Elizabeth York Brunton: the story so far

 

Nowadays, the internet is awash with all sorts of misleading information and misassumption that does lesser-known artists no justice. So far as Elizabeth  York Brunton goes, I will admit I am to blame for  not challenging this automated tosh and putting the record straight. Happily, the opportunity to make amends has arisen because a small group of colour woodcuts by Brunton has turned up in Glasgow, including Drei Zinnen (above) and the pair of birds (below) and these thrown new light on her career. Not all that much light, it has to be said, but enough of it to make a difference.

Brunton was born at Musselburgh in Scotland in 1880. She was the daughter of William Neilson Brunton and his second wife Louisa. At the time, Brunson was a building surveyor but went on to run a wire manufacturing business in Musselburgh. Typical of the age, the family was large and in 1910 Brunton decided to make provisions for his three unmarried daughters who  at the time were living together at 15, Regent Terrace, Edinburgh. 

It is likely she was a student on the teacher training course at Edinburgh College of Art by then. In common with almost all government schools of art, Edinburgh provided no training in fine art (and I don't know why Glasgow was an exception). No one knows whether or not she was introduced to colour woodcut there. Mabel Royds had trained as a teacher at Chester and was on the staff at Edinburgh before she left for India in 1914. All we can say is Brunton's colour woodcuts are in the Japanese manner adopted by many Scottish and English artists of the period and make use a full keyblock and inks applied with a brush. This is apparent in the sky and the brown rocks of Drei Zinnen and is no different from what Ethel Kirkpatrick or Mabel Royds were doing. 

But in many other respects, Brunton was different. Her principal training took place under the animal sculptor Edouard Nevallier at his studio in the southern suburbs of Paris and for many years Brunton used a flat on the Boulevard de Montparnasse. The difficulty is I know of only one surviving sculpture. This is a bronze bust of her father belonging to the museum at Musselburgh and although at least one other statue was exhibited at in the bust is all we have to go one at present. At one time, there was a little photo of it online but even that has disappeared so I must rely on my agent in Scotland to make further enquiries because I know my own got nowhere.

It goes without saying that over a career of at least thirty years, there were changes of subject and style, though animals and birds are constant throughout. The fact is so little is available, I can only note the influence of Scottish faux naif early on and Ohara Koson and art deco in the 1920s and assume many of her bird subjects were found in the Jardin des Plantes.

Considering I have a reliable list of twenty-two colour woodcuts by York Brunton, the group of twelve prints I know of in public collections and the four or five currently online is as discouraging as it is enigmatic. She exhibited widely and must have sold her work, so where is it all? Very little turns up, even in Scotland. The gateway was for sale in Scotland some years ago but was too uninteresting to buy and the top three prints illustrated here are coming up for auction at Great Western Auctions, Glasgow, on 13th June, 2026.

The check list draws on the research of a reader in Scotland and Alan Guest's unpublished list of prints. Alan made use of catalogues of the Graver Printers in Colour and the Colour Woodcut Society as well as the small collection held by  the British Museum. In addition, my reader made use of catalogues of the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Glasgow Institute.

I have assumed there are only two prints of Drei Zinnen.

The pig market, Montreuil 1911

The treadmill 1911

The pergola 1922 (Hoover Museum of Art, Cornell University)

The watchtower 1924

Les cochers 1924

Old gateway 1925

On the Dee, Kirkcudbright 1925

Drei Zinnen from Landro 1925

Sellagruppe 1926

Calendar with owls 1926 (Author's collection)

Tofana 1926

Demoiselle cranes 1927

Aigrettes 1928

Penguins 1928

Pedwell, Norham on Tweed 1928

Summer 1928

Chamaeleon 1928

(St Roch) Rhone 1929

Bullfinches 1935

Donkeys 1936

Monte Cristallo

Drei Zinnen from Lake Misurina

Java Finches

Edinburgh School

The one thing I did not want to do in the last post was to give the wrong impression about Mabel Royds herself. I suspect the reason she was willing to help Norman Bassett Hall was because she had always learned from other artists throughout her own working life. But then there are so many misconceptions about Royds, it is hard to know where to begin. But one person that was right about her was Malcolm Salaman when he described her work as synthetic. It was not only a matter of how much she assimilated from other artist, there was also something premeditated about her use of colour.

                                                                             
The Indian notebooks are also misleading. It has also struck me as odd that notebooks that were sometimes ten or more years old could provide the basis for new work. But you only need to compare Elizabeth York Brunton's colour woodcut 'The pergola' from 1922 and Royd's 'The musicians' from 1927 to see how far Royds could synthesise her drawings made in India and work made by her contemporaries after she had returned.

Royds and her husband had moved back to Edinburgh in 1919 while York Brunton had been born there and had trained at Edinburgh College of Art amongst other places (but almost certainly before it became a college under Frank Morley Fletcher in 1907). Like Royds (who was six years older) she had also trained in Paris and had spent time working there. She was a sculptor-printmaker like Eric Gill and to a lesser extent Robert Gibbings. She had a strong interest in structure, texture and light. Her prints are far from technically perfect and often have a scrappy look to them but they were also spontaneous and exploratory and again I suspect this was what attracted Royds who after all was quite a literary and cerebral artist. But then York Brunton was no slouch herself when it came to lifting ideas from others. Take a look at William Giles' 'At eventide, Rothenburg am Tauber' from about 1905.
                                                                               

Giles had a wayward originality and commitment to his trade that was beyond the reach of many artists and York Brunton's inclusion of his outlandish orange rooftops in her own print shows exactly the kind of example he had set for artists who were making colour prints. His work is seminal, it is as simple as that. I had always assumed that York Brunton had used a French subject for her print. Looking at the all together for the first time, I can't really avoid the coming to the conclusion that her woodcut shows Rothenburg as well! She did work in Germany as well, after all. What is fascinating is the way the combination of deviant purple and warm sand was first transferred by York Brunton into her own woodcut then taken up by Royds along with Brunton's use of shadow.

All this strikes me as productive and not at all inbred. All three prints have something different to offer us. York Brunton's may be the weakest but it also has the kind of nonchalance and vigour we have come to expect from good modern prints. Royds' woodcut was masterly in a more obvious way. The use of western conventions - the sense of light and space and the study of the human figure - are plainly obvious. Less apparent is the subtle use of double framing to enhance the intimacy of the scene and her constant sense of crowded space was perhaps never bettered than it was here. Giles' print is of course superb printmaking. No British artist, before or since, did it quite like him. Beyond that, the imagination was at work. It's those quirky white railings that give away how fascinated he was by what he saw but the way he re-imagined those things. If Royds synthesised then as someone once said about Giles, he transposes his feelings.

 

 

 

Elizabeth York Brunton

There must be a process whereby an artist becomes an enigma. How it came about for the Scottish printmaker, Elizabeth York Brunton, I do not know, but certainly an enigma is exactly what she has become. For someone with such an individual gift, we should have more on her, but in three years or so, I have turned up only two images. Belatedly, here is a first post on her.

I deduce that she came to colour woodcut late. This was by no means unusual. In fact, her close contemporary, Marion Gill, began to exhibit her first woodcuts the same year as York Brunton, having also studied at Edinburgh College of Art. Unlike Helen Stevenson, who graduated and began to exhibit the previous year, both Gill and York Brunton were in their early forties. But while Gill went on to become a superlative maker of prints in as far as her technique was just wonderful, York Brunton I suspect stayed closer to her teacher's own approach. The expressive cutting and printing you see here can only really follow the example of one person. Unfortunately, I have no proof that it was Mabel Royds. But you decide.

Like Stevenson, she had made a surprising number of woodcuts by early on in her printmaking career and I have to assume that some of them were student pieces. Certainly by 1926 there were at least eleven, all of them in the Japanese manner, and not bad going for someone whose first exhibition date (so far as we know) was 1924. Owls, with its twiggy blue keyblock, may well be one of them. Fairly simple in its structure, there is nevertheless depth of experience in the way she makes us look up and down the picture and note the alertness of the bird and its intensity of vision. (Like so many good works of art, it describes itself).

                                                                              

This follows straight through into two more of her subjects that sit and wait. Again, I am going to make an assumption that this so far unidentified print, is Summer. It is altogether more sophisticated and it has already been pointed how much it has in common with Frank Morley Fletcher's image of a farm at Trepied near Etaples. This one also looks like France to me and presumably describes a scene in a tourist town where people ride carriages for pleasure. If the way the keyblock is used to catch the shadow in the trees and bark is Fletcher, the array of colours, especially the soft peach and turquoise, is Royds. But Royds never has that sense of heat and indolence, even in her Indian prints. York Brunton's work is much closer to the painter who paints out of doors and catches the moment of time in her claws. Royds is just that touch academic by this point. The patterns that the print sets up - the tree trunks, the wheels, the doors, are more subtly French than either of her teacher's work, even though all three of them studied in Paris at one time or another.

Probably kindred spirits gravitate towards one another.  But I think I have made enough suggestions for one short post. Over the next month or two I shall be looking at more woodcuts by York Brunton and reporting back. The subjects sound similar: birds or landscape and sometimes both. Enigmatic, yes, and also intriguing.