The enigmatic E.A. Hope

Modern Printmakers is not short on women artists of the early C20th who have turned out to be hard to discover much about even though Hope herself was well-connected. Worse still, it is almost impossible to find her prints for sale though I did come across one in Australia where she was born. I should say here I was mistaken when I said in the first post I devoted to her that her father had been the governor of Australia. He was governor of the state of Victoria and returned home to become the Queen's chamberlain before returning to Australia in 1900.

  

Hope first studied at the Slade School of Art before moving to the London School of Art about 1908 and where the potter Bernard Leach and the Australian artist, Jessie Traill were fellow students. The School has been set up by Frank Brangwyn in Stratford Road in 1904. Brangwyn himself had never had any formal training and as sceptical about British art school as British art schools and art critics were about him. Like Claude flight at the Grosvenor School in the 1920s, Brangwyn had an inordinate influence on his students who tended all to end up looking like him rather than themselves. At some stage Hope went so far as to commission a bookplate from Brangwyn who produced this studied pose of a boy-girl figure filling a basket with apples. I could go on but I will resist the temptation to mock Brangwyn and can only add that Hope continued in much the same vein with her images of wicked fauns drinking wine from 1911.

The lush literary style had little in common with the faux naif woodcuts she eventually made but her work was shown at exhibitions organised by the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art early in the century and a couple of works went into the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. But they all tend to seem remote from the kind of work that interest readers of Modern Printmakers. Yoshijiro Urushibara was also a student at the London School of Art about then and went on to make the Bruges portfolio with Brangwyn during the war but the small scale colour woodcuts have little in common with either artist apart from the nocturnal subjects they chose for Bruges.

I have now discovered the night scene (above) show the town and monastery of Subiaco south of Rome while a reader tells me the print at the top hangs in Gargunnock House near Stirling. This was not all that far from her ancestral home at Hopetoun House near Edinburgh and presumably the two families knew one another. (My reader tells me all the pictures on the wall at Gargunnock are associated with the house). The impression I get from Alan Guest's records and copies of catalogues I have is that in common with many other artists who began to make colour woodcuts, it all happened after the war. She exhibited Albi with the Graver Printers in 1928, followed by York and Sturminster Newton 1929 and went on exhibiting with them until 1938. 

Some of the prints like Albi, Boston market (1934) and Trotton Bridge (1936) can be seen first post I put up, 'Land of Hope and Glory: the colour woodcuts of E.A. Hope. The problem is only the photo taken by my reader and the one of Subiaco do Hope much justice and all I have been able to do here is offer some more of the story.

A tale of two bridges

 

In 1915, the writer Walter Sparrow Shaw published 'A book of bridges' with illustrations in black-and-white and colour by Frank Brangwyn. Shaw was a great admirer of the work of Brangwyn in a world where the critical reaction to his work was more sceptical at home than it often was abroad. He and Brangwyn also had a fair amount in common. Shaw had been brought up in the Welsh town of Wrecsam but had been educated in England and at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, a background that must have appealed to Brangwyn whose mother was born in Brecon and whose father was born in England of Welsh parents. Brangwyn himself had been born in Bruges where he had lived until the age of nine when the family had gone to live in Shepherd's Bush in London.

So far, so similar. Brangwyn spent more time in his father's workshop and at the South Kensington Museum than he did at school and wangled an apprenticeship with William Morris. Shaw, on the other hand, was very well educated. Apart from the seven years he spent in Brussels, he had attended Chester College followed by  a stint at Newton Abbot College in south Devon. In the late 1870s he then studied for 15 months at the Slade School of Art under the exacting but multi-talented French artist, Alphonse Legros, before moving on to Brussels. This was exactly the kind of a person to recommend themselves to Brangwyn whose bravura style was always in need of sympathetic adjustment. What is astonishing is how many bridges Brangwyn was capable of and wherever he went there was a succession of dramatic arches and theatrical weather.

At face value, the black-and-white illustrations were woodcuts, but in reality were no more than the approximations of a man who could apparently turn his hand to anything but depended on others to do the work, a man who could criticise the art schools for doing nothing but turning out clever imitators but had no scruples about working with artists who had studied there. Enter Yoshijiro Urushibara, a man who followed the longest apprenticeship of anyone I can think of. At the time Shaw and Brangwyn were collaborating on 'A book of bridges', Urushibara was printing a large number of blocks mainly prepared by Sugasiki Hideaki for a reproduction of a copy of an ancient Chinese scroll painting Admonitions of the instructress by the C3/C4th artist,  Gu Kaizhi (below) . He then moved on to a short series of colour woodcuts of Stonehenge roughly based on a print by William Giles remarkable for all being so alike.

Brangwyn knew a good thing when he saw one and there followed a unique collaboration with Urushibara and the curator and writer, Laurence Binyon, on a superb portfolio of colour woodcuts simply called Bruges which Brangwyn designed and Urushibara cut and printed (below). Binyon had an intererest in Chinese and Japanese art for a long time and it was Binyon and the head of prints, Howard Colvin, who had recognised the significance of the Admonitions when it had been brought in to the British Museum a few years previously. Bruges was published in 1919 and Urushibara must have set to worked on Ruins of a Roman bridge soon after the portfolio was finished. The image had appeared in Shaw's but the success of the later image depended almost entirely on Urushibara's interpretation. His work, The Studio Magazine said, were translations of Brangwyn, though interpretation is more like it  and I would find it hard to believe that Urushibara hadn't chosen the image or the time of day. In the original,  there was no obvious time of day and the left hand side of the sky is filled with a shower of rain. In the Urushibara colour woodcut, it is a lucid twilight with a crescent moon hanging above the bridge.

This was the kind of imagery and symbolism that attracted western artists to the work of Japanese printmakers in the first place. On a simple level, the two bridges are images of collaboration, but the ruin in the foreground and the complete bridge seen beneath the single arch suggests the life Urushibara was leading in a way that would be natural for a Japanes artist Within you/without you is crude but it is something like that. Today Urushibara has a reputation for skillfulness but within that over-arching reputation there was more. He was also ambitious and would not have taken the job at the British Museum if it had not suited him and aside from the work with Hideaki and Binyon on the Gu Kaizhi he was asked to supervise a long-term project which involved the unrolling and conservation of scrolls excavated at Mogao in China by Sir Aurel Stein (until the Chinese government put a stop to his activities). Urushibara was not only a professional conservator, he had a professional interest in archaeology and the choice of subjects like the ruins of Stonehenge and the Roman bridge across the river Loire at Brives make sense.

In the original Brangwyn image, the new bridge seen through the one great arch of the old bridge is a neat visual trick. By casting moonlight on the far bridge and making it more prominent by emphasising the small islands in the river, Urushibara made the series of arches the focus of the image. All this came about only because Urushibara handled the colour and printing with such subtlety and care. Niot many artists could use only blues and greys to express the last light of the day and keep a print so varied and of such interest. It is not simply evocative, it suggests the sympathetic relations of one thing and another which no one looking through Shaw's book would have been concerned with.  I am not suggesting Brangwyn didn't understand all of this only that he was too restless a man to be so thoughtful. All too often western artists have concentrated on the means rather than the end of Japanese printmaking. Urushibara's real achievement was to put new energy and poetry into British colour print. As Giles said, all of us owe him a debt, a debt that was not only to do with technical things.

You only have to compare S.G, Boxsius' Houghton Bridge, Sussex (the smaller bridge above) to see the effect Urushibara's image-within-an-image had other artists during the 1920s. Phillip Needell's colour woodcut of the old bridge at Avignon was less subtle and had none of the understatement typical of Boxsius but bears in mind the grandeur (and overstatement) of Brangwyn's original idea. The interesting thing is that we would not have associated Boxsius or Needell with the Japanese school of printmaking but obviously neither of them were immune. Urushibara's version was not about the past because we search for more bridges in the print than we can find, no, the little bridges of Needell and Boxius only go to prove that Ruins of a Roman bridge looked forward to the future,

Bruges by night: Frank Brangwyn & Yoshijiro Urushibara

Many years ago I was on a visit to Leed Gallery of Art with a friend (who had trained at the Royal College of Art in the Hockney days) and he began to mock the technique used by Frank Brangwyn (1867 - 1956). 'He puts black lines round everything,' he said. When I pointed out that van Gogh had done the same, he only replied, 'That was different.'  Well, Brangwyn was different and that's for sure.

He was born in the old Belgian city of Bruges where his father worked on church architecture. After an early childhood spent there, he went back to Britain and was sent to copy things at the old Kensington Museum (now the V&A) and received precious little in the way of formal education. Eventually, he was taken on at William Morris's workshops in Walthamstow so his background was to some extent a practical one, in the arts and crafts tradition.

He may have left Bruges but Bruges did not leave him and at some point during the first war, with Belgium overrun by the German army, he had the idea of translating designs of the city where he had spent his childhood into colour woodcut and the folio he produced with the Japanese woodblock maker Yoshijiro Urushibara (1888 - 1953) turned out to be one of the most personal responses to the terrible events of that war.

The mere choice of the medium was a very interesting one. It shows to what extent colour woodcut was regarded as belonging to the arts and crafts movement by an artist who had after all initially trained under the aegis of the great man himself. More than that the project exemplified the arts and crafts approach to co-operation and their attempt to break down barriers beween disciplines. The woodcuts acted as illustrations to six poems by the writer and scholar, Laurence Binyon. Now, untill 1915 Binyon had been head of the new sub department of oriental prints and drawings at the British Museum where Urushibra had been working as a conservator of prints and scrolls since 1912. Binyon was given leave to volunteer as an orderly in military hospitals so he was the only one of the three men with experience of the war. He returned to the museum in 1918 and this symptomatic folio itself was published the following year.

Symptomatic because I wonder whether Brangwyn already realised that he was going out of fashion, a process that would end in the derision of the sixties. It did happen; he became unfashionable in the way that Augustus John did. He didn't have a good war, as they say, and I think colour woodcut looked sufficiently stylish for him to make a come-back. He had caused outrage in both this country and Germany when he produced a propaganda poster showing a terrified German soldier about to be bayonetted. So much so Kaiser Wilhelm had vowed to have his head. These night pieces of Bruges are about as far as you can get from the eighty war posters he produced in all.

Different and yet not so unlike the posters that designers in the arts and crafts mould like F Gregory Brown were starting to make. Brangwyn approached almost everything he touched with bravura. What Urushibara finally offered him was subtlety.

Before he came to Europe, Urushibara had worked at the publisher Shimbi Shoin who specialised
in fine reproductions of Japanese woodblock prints so he was ideally suited not just to interpret Brangwyn's work but to get a very good likeness. What he added was the kind of trance effect we were later to see when he made prints like Moonlight, Bournemouth.

                                                                                    
What is so utterly remarkable about the work of the Japanese artist was the way in which he was able to be true to both Brangwyn and to himself. I know this sounds like an allusion to what we as Westerners see as oriental self-effacement but I am not sure what other term we can use when faced with what to us is a strange displacement of the ego.

I've not really said anything about the individual prints as I would usually do. Perhaps this is because there is only one print and this is also the Urushibara effect. He brings everything together into an overall mood; the differences between these lamplit, evening images is less than what they have in common. I don't think I could really judge without seeing all of them together alongside the poems by Binyon and I still haven't read those nor have I come across all the images in a format suitable for the blog. So, this post must be as partial as Brangwyn was himself.