Edna Boies Hopkins: the Derbyshire connection

Back in 1908, the educationalist Samuel Clegg published a monograph about the American colour woodcut artist, Edna Boies Hopkins. This included an odd passage where he said he  regretted that her prints had not been made available 'for art school purposes'. In those days it was common practice for art students to study and copy the work of other people. Alphonse Legros taught his students at the Slade to distinguish between the hand of Raphael and the work of his two assistants. But this didn't make the remark any less odd, at least not till he wrote a second monograph about Allen Seaby who did make imperfect (and unsigned) proofs of his own prints available to schools at a reduced rate.

Boies Hopkins was a student of Arthur Wesley Dow, himself a well-known art educationalist by the time Clegg was publishing his monographs. Whether she made her own proofs available is another thing but British students did nevertheless make use of her work in a very direct way as you can see from the nicotianas below.

Clegg was headmaster of the new Long Eaton School and one of his school governors acquired four  recent prints by Boies Hopkins for the very purpose. I can't remember offhand whether Nicotianas (below, 1909) was one of them but judging by the children's work made only four years afterwards in 1913, it was. So, here were thirteen and fourteen-year old Derbyshire school children cutting and printing their own colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner with Boies Hopkins examples supplied for them to study by the school. 

But why use Boies Hopkins and not Seaby? I think there are two reasons. Firstly, Boies Hopkins concentrated on one image rather than make a complex picture and, secondly, although Boies Hopkins had gone to Japan in order to learn how to make a keyblock, by the time Clegg wrote his article, the keyblock was no more than a vestige in her work and often wasn't there at all. This all made the process of cutting and printing much easier for the children.

On of these lucky children was Edward Loxton Knight who went on to train at Nottingham School of Art where he specialised in commercial art. When I first wrote about Loxton Knight, I had no idea about the survival of this remarkable series of school prints but, as you can see The primrose-seller (1929) his first professional print, the Boies Hopkins lesson sunk in. It is not so much the flower subject that was like her as the overall tone, particularly the way the print was wiped in the same downward manner Boies Hopkins was using before the first war.

As you can see, Loxton Knight had learned to use a keyblock to define smaller shapes and to provide moulding for larger figures like his primrose-seller. Ironically, he didn't use the Japanese manner at all but printed all his blocks with poster colour, adapting the flat Japanese style to give the contemporary feel of commercial art of the period. But he certainly got away with it and, so far as I am concerned, this first print of his was the most satisfying he made along with The Nottingham Canal.

It is in the nature of commercial artists to make use of approximation to gain their effect. But there was another sleight of hand involved in The primrose-seller and one you could only be aware of if you know this location well. The primrose seller is standing on the north side of the market square in Nottingham where people were still selling flowers and newspapers when I grew up. The problem is from where the man is standing, it is impossible to see the spire of St Peter's church at the bottom of Wheeler Gate. It just looked better that way, that's all.

Arthur Wesley Dow: lost chances along Ipswich River

                                                                                                                                         

 

 I begin to wonder what exactly was in Arthur Wesley Dow's mind when he made his first colour woodcuts in Massachusetts early in the 1890s. (The photograph shows Dow with a guitar seated on a wheelbarrow with his brother). Over the years he has gained a reputation as the first artist in the United States to make them and although this is true, scholars and academics are in the bad habit of giving such events as 'the first American colour woodcuts' a meaning they never had at the time. It's called art history.

 

That said, this would not be Modern Printmakers without a little bit of history of our own. Dow was not the first person to make modern colour woodcuts. The honour, such as it is, goes to Auguste Lepere in Paris. He came up with two or three rather peculiar and misconceived works starting just before Dow and was followed by Henri Riviere who had the bright idea of a making a portfolio of woodcuts, which all included one view or other of the brand-new Eiffel Tower in imitation of Hokusai's 100 views of Mount Fuji. But Riviere soon realised his project was too ambitious and he scaled back and most of the prints in the series became lithographs.
                                                          

Wisely, Dow made much smaller prints than Riviere and also made prints that didn't depend on a famous location. Instead he chose the river bank of his home town of Ipswich and, I believe, the north shore at Boston. It was a deliberate choice because he had come to the conclusion that the representation of a subject was less important than manner of representation. Beyond that he also produced variants of the same print, often radically different ways of using the same blocks. These were called 'lost chances' by his colleague and  friend, Ernest Fenellosa who was a curator of oriental art at the Museum of Fine Art at Boston.

Dow had come back to the U.S. in 1887  after training in Paris and later said, 'An experience of five years in the French Schools left me thoroughly dissatisfied with academic theory' and he went on to say, 'in a search for something more vital I began a comparative study of the art of all nations and epochs'. But this was not an idea he had to himself. Oscar Wilde was more subtle when he said, 'All beautiful things belong to the same era' and what Dow was doing was taking up the study of aesthetics and as he read and looked he came into contact with Fenellosa at M.F.A. and both began to work together and eventually Dow became an assistant curator for a time.
                                                                      

But this is not what artists generally do and in some ways the small prints you see here are what you might call teaching examples. At the time young craftsmen and artists were sent to museums and galleries to copy work and what Dow was doing was making a synthesis of the work he had himself studied to suggest a way forward beyond that kind of sterile reproduction. The next step  was to start giving lectures and then to teach. But again, this was nothing new. His model was the English artist and theorist, John Ruskin, and it was education that drove men like Ruskin forwards, the education of the working-class, the education of craftsmen and of artists. But then Ruskin had a great and practical follower in William Morris. Fenellosa and Dow were variants, lost chances, if you like. You can see that Dow also took photographs of many of the same places. Like the prints, they are impressions, the Ipswich River and its boats and buildings and bridges are depicted tonally and then in colour. It could be anywhere; it didn't matter.
                                                             

Fenellosa was a scholar and teacher while Dow was true to the nineties in the way he combined making art and coming up with a theory of art education. But it was all very different from what was happening in England in the Arts and Crafts at the time where the emphasis was placed on doing and the way people learned by doing proper work. All this helps to explain what I think these early prints by Dow are really about and why it was that British artists like John Platt, Ian Cheyne and Arthur Rigden Read from about 1920 onwards could send prints to the U.S. and win the prizes. Dow hadn't liked French academic theory and went on to replace it with theory of his own. It was left to Dow's students like Edna Boies Hopkins to make the really good prints. When Dow began to draw on the Japanese example and make colour woodcuts in his own way, he could have had no idea what would follow. Looking at this work is like following his footprints as he works his way along the shore. It is not so much they are variants, they are tentative, with nothing final about them.
                                                                         

The colour images are from Herschel and Adler's exemplary website so many thanks to them. The photographs come from the distinguished collection at M.F.A. Boston. Please don't sue.

                                                                    

Arthur Wesley Dow: declaration of independence

                                                                                     
It would probably be a mistake to try and be too exact about Arthur Wesley Dow. Apparently, he never set out to be an artist in the first place and there are also people in the United States who take the line that his work as an educationalist is more important. This will be just a brief look at some of his prints; the man himself, in the end, was no specialist.

                                                                              

He was, though, a man for libraries and museums and took private art classes whilst he was doing other things. He was then encouraged to study in France and left the US in 1884 only to find himself discouraged by the prevailing academic approach to art. I do wonder what he was doing in France because he was there, on and off, for five years, but by his own account he didn't discover the work of Hokusai untill he had returned to Massachusetts in 1885. But then some artists make up a story for themselves about themselves and I have to say I find it hard to believe that he could spend so long in France at the height of the interest in Japanese woodblocks without knowing who finding out who Hokusai was. But let's go on with the tale as it has been told. First off, he went back to his town of Ipswich but soon moved to Boston where he had more opportunity to sell his work. While there, he made his well-known trip to the Boston Public Library where he discovered the work of Hokusai in a book.

                                                                              

He has presented this as a moment of truth. Perhaps it was, but perhaps it wasn't. This led him on to Ernest Fenellosa who was curator of Japanese Art at Boston Museum of Fine Arts. This institution was in the process of building up an important collection, partly based on works that Fenellosa had bought back from Japan himself, having spent years there teaching. The upshot was Fenellosa took on Dow as an assistant and the pair of them set about categorising Japanese visual art. Now here comes my own declaration of independence.

                                                                             

A good deal has been made of his friendship with Fenellosa but so far as his printmaking goes I think the curator of prints at the museum had a bigger effect on Dow. The man we are talking about is Sylvester Koehler and for me he is one of the best examples of print curators at their best. He had been born in Leipzig but had moved to the States as a boy and was eventually offered the job at Boston as a leading figure in the etching revival (and I have to say this isn't independent research). He probably met Dow in Boston but Koehler was only appointed in 1885, the same year Dow took a post at The Pratt Institute in New York.. The following year Fenellosa was dismissed for marrying so soon after his divorce.

                                                                                 

That year Koehler was made honorary curator of graphic art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and in 1891 organised an exhibtions of Japanese prints that included print-making equipment and blocks. More to the point, the following year a very helpful report was published by the Smithsonian that basically told you how to make them. And it took all that time for Dow to get round to it. And then he couldn't stop.(And as you will be wondering, the man in the photograph wearing the tam is Dow. I can't remember who the other person is but he is not Fenellosa (and not Koelher either).

                                                                               

Dow was also a keen photographer and is also credited with making some very early linocuts. Now, I like the print below very much, but again I find it hard to credit that Dow could have been making linocuts as early as 1911, the date of this print (called 'Snowy Peak, Los Angeles'). On this one, though, I may be wrong. Dow was at pains to create an American style and he went about this in two ways: by example, and by teaching. For instance, he was tempted from the Pratt in 1904 to be director of the new department of fine arts at the Teacher's College, Columbia University. It's paradoxical, but he was not the only artist to attempt an independant style using art from a very different culture as a model. At the same time artists in Glasgow and Galloway were trying for their own national style partly using the graphic art of Japan as a model, too. It was of course by and large free of associations for them. In a similar way, Claude Flight in the 1920s praised linocut for having no history. It's disingenuous, when you look at the reality - I mean how much they all knew - but who am I to judge? Fortunately, these eloquent little prints here speak for themsleves.