John Hall Thorpe & Bemrose and Sons

As some of you will know, John Hall Thorpe training was in commercial work in Sydney where he was on the staff of two newspapers before he moved to Britain in  He had already made a few etching whilst in Australia and did not exhibit any colour woodcuts until the end of the first war. But when he did, these prints were important in the revival of colour woodcut in the 1920s. As you may also know, Hall Thorpe never printed his own work and acknowledged the printing was done under his supervision.  This meant he was unable to exhibit with the Graver Printers though he gained by having much larger editions to sell. If he went to a commercial printer (and I think be did) he was also limited by the numbers and subtlety of the colours he used. But if you look carefully at his prints, what stands out is how successful his economy of means was.

William Bemrose (or Bemrose and Sons as it became) certainly worked with Hall Thorpe on prints like Summer (top) which was published in 1929. Bemrose set up in Derby as a maker of railway timetables in 1826 and naturally worked with the Midland Railway whose main base was at Derby Station (destroyed by British Rail). The fine engraving below of the station was made by them in 1840 and you will be pleased to know the memorable clock tower to the left remains unmolested 180 years later. Features like the tower were typical of the Midland's serious attitude to public architecture. John Ruskin was appalled by their plans to drive the main line through from Matlock to Chinley but no one seeing the grandeur of the remote viaduct over the Derwent at Monsall Dale could fail to be impressed.

The firm did everything. This poster for the Midland's excursion to Newcastle races from Sheffield is typical though not the most amusing. Readers who are also railway buffs will notice that by the seventies, the Midland were a market leader and had done away with 2nd class, much to the consternation of other operators. The Midland took a modern, integrated approach to rail travel and whether it was commercial vigour, engineering expertise or style, for a time they were in the vanguard. George Stephenson did work for them, but they also understood the appeal of stylishness and how far everything from stations and publicity to refreshments could promote the railways as a pleasurable and sophisticated form of travel. From Leicester London Road to Nottingham Midland, surviving stations are confident and original and some small stations like Matlock Bath in Derbyshire and Collingham, Nottinghamshire, were remarkable if not sublime. Everyone played their part, including businesses with expertise like Bemrose.

Bemrose's son, William, became interested in applied art and wrote a book on wood-carving but the firm evidently had the ability to produce fine prints by 1840.  As you see from the 1902 advertisement  (second from top) colour block had become prominent in the specialist work they undertook. You will also note by then they had premises at Snow Hill in east central London. By the 1930s, they were printing off everything from colour railway posters to brochures for L.M.S. With classic overkill, Matlock was promoted not only as our own Switzerland but as a metropolis of hydropathy. (Matlock Bath station was designed to look like a chalet - wood was another feature of Midland designs). 

Readers will know from the previous post that Bemrose worked with Arthur Rigden Read on Valencia. But notice the similarity between the block capitals used in Hall Thorpe's Summer and S.G. Boxsius' Evening afterglow (below). I suspect this masterly woodcut from about 1936 was printed by Bemrose. Certainly if Boxsius had printed it himself, he would have signed it in pencil. (I know it isn't signed because I own it). What Boxsius, Read and Hall Thorpe all had in common is knowledge of the print trade. I cannot be sure that Bemrose printed any of Hall Thorpe's other woodcuts, but someone had to and, as you see from the standard of all the prints and posters here, Bemrose knew what they were about.

But I need to add a footnote about letterpress of the kind used by Bemrose in the C19th. In 1916, Robert Gibbings made the initial proofs for his first colour woodcut, Retreat from Serbia, on the letterpress kept at his father's rectory in County Cork. (See the post about Gibbings). Both Hall Thorpe and Gibbings had studios in Fulham in London towards the end of the war. Gibbings installed an Albion press at his and I believe Hall Thorpe's attitude to making prints owes something at least to Gibbing's resourcefulness. Gibbings showed it was possible make colour woodcuts good enough for the V&A to buy them without using the laborious Japanese method. The V&A may never have paid for any of Hall Thorpe's prints but he made sure they had some all the same.

Arthur Rigden Read's 'Valencia'

 

As there is a copy of this print for sale which people may have seen, I wanted to explain exactly what it is. The print suggests like nothing else he made how much broader Read's approach to making colour woodcuts than any of his contemporaries. I remember seeing it first many years ago in a shop in Camden Passage in Islington and being bewildered. I certainly didn't buy it because I had a very limited idea at the time what a British colour woodcut was partly because I had seen so few of them and partly because I had only even seen Read's Venetian shawl and which I owned by then. But this print was different and I now know why. 

So far as I am aware, Read never had any formal training apart from the instruction he received at the School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography at Bolt Court just off Fleet Street in London. The locality says everything. Most of the boys intended to enter the London print-trade and while he lived in London Read worked as a writer and publisher's illustrator. Beyond that Bolt Court (as it was always called) had a considerable effect on Read's attitude to making prints and, as I said, it is nowhere more evident than in Valencia.

Amongst other things, the boys at Bolt Court were trained in reproductive techniques. The idea was to reproduce the feel of the original work and Read was proficient enough as water-colourist by then for other boys to use his watercolours as a basis for their own lithographic reproductions. Once Read began making colour woodcuts about 1920, he not only gave his attention in particular to pattern and texture, he went out of his way to depict effects like the sheen of silk or the dirt on a chimney sweep's face. It was this approach that helped make him so original. Unfortunately, when he came to to make Valencia in 1933, the way the blocks were printed off defeated him.

Read took the idea for Valencia from Edouard Manet's Lola de Valence. Manet had painted this in 1862 while Lola was performing in Paris as a member of a troupe  of dancers.  It may be a coincidence but Lola de Valence went into the collection of the Louvre in 1912 at the time that Read was training at Bolt Court. He probably also saw it at the Louvre, where it stayed until it was moved to the Jeu de Paume in 1947. Admittedly, it is only the title that makes it plain that Read decided on Manet as his victim this time round though the flowered skirt and the edging of Lola's own shawl obviously provided Read with his main leads. But you have to start somewhere and Read may or may not have known that Manet adapted the pose from Francisco Goya's full length portrait of the Duchess of Alba. Read decided against against that appraoch and instead we have a portrait that emphasises the shawl covered with camellias. Alphonse Legros used to tell his students at the Slade that if they were going to rob anyone, they should rob the rich and not the poor. Artists certainly do not get any richer than Manet. Nothing if not ambitious, Read's image itself falls flat mainly because it was printed on the press at the art printer Bemrose in Derby (this is why none of the images are signed in pencil). Read's flair for texture, which relieved the flat designs he often made, was impossible to reproduce and no amount of busy detail could save the image from looking unappealing. Basically, it is the face that let's it down because the fringes and the flowers are all well executed. And having said this much, I  must add that once I got a second opportunity to buy it at a reasonable price, I did so. But you would need to be a serious collector of Read (or writing a book about colour woodcut) to lay out even fairly serious money ie £250, on Valencia.