William Lee Hankey, Wilfred Fairclough & Charles Mackie at Parker Fine Art

 

There is a good selection of prints and watercolours coming up at Parker Fine Art at Farnham on 9th February, including fairly expensive work by Laura Knight. Needless to say, Knight is never likely to find approval anywhere on Modern Printmakers. Nevertheless, there is good work by three artists who always will. Top of the list in my own book is Wilfred Fairclough's etching Hambledon orchard from 1943. William Lee Hankey's fine pencil and watercolour of a Pas de Calais scene (above) is the better work, but I would probably go for the Fairclough if I were going to bid (which I am not).

The delicate study of country women finds Lee Hankey at his best - bold, spontaneous and sensitive to light and movement. In fact, everything a watercolour study ought to be. I would guess the scene shown is in the village of Camiers where Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown lived and where the two artists sometimes worked alongside one another. Both were part of the troupe of English and Scottish artists who had settled in and around the town of Etaples from very early in the C20th and who exhibited together after the Graver Printers finally put on their first shows in London and Paris in 1911. Lee Hankey and his wife, Mabel, had a studio in the town, but had a house built at Le Touquet in 1904. He also acted as secretary for the Graver Printers while Brown was a leading figure in the Colour Woodcut Society when it was founded in London in 1920. Their first shows were held at the Macrae Gallery were her brother was proprietor.

It shows if nothing else how closely these artists worked together (and there is another post about Lee Hankey working at Camiers elsewhere on the blog). It may be coincidence, but Charles Mackie also worked near Etaples at the same time though the work offered for sale is from the distinguished and influential colour woodcuts he made of Italian subjects. To begin with, it is beyond me how Parker Fine Art can have made such a mistake with their cataloguing. They describe the print as At the Borghese Gardens in Rome simply because that is what it says on the label. If they paid more attention they would know the view shows San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, a church which also appears in the work of Ethel Kirkpatrick and Carl Thiemann amongst others. I suppose they thought it might be St. Peter's but the correct title is The Palace Gardens, Venice (below).

About 1904, Mackie received a commission to copy a painting by Diego Velasquez in the Prado. On his way back from Madrid, he stopped off at his brother's flat in Paris then went on to Rouen and painted The return of the flock to the fold in the village of Lefaux only three or four miles from the Browns' home at Camiers. I suspect this was when he became interested once more in colour woodcut because the painting became the basis for a print. But it was after a trip to Venice in 1908 with the Laura and Harold Knight and Adam Bruce Thomson that he began to make the large-scale night scenes that Frank Brangwyn took note of when he was planning his seminal Bruges  portfolio with Yoshijiro Urushibara.

Mackie's method were unorthodox and either you like the end result, or you don't. But the Italian prints are impressive, especially the glorious Ponte degli Alpini, Bassano del Grappa, the one I like best. he had come to know the Knights after a hockey match played at Hinderwell near Staithes when the couple had only just left art school in Nottingham. Mackie took Knight under his wing and once a week she went down to his studio in Staithes where he showed her how to organise her palette. But it didn't really work for either of them and both artists were dogged by an inability to find any kind of working style.

I am going to return to Fairclough in a review of Ian Lowe's book about his work, so all I will say for now is Orchard Farm used to be at Hambledon in Surrey until some affordable homes were built on top of it. What I will add is that Parkers have got the title right on this one, the print comes from the period of his work I like best and there is another batch of proofs plus a later print included in the sale. Fairclough was also in Spain, with the resulting work being austere. After Mackie had been there, the Browns and Lee Hankeys visited the south together about 1906 and where the two friends worked at Granada. What strikes me as remarkable is that British artists and writers like Laurie Lee, Gerald Brennan and Fairclough continued to find the country rewarding long after it had gone out of fashion.

See also 'William Lee Hankey's deserted village' for more about Camiers and his illustrations for Oliver Goldsmith.

From Corot to Urushibara: Corot, E.C.A. Brown and Theodore Roussel

                                                            
                                                                          

In 1907, the National Gallery in London acquired Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Marsh at Arleux (below). The picture had been painted in Artois in 1871 during the revolutionary period of the Paris Commune. Many artists had left the city and moved to the Pas-de-Calais and continued to paint whatever they saw there. But Corot's picture is strange, lacking in detail, laden with atmosphere and with a deliberate lack of finish. There is a sense of dislocation and foreboding that looks forwards to modern art. Corot is not an artist  I would associate with an image, pure and simple, but it does show exactly why French artists had so much to learn from colour woodcut artists like Hiroshige to whom the meaningful image was naturally a part of what they did.
                                                                  

By the lake (at the top) by E.C.A. Brown was first exhibited (so far as I know) in February, 1911, and shows one of the lakes at the village of Camiers in the Pas-de-Calais where she lived with her husband. The couple moved backwards and forwards between France and accommodation in London and while I do not know whether Brown saw Corot's picture newly-arrived at the National Gallery, you will agree, her woodcut takes so much from Corot, it is uncanny. The picture was given to the Gallery by Mrs Edwin Edwards. She and her husband had made strong links with French artists, including Henri Fantin Latour and Alphonse Legros, as well as Whistler, who had been close to Theodore Roussel, and it is always possible that all these artists had already seen the Corot.n at their home.

Brown knew Charles Bartlett who went to work in Tokyo with the publisher Shazaburo Wantanabe and, as Modern Prinmakers said some while back, used Georges Seurat's A Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte as a basis for his colour woodcut Silk merchants, India. What you see here is the first time a British colour woodcut artist made direct use of modern French art rather than a Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut. Roussel's  Moonrise from the river made in London (where he lived) in 1914 is an interesting variation. The mood has changed again to something far more neutral. There is more I could say, but what you can see here is the beginning of Urushibara's work with Frank Brangwyn and this is why.

                                                                                 

All of these artists - Corot (above and below), Fantin-Latour, Whistler, Legros and Roussel - made prints and all of them, apart from Corot, knew London and some of the artists working there. For Corot what mattered most in a picture was what he called himself 'the value of tone' - and he meant the tone of the overall picture, so it made particular sense for him to produce etchings because he could explore and use tonal value in a new way. Corot was remarkably diverse in the things he did. Despite the basic similarity of the subjects, The dreamer (made in 1854 but not printed until 1921), is very different in approach - basically a type of northern expressionism, if you like - from his etching, Near Rome (1866) He was a translator and an interpreter and that would make him interesting to other artists.

                                                                                    

One of them was Brown. By the lake was not the only print she made that drew on Corot. With others, it is just less obvious, but I think it is still there and the French art historian and critic, Gabriel Mourey, who saw Brown's prints when they were first being exhibited in Paris, said the same thing: 'the countryside between Montreuil-sur-Mer and Etretat is the countryside of Cazin and Corot'. Corot was based at Arras in 1871, but he and his biographer-friend rented a house at Arleux 30 km to the east during July and August, where Corot made a prompt return to the scratchy technique of the first etching.

There are two points here. The importance of French art to the first British colour woodcut artists like Brown hasn't been talked about. It has been very easy to discuss the importance of Japan simply because so little is known about what they were doing and what the artists were actually thinking and doing (and because some of the people doing the writing knew more about C19th Japanese colour woodcut than they did about C19th French etching). The fact that Brown and her friends and colleagues were using the Japanese method is almost beside the point; her husband's prints were mainly colour etchings and as she was the better printer, she printed at least one of them herself (above). And what she achieved there was a sense of tone; it was already an interpretation of Thomas Brown's work because he was never as subtle as that.
                                                                    
                                                                              

Urushibara's main contribution to Frank Brangwyn's Bruges portfolio (1919), above, was its tone. This wasn't a by-product of being very clever when it came to making prints. As The Studio said in 1920, he was translating Brangwyn and to me, at least, that is what Corot was doing, and what Brown did, when she printed her husband's fishing fleet at  Etaples. She was a co-artist on that print and signed it on the left. This was where Urushibara's work with Brangwyn began; this was the environment Urushibara came into when he arrived in London in 1910. People talk as if he were some kind of boy-genius who has arrived from the wilds of Tokyo and did it all by magic. Urushibara was in Paris over the winter and where By the lake, as well as Roussel's etchings, was exhibited and I would think it likely that he saw all of them, along with other colour woodcuts by British artists, simply because his French colleagues were interested, too. So, I am not saying he began by studying Corot etchings; there was no need to, he was surrounded by people who had.

Five proofs by Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown

                                                                            

I am here to make amends today - very belated amends. Five years ago I put up a post about the colour woodcut proofs you see here using an attribution by a dealer on British ebay (where the prints were for sale). I have known for a long time that they were not by Thomas Austen Brown, as they dealer believed, but by his wife, Lizzie Brown. I did say this later on but people still keep picking up the original post and I am off to delete it right now. The Browns had a studio at Camiers near Etaples in northern France in the early years of C20th and all the prints show different aspects of the village and surrounding countryside. (There is a post about the work their friend, William Lee Hankey, did at the village at http://haji-b.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/william-lee-hankeys-deserted-village_13.html). In the proof of  Autumn owned by the British Museum, there are some of the red-tiled cottages in the background. The first proof may be unsigned, but I think it is the better image, simpler and fresher. You can compare the BM print, below.
                                                        

Brown very much belonged to the early experimental phase of British colour woodcut print, alongside artists as diverse as Mabel Royds, Ethel Kirkpatrick, Sidney Lee, Edith Dawson, Allen Seaby, Mabel Lee Hankey and her husband. This is one reason why the proofs differ. Like Seaby, she cut and printed as she went along. Unlike him, she also sometimes added colour as the print progressed so the signature (or lack of it) does nor necessarily mean the prints are  definitive, just that she is satisfied with it. I would certainly think the top print is the later version. You can see how far the image has been reduced to essentials and the way the colours work in harmony. Some iof the blocks have also been removed or re-cut and, all in all, you can see how much was was clarifying her ideas as she worked at the print. She would have first studied colour woodcut under Frank Morley Fletcher at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and together these two prints are perfect examples of what was happening amongst Arts and Crafts practitioners at the time. It was not just a matter of 'trial and error' as the School Principal, W.E. Lethaby put it, 'but re-trial and re-error'. I am sure you can see what he meant. The lower proof has all the twilit sentiment of a genre picture; the top print is altogether tougher.
                                                 

This is where she differs from here teacher and also sometimes from Seaby. he believed at the time that colour woodcut was suited to certain times of day like twilight and it was the twilit mood that was prominent in Fletcher's first colour woodcut, Meadowsweet and Kirkpatrick's early print, The full moon. I tend to think that Brown's approach was more subtle. In one print, the woman is driving her two cows home at the end of the day. In the other, there is not time of day apparent. What did interest her, though, was the lives of working women and children, so the time of day plays an important part in the print. I don't think she is ever merely decorative. As with Royds, it is the lives of the people that matter. The shepherd with his flock is a case in point. Here she is using the rather dark colours of the British Museum Autumn, a tone that brings out a genre complexion which is never quite satisfactory. The girl with the geese may be cute but the design and the colours are unsentimental and concern themselves solely with what is there and not with mood. In this, she was unusual for the time.
                                                                    

What also is worth looking at in Brown's work is her tendency towards abstraction. It would be easy to notice the genre imagery and miss the way she was gradually simplifying the shapes she was using. The roadsides, the shapes of the trees and the rooftops, are all moving in a modern direction. She is never as obviously in debt to William Nicholson as Royds is, but I think his example lies behind the fencing and the boldness of the goose print.

                                                                          
I wish, though, I had been bolder myself and bought these last prints, which I like very much. Since the auction, I have spent quite a lot of time thinking Lizzie Brown over and come to appreciate more exactly what she was doing and what she achieved. My favourites may not be here but these two remain eloquent for all their imperfections. The use of line and recession is the work of an artist of the utmost delicacy and the more she simplifies, the more she draws you in. There is still a hint of staginess in the looming trees and a touch of William Blake in the resting flock, but she pins the moment down, I don't think I ever doubt that what I am seeing isn't real. As for the print below, I think the colours used are exquisite and almost no-one used the keyblock with such tact or as so expressively apart from Royds. It has almost nothing at all in common with her Japanese predecessors. There is no hint of ukiyo-e stylisation; she only takes the medium and uses it to great advantage. I am not saying she hadn't looked at the Japanese masters; I am just saying she didn't try to let us know she had. She simply uses light to tell her tale. Nor is it the light of the past or of other cultures. This is the light of the present, of the simple pleasure we take in life..