlington Fine Arts. The most important aspect to all this is not so much the brightly-coloured print as the spelling of his Christian name and what it says on the inside page (below). Firstly, in my opinion, this is the way the signature reads: a, u, r, e. It is easy enough to read 'w' but here we have contemporary printed evidence that all of us appear to have been spelling the name wrongly. 

Secondly, this does not mean that all Bell's prints were coloured by hand but it does suggest why so many are so bright. It is up to readers to decide for themselves because the card is the only work I have seen by Bell. But if you look closely, it should be obvious whether or not he has used pigment and where the colour overlaps the keyblock.

The card provides one further clue in the way linocut was spelt. In 1923, Allen Seaby always wrote linoleum cut and never used the short form 'lino'. Claude Flight did and in 1927 went out of his way to spell it Lino-Cut in the title of his book - not sure why but then I could say that about so many things Flight wrote. I will have to check earlier spellings!

There are at east three readers who own work by Bell and they may be able to detect signs of hand-colouring on some of their own prints. Either leave your comment below or send it on to me. The advantage to leaving comments in the box is that they stay with the relevant post. Either way, between us we have made some progress.

Laurence Bell: new information & prints

 

Since I put up the post about Laurence Bell recently, a number of readers have written to me, including one who sent this print from his collection today. The subject is the place de Verdun at Genay near Lyon.

The main information is that Bell described himself as an engraver living at 13a Heath St, Hampstead. The only exhibition records given were for two watercolours shown at the Glasgow Institute in 1921 and 1922. This isn't much to go on but it far more than we had previously and I would think that this must be the right person.

I have included his view of the Porta Capuana in Naples done before the houses and the upper structure were removed. They were certainly there in the earlier part of the C20th as you can see from this intriguing photograph which appears to show the street under water. Also included is one of the etchings. This is in the style of Alphonse Legros who taught at the Slade School of Art until 1893. Whether Bell was a student there is another matter but it certainly maintains the links with France.

The mystery of Laurence Bell

 

A few years ago, a reader did a lot of research into a young artist called Lawrence Bell who trained at the Bushey School of Art in Hertfordshire. Since then other documents have appeared online  suggesting that this Lawrence Bell died in France in 1916. This leaves me no nearer to saying anything very useful about this intriguing maker of colour linocuts. (see later post for the correct spelling of his name). It doesn't help that there have also been persistent rumours for some while now that Bell was Canadian although without anyone coming up with any evidence, so I think we have to ignore that. What we are left with are the prints themselves and, as work keeps appearing on the market and finding its way onto the internet, there is now far more to go on than there was five or ten years ago.

The only dated print I know of is Winter where Bell added '36' after his signature. This makes Bell look like one of the late-comers to the colour print scene. James Milner was another. A retired teacher, he returned to colour woodcut in the thirties. Norah Pearse was yet another. Both have had posts here on Modern Printmakers. Bell has not been so fortunate despite lobbying on his behalf by loyal readers who are also avid collectors of his work. But here readers have a considerable advantage over Modern Printmakers because I own only one example, a small card I managed to pick up cheaply on ebay. The point is that this was enough to confirm the general consensus that Bell used lino and oil-based inks. It also strikes me that he may have made use of a press. This was nothing unusual. Robert Gibbings and John Hall Thorpe did the same from about 1916 onwards. Nevertheless, I think all these factors suggest someone who was prolific during the thirties when he made twenty or more colour prints in addition to etchings and watercolours.

What is unusual is how many of Bell's subjects like Kirstenbosch in Cape Province (above, top), can be identified. Another place he visited was Chateau Gaillard in Normandy and there is at least one print of Naples. But most prints depict south-east England where so many artists worked and whose subjects helped to make their prints saleable. The Mermaid Inn at Rye in Sussex (second from top) stands out as Bell at his most vigorous. It is fairly obvious to me that other subjects are the Kent and Sussex churches and the local Romanies. The churches are too distinctive  to be anywhere else while the travelling folk were favourite subjects of Arthur Rigden Read who also exhibited at Rye. Identifiable subjects were always easier to sell and while the old streets of Rye and sturdy churches of Kent provided likeable subjects, his publisher was firmly based at Burlington Gardens off Bond Street in London. The Fine Arts Publishing Company were an established business had been publishing photogravure work since the C19th and this is why I tend to think the prints were printed on a press. They are certainly relatively common otherwise readers would not be telling me they had found yet another.

I wish I could say more. Despite a reputation for including trees of the Clarice Cliff variety in almost all his prints if he could manage it, Bell's best work is rugged, autumnal and enduring. Perhaps not surprising then that anyone would claim he was Canadian. There is a sense of the pioneering outdoors in Bell. His land is a land of log-cabins and his big-scale inns and small-scale churches look as though they belong in the Rockies more than rural Sussex where inns and old churches are all the same size. That kind of wayward originality made him very much a man of his time and if the prints have a deliberate generic appeal, no one could ever accuse Bell of being bland and inoffensive. So you wonder how it could be that such an artist now is more or less anonymous.