The experimental Mr Batten: John Dixon Batten & British colour woodcut

 

John Dixon Batten's father, John Winterton Batten (above) had wanted him to be a lawyer and, like many of the young men of the time, including Frank Morley Fletcher, Batten went along with his father's plans for him. He gained a degree in law from Trinity College, Cambridge, was called to the Bar and promptly gave it up for a course at the Slade School. There he encountered the debonair Frenchman, Alphonse Legros, who was professor of fine art. Legros believed he had wasted his life teaching young artists but Batten's approach to art depended on the example set by Legros. Unlike Mabel Royds who had studied at Chester before she went to the Slade, the school and Legros was all Batten had to go on. It was probably enough because from engraving on cornelian to theatre design, Legros had a broad range of skills he could impart to the students and his attitude to colour was obviously one of them.

   

The role Legros played in preparing the way for British colour woodcut has never been considered except on Modern Printmakers. A good deal has been made of the example of Japanese ukiyo'e prints but far less of the influence of European artists. When Walter Crane went to Rome with Legros, he was astonished his friend spent all his time there copying the corner of a fresco by Raphael. As it happens, I recently come back from Florence where Masaccio and Masolino's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel are undergoing their second modern restoration (above). I told the guide it was like Prada and she said, 'Prada want to come here and look at these colours'. But it was not only colour. Legros had looked so carefully at the Raphael cartoons in the V&A, it could show students like Batten the difference between Raphael's hand and those of his two assistants.

    

What this amounted to was a serious interest in graphic design and colour and both played a part of what Batten did in The centaur. This was made in 1921 twenty-two years after The tiger (below) the first print he made more or less independently of Frank Morley Fletcher. Batten had a great admiration for the work of Hokusai and was not beyond pinching good ideas from him like his hobyahs, but what he borrowed was always translated into a European idiom and what is best about European tradition is here. It may not be to contemporary taste but Batten was simply being true to the central tenets like perspective, realism, the nude and respect for past art but providing students with a practical way of making colour prints. 

He knew what a struggle it had been for Fletcher and himself. It also knew how easy it was to be led astray. By 1921, the post war revival of colour woodcut had begun and new artists on the scene like Frank Brangwyn and Yoshijiro Urushibara were heavily influenced by Japanese style and subject matter and Batten had never believed that was the way to go. Nor was he alone. Mabel Royds had never showed any interest but more canny artists like Ian Cheyne went to Japan for  sense of chic. It was all in the interpretation. The centaur was made that year in two versions, one using four blocks and suitable, he said, for a portfolio or illustration and a second with six blocks like the one above and suitable to be framed and hung on the wall where it would need more impact. He was trying to be open-minded and suggest there was considerable potential for printmakers as the New Year card designed for his parents suggests.

    

Another development that mattered to Batten was the growing reaction of important traditionalists like the etcher, Sir Frank Short. (The shadowed valley 1927, above). Short had been put in charge of the etching class at the Royal College of Art in 1891 two years before Batten began to try out colour woodblock (below) and, as he was there until 1926, remained very influential and was able to uphold what he saw as a tradition that went all the way back to Mantegna, Durer and Rembrandt. The problem was this view of tradition was partial. Italian and German artists had made colour woodcuts well before Rembrandt was working and W.R. Lethaby went so far as the suggest colour print had been introduced to Japan from Europe. So far as he was concerned, it was all down to method and as Fletcher had written in 1916, 'Batten... had attempted, and partially succeeded in making, a print from wood and metal blocks with colour mixed with glycerine and dextrine... As the Japanese method seemed to promise greater advantage and simplicity, we began experiments together... ' and the rest is history. Fletcher not only became a proponent of Japanese colour but of Japanese style and was as unrelenting as Short.

                                            

The colour woodcut class at Edinburgh College of Art

 

It has been believed for many years now that Frank Morley Fletcher taught a colour woodcut class during his time as principal of Edinburgh College of Art, a period that ran from 1907 to 1923. I want to try and lay this for to rest once and for all. He did not. And while I am at it neither did Mabel Royds. The reasons are different, but the outcome is the same.

In order to gain a teaching post at any state school in Britain, you needed a teacher's diploma. Royds had one from Chester, her husband, E.S. Lumsden, William Giles and Allen Seaby all had one from University College, Reading, S.G. Boxsius had one from Islington, Chica McNabb and Ian Fleming had theirs from Glasgow and Helen Stevenson from Edinburgh. The whole point of the state art school was to train teachers. It has been a famous and long-lived complaint that students went to art school to become artists and were subsequently told that was not why they were there. Fletcher never set foot as a student in any state art school. The myth may have come about because he taught a class at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. But those schools were not run but the state. Rather they were the responsibility of new statutory authorities set up by the government and had the own independent boards of education. This meant that these vocational schools could employ working practitioners like May Morris and Edward Johnston. More likely, though, misconceptions about Fletcher are merely based on assumption.

If there appears to be a discrepancy, it centres round this fact. Many headmasters of art school came straight from what was effectively post-graduate study at the Royal College of Art in London. To Walter Crane, its first principal, the R.C.A. was 'a teacher mill'. (Nor did the chief agitator last long in the post.) It was taken for granted that a graduate would get a job as headmaster once they came out. John Platt (above, painted by Fletcher at Robin Fedden's house in France in 1922) went to Leek and Thomas Todd Blaylock went to Bournemouth. So, why was Fletcher eligible for the post at Edinburgh? Like Crane, he had no qualifications. I can only assume the post of principal involved no classroom teaching. But there were ways round the system apparently. Walter Phillips only taught in private school in Britain but did gain employment at the Technical Institute in Winnipeg.

So, why didn't Royds teach colour woodcut at Edinburgh? ('Edinburgh Castle' above is her only print showing the city). Because she was employed on the fine art course and colour woodcut was taught on the applied arts course where Platt was head of department for a few years. The only Scottish colour woodcut artist I know of who trained under Platt, was Stevenson. I have never come across anyone else, though I assume others may have studied the technique.

Going back to the Royal College, the most famous modern artist to have come out of the British system is David Hockney. He began at Bradford, then went on to the R.C.A. and Hockney, for all his Celtic exuberance, retains an academic feel to this day. Another popular and accessible artist is Eric Ravilious who trained at Eastbourne and only got into the R.C.A. by chance when a successful candidate dropped out. Unbelievably, there were no entrance exams as there were for the Beaux Arts in France. Instead, each school was allowed two places per year and if you didn't get in, that was it. Even then, Ravilious was assigned to the applied arts department not fine art.

In its defence, one of the great strengths of the British system was its draughtsmanship based on drawing from the model, although this was by and large imported from France by artists who has studied at the academies in Paris. This takes us back to Fletcher who not only studied in Paris, but went on to take a life class at the Central School.

Fletcher's legacy depends on this handbook published in 1916 (above) and which ran to three editions. Possibly in defence of Fletcher, Arthur Rigden Read said that everything he knew came from that man. This is unlikely to be entirely true, because he must have learned something from Urushibara, too. But it does suggest he learned to make colour woodcuts using Fletcher's book. How many others did? I know for certain that Steven Hutchins did in the 1980s. So, as you see, there was a class in Edinburgh after all and it went by the name of 'Woodblock printing'.

Elizabeth Colwell: Reading, Cornwall & Chicago

 

Never a good idea, but I had always believed for no special reason that Frank Morley Fletcher's Woodblock printing  published in Britain in 1916 was the first manual on the subject in English. I was wrong. A far less well-known American colour woodcut artist got there first. This was Elizabeth Colwell whose own book On the making of  woodblock colour prints came out in the United States in 1910. I have to say here that I don't think Colwell is in the first rank of America colour woodcutters not because she didn't have talent but she failed to throw off the method of making colour woodcuts she had learned from others.

                                                                                                 Annex Galleries

Colwell was born in Bronson, Michigan, in 1881, and trained at the school of the Art Institute of Chicago where she met the colour woodcut artist, B. J. O. Nordfeldt. He has a studio in the city's South Side district and it appears it was there was was introduced to a way of making colour woodcuts based on the Japanese method. What is unusual about all this is that Nordfeldt had worked for a friend of Fletcher's called Albert Herter who ran a family design business and after Nordfeldt had been to Paris to work on the firm's exhibit at the Paris Exposition in he went to Reading to take the class in colour woodcut that Fletcher was running at the Extension College there. What has to be said is that none of the were all that experienced as printmakers. Fletcher had made up the method as he went along  a few years previously and then tried to make everyone else keep to it. Ironically, in Reading Nordfeldt made friends with William Giles who at twenty-seven refused to take Fletcher's prescriptive approach on board and eventually went off to Sweden where Nordfeldt's family came from.

As for Colwell herself a biographical note published by the Art Institute says she also trained abroad and the only evidence of where she went is the print above, Cornwall coast, England, now in the Museum of Fin Arts at San Francisco. Friendships and connections between American and British artists between about 1897 and the first war are poorly understood but they did exist and they were a way that artists often learned how to make prints. Norma Bassett Hall's visit to Edinburgh in the twenties is well-documented but we have far less to go on with Nordfeldt, Colwell, Arthur Wesley Dow and Edna Boies Hopkins who almost certainly came to Britain too. Colwell's technique in the Cornwall print are in some ways exemplary. All the main elements are there - the depth of colour, the brushwork, the keyblock - but behind it all is the ghost of yet one more American artist and it is James MacNeill Whistler. The importance of tone and the arrangement of the image is more Whistler than Hiroshige. I was only looking at the strange blues in Whistler's Symphony in white number III on Friday in Birmingham and here they are again! You will also notice the Japanese fan the girl has let slip. (The other woman is Joanna Hiffernan who was Irish and lived with Whistler in London in the 1860s. Her father referred to the artist as 'mi son-in-law'.)

The difficulty is that all these early colour woodcuts can tend to look generic. You ask yourself whether it is Cornwall or Eagle Bay or Provincetown. Because what matters most is the mood. I constantly mix up the work of Colwell, Nordfeldt and sometimes Sidney Lee who also trained with Fletcher and worked at St. Ives. What holds them all together (and restricted them) was the method Fletcher insisted on teaching. His excuse was that colour woodcut method was good training for them. The unfortunate result were prints that were constricted by the keyblock, the artful application of ink and general lack of vigour. The artifice exemplified by Whistler's languorous young women lounging about in his Charlotte St. studio had become a burden by 1910 when Cowell was at her most prolific. Fitzrovia is not Chicago's South Side and that is that!

By now you may see my drift. They all of them (given half the chance) wandered from one art colony to another. It didn't matter whether it was the area around Fitzroy St. off Tottenham Court Road in London or St. Ives or the quartier latin, they met the same people and more importantly the same ideas. And the same assumptions too.

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Nancy E. Green 'From Edinburgh to Santa Barbara: Frank Morley Fletcher's transatlantic influence'

 

                                               Credit: William P Carl Fine Prints

For many years now Nancy E. Green has been a leading scholar in the field of the American Arts & Crafts movement and colour woodcut in particular. From her base as senior curator at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, she has published books and articles that are necessary reading for anyone with a real interest in colour woodcut. Unfortunately, on this side of the Atlantic, some of this work has been either unavailable or has become expensive, so I do not have her books about Arthur Wesley Dow and her old essay about Frank Morley Fletcher on my bookshelf. This means that the article published this month by the Scottish Society for Art History in volume 25 of their journal is going be indispensable reading for both scholars and collectors.

                                                                                       

The society are fortunate to have James Barnes as a member. He is their treasurer, an enthusiast for colour woodcut and an experienced proof-reader, and it was James who edited the lecture given by Nancy E. Green in Glasgow last year. The result is the most comprehensive account to date of Fletcher's life and career from his early days in Lancashire to his final years in Ventura County, CA. But this is not merely the story of an artist and his work. Fletcher was a teacher and educationalist, an administrator and committee man, a writer (above) and a proponent of industrial design (below) as well as being a printmaker. This makes him a tricky person to research, a situation made more complicated by Fletcher leaving Britain in 1923 to live and work in California. No-one could know it all. What is worse, the material available is scattered and often tantalising. This essay has made something coherent out of all that.

                                                                                             

                                                                                                The Fletcher desk

Nancy Green did some of her research in Scotland while the Fletcher family were also very helpful to her, but inevitably some things are missing and there are occasional errors of fact. What is more important are the judgements Green makes. A case is properly made for the importance of partnership in Fletcher's life, above all with his wife, Dolly, and suggests how much this was part of the ethos of the Arts & Crafts movement both in Britain and the U.S.A. Not only has the topic been neglected, the role people like Dolly Fletcher, Mary Batten and Ada Shrimpton played has been more or less ignored, something Green will be putting right with her next book. She also pins down Fletcher's talent for building on ideas and the way he put his organisational ability to use in the cause of art education at new schools like Edinburgh College of Art and the Santa Barbara School of Art, a skill I suspect he first developed in the United States. Lastly, she takes care to emphasise the importance of Fletcher's large family of ten brothers and sisters - and his father, Alfred Evans Fletcher (below). Alfred was a scientist and engineer with a lack of realism that he finally managed to suppress during a successful career as chief inspector of alkali works. Fletcher was as uncompromising as his father (who had refused to sign the Thirty-nine Articles to become eligible for Cambridge) and one of the most telling passages in the essay deals with Albert Herter's visit to the Fletcher household in 1891: ' ...his father is in a chronic state of grievedness at the wickedness of his family and their frivolity of Godlessness.' 

Worse was to come. In 1895, his son married the daughter of a Suffolk fisherman who was also an artist's model (the daughter not the fisherman) and continued with his plans to become an artist himself. What Green does not say is that Alfred's own father was an educationalist, a connection Alfred could not have failed to make once his son began teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in 1897 and became headmaster of the art department at the new University Extension College at Reading only one year later. His sister-in-law said later Fletcher had the same far-seeing eyes as his father (which the photographer has captured) suggesting both men were equally sensitive.

This essay made me think and represents an important stage in the study of a neglected field, particularly in Scotland, and members of the society have done a good job bringing the subject to the attention of readers in Scotland and beyond. The piece is well-illustrated and the colour reproduction good. The image above is one of the versions of Mount Shasta from his short California series begun in 1926 after he and his wife became American citizens.

Copies of journal 25 are available at £8 plus P&P from ssahistory.wordpress.com/current-journal/. Use the Art UK option. Fletcher's Salinas River, California I (top) is available at $7,000 from Bill Carl. The first two editions of Woodblock Printing (above) contain different original prints by Fletcher and are occasionally available, sometimes inscribed by the artists who owned them. An essay about Walter Phillips by Nancy E. Green is contained in Walter J. Phillips (2013) from Pomegranate Press, Portland, Oregon, and is available online at £22.

Frank Morley Fletcher, artist

                                                                                   

When the enumerator came round to Eastern Avenue to collect Frank Morley Fletcher's census form in 1901, he would have seen that he had described his occupation as artist. Interesting, convincing, but not entirely true. At the time he was employed as Head of the Department of Art at the extension college at Reading and also took a well-paid class in colour woodcut at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Artist as a term does not account for his growing role as educator, a role that may have eventually left  him old and poor in the sunshine state of California. (This fact from Michael Redmon of the Santa Barbara Historical Society. To his credit, he has done more research on Fletcher's life in the US than anyone has done in Britain). But this post is about the printmaker whose prints were well-made but few in number.

                                                                           

The Flood-gates you see at the top was only the second independant print Fletcher ever made and was published in 1898, and must also help account for Ethel Kirkpatrick's enduring passion for the colour mauve. Kirkpatrick was certainly a student at the Central School during the 1898/1899 year and Fletcher's print and her own print, The full moon, of a lone woman artist with her back to the viewer, does show what an inspiration Fletcher was to his students.

But the comparison with Kirkpatrick isn't all necessarily in Fletcher's favour. At first sight, her print looks simple, crude even, but her undisguised brushwork shows her to be just as aware of the lessons of Paris as Fletcher was himself. (She was only three years younger). Moreover, she selects and thereby suggests more; Fletcher's compostion is sophisticated but fussy. But what strikes me most about this woodcut is how good Fletcher had become at printing them. Only four years before, he and John Dixon Batten had struggled to get a good proof  from Batten's woodblock of Eve and the serpent. The pair had then gone on to Batten's theatrical woodcut The harpies. Fletcher's first print Meadowsweet is straightforward landscape compared to The flood-gates. This second print is not only virtuouso and an exhibtion item, it also looks to me like Frank's CV. The same year the print was published, the painter and woodcut illustrator Walter Crane left the art department at Reading where he had been head for only a year, to take up the post of principal at the Royal College (he wasn't there for very long either). Morley Fletcher got the job.

                                                                                       

So far as I can see, Morley Fletcher produced prints slowly and Brotherswater dates from 1900. There is another print called The mountain from about the same date and then things begin to slow down even more. Given how few details we have about his life, it is very hard to know why this was. There is a cool discretion about them all, an undertow of feeling, to be sure, but their execution looks impeccable, as far as I can make out. But then how often does anyone actually see one of Fletcher's prints in front of them?

                                                                                       
In fact, quite alot can be learned about Morley Fletcher from the way his students of colour woodcut work. From the earliest ones like Kirkpatrick and Mabel Royds to the last of his British students like Marion Gill at Edinburgh, all print with skill and care. The first thing I always notice about any of these three artists is the quality of the surface. This is what they learned from him. He was adamant about the inability of linocut to produce this beautiful surface and, looking at the work of his students, I often think he had a point. Monitor images like these are poor substitutes. I saw the large Kirkpatrick print in London the other week of Thames sailing barges. The way she worked with the materials of pigment and paper really was quite wonderful. Seaby can be even more so. But the master remains aloof and enigmatic.

                                                                          
To some extent, this says quite alot about his background. Unlike Allen Seaby, whose father was an artisan, Fletcher came from the intelligentsia. Science provided the livelihood for both his father (who was a government inspector at an alkili works as FMF grew up) and his brother, Walter. Frank perhaps should have written another occupation on that census form. I think alchemist might have summed him up better.

                                                                                     

The definitive Ethel Kirkpatrick

I need to completely revise the few details I gave about the life of the British artist Ethel Kirkpatrick (1869 - 1966). Needless to say, I haven't changed my view that she fits well within the British topographical tradition, is both a keen and accurate observer, a talented colourist, a skilful woodcutter and, last but not least, has the kind of appeal many modern British printmakers can only dream of.



She was born in Holborn, London, the daughter of Mary and Thomas Sutton Kirkpatrick. Her mother was from Yorkshire, her father a professional soldier from a landed family at Coolmine in Dublin. He had left the army the year she was born and the family eventually moved to Exeter when her father was made governor of the prison and then to Harrow-on-the-Hill near London when he became governor of Newgate. There was an older sister, Ida Kirkpatrick (1866 - 1950) who also became an artist.

Ethel had the broader art education, studying at the RA Schools and the Central School of Arts and Crafts before taking the well-worn path of British artists at the time to the Academie Julien in Paris. Some time after this Ethel moved to St Ives in Cornwall where the artist Lily Kirkpatrick lived and worked and where there was a growing colony of artists. Ethel Kirkpatrick also exhibited in the town.

Ida also moved to St Ives but both sisters moved back to the family home, The Grange at Harrow, in 1906. Ironically, it is still impossible to date much of the work shown here except on the grounds of style and subject. The second image of the woman walking towards the full moon could be a Cornish scene but has a French genre feel to it. Both I would think are early woodcuts. The river scene above, variously described as the Clyde and the Thames, is dated 1911. I think the hills are too close and the river too broad to be the Thames but a work of this skill suggests she had taken up colour woodcut a few years before.

The third image with the windblown hedge may be somewhere like Carbis Bay near St Ives. As she probably used watercolour sketches as a basis for her woodcuts, she could have made them quite a lot later. Even so, she must be one of Morley Fletcher's earlier followers, along with Sidney Lee, and once the two women returned to Harrow they made frequent trips to join the artists at Walberswick in Suffolk. Lee also made a colour print there.

The rocky, hilly coasts I think we can safely say are Cornwall rather than Suffolk and I've included another fine proof of Kirkpatrick's view of Mousehole near Penzance. As a woman of independant means and mind, she travelled elsewhere and I especially like this view below of Venice. It shows just how much she took note of the light in Cornwall. Her Cornish pieces are never as limpid as this.

She could quite obviously ring the changes, both in mood and style as you can see from the second, strikingly expressive view of the city from the lagoon. Even if she did train initially with Frank Morley Fletcher, the way she handles those reflections is closer to Munch. Everything depends on the subtle and brilliant tonality and disparate array of shapes. You can hardly believe it is the same artist whose keen eye apprehended the pilchard boats as they left Mousehole.

Readers will have seen this view of the Thames before as well but this is a better image and will appear in larger format. It is strikingly fresh with all kinds of subtle reflections.

 

The print below of nesting rooks is still near London. In fact, it's at Harrow-on-the Hill, with what looks like a subtle smoggy dawn. Her mauves are as improbable as they are irresistable. The rooks are also a bit flat and unconvincing but she has top marks for the original bird's eye view. One wonders how she got so close. It shows by just how much her work depends on empathy and imagination.

I think the last two images are later work. The first is a Swiss view, the second is called 'Communication, past and present'. The line is sharper and more modern but the tone alot less sympathetic but we have to acknowledge that she always varied her approach. Boats and colour woodcut may have been great loves, but her style changes.

It's fascinating to see her take on the world of the inter-war years even if the print itself is less appealing - at least for me. And I need to add that I was totally dependant on the London dealers Abbott and Holder for these images. They all come from their Christmas exhibition and some are still for sale: abbottandholder.co.uk/ . If you go onto the site, just scroll down to the prints section.

Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953): a sort of magic

AW Seaby was a sort of late Victorian. A Londoner by birth, he must have trained as a painter but where no one seems to know. What is certain is this: he moved to Reading in Berkshire where he fell under the spell of Frank Morley Fletcher (1866 - 1950) who was a teacher at the university college. Or he may already have trained under Fletcher, who was only a year older, at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. It wasn't the classic student/teacher relationship, which says alot about the rapid development of colour printing in Britain at the time. Like Ethel Kirkpatrick, he started as a painter but understood the opportunities that colour woodcut provided.

Fletcher is the ghost in the machine - both for this blog and others. He is famous for reading T Tokuno's article 'Japanese wood-cutting and wood-cut printing' (published by the Smithsonian in 1894) and then joining up with John Dickson Batten, to teach themselves how to make woodcuts using the Japanese method himself. This involved using cherry wood blocks, applying a watercolour based ink with a brush, printing without a press etc but neithern were so keen on Japanese style. If Morley Fletcher was quick to adapt, like other Londoners before him, Seaby had a good eye for character. In his case, he leant his considerable printmaking talents to birdlife. Personally, I've never been keen on his birds in flight but the secretive, searching behaviour of the ones here appeal very strongly. But then he was a naturalist. He knew them what they were like.

He obviously worked very hard and was well-thought of because by 1908 many of his early prints had been bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. 'Printmaking' as he put it, 'is a sort of magic very captivating to many minds'. This is true of his work. A Seaby impression in good condition has a brilliant, subtle surface and it isn't hard to imagine his own wonder as he pulled the prints. I have chosen close-ups because they show the sheer quality of his brushwork and the almost casual details. This makes him very much the late Victorian aesthete.

After becoming professor of Fine Art at Reading in 1920, he began to write. He obviously knew a great deal about different subjects. In one of is early books, 'Colour printing with linoleum and woodblocks' (1925) he says this about the making of colour prints: 'Wood is obviously superior to linoleum in many ways... Those who wish to take the craft seriously as a means of artistic expression should certainly use wood'. You have to assume that if he knew what the fashion department at the Vienna Workshops or, even worse, the members of Die Brucke were up to (see previous post), he chose to ignore it. He was an individualist and emphatically not a modernist. Interesting as well that his own grandson, Robert Gillmor (b 1936) is a notable contemporary linocutter. It's even more interesting that many of his books were for children, or teachers. Gillmor describes the memorable experience of seeing his grandfather at work in the studio and he had learned enough to publish his own work at the age of sixteen. Seaby's prints, like his birds, are innocent.

He observed children. As he says himself, the prints here are the very opposite of what they tend to do. His birds fill up the picture space in the way Japanese birds do; children are in the habit of drawing little people in big worlds (my paraphrase). He's the high art paternalist but can we blame him when he produces such beautifully sensational images as these? And from 1928 onwards, he began publishing his four volumes of 'Art in the life of mankind'. I have to say it sounds more Germanic than Japanese. In fact, when he draws or paints there is nothing Japanese about him at all. And when he tries figure subjects, the results are not always good. He produced an 'Adoration' where the attitudes of all concerned are very hackneyed indeed.

That image is stuck on my old pc - fortunately, in many ways - otherwise I would have shown it in the next post. Because I haven't finsished with AWS and his varied career just yet. There is more to him than birds. There are also rabbits and ponies.

Helene Mass: four more woodcuts

Four more colour woodcuts by the German artist Helene Mass, along with some others for comparison. Above is an image already posted but in a different colourway. I think this must be a second version because I assume the shrubs are lilac. Or unlike the Kaiser perhaps she just liked blue trees! You be the judge. But below is the other version.

The one below of parkland horse chestnuts has already been posted as well but I came across an image which I understand is by Carl Thiemann. The two are remarkably similar in conception and, in fact, fellow members of the Berlin Secession were visitors to Dachau. I very much doubt Mass wouldn't know Thiemann's work.

Interesting, anyway. Perhaps Thiemman even took leaf out of Mass' book and took a a stroll through the Tiergarten. His print is the more conventional work.

I assume the next print is a later work and finds Mass in Frank Morley Fletcher mode. Again, I would doubt looking at this she wasn't familiar with his work. Of course it's freer than Frank and is more a felt landscape than he would go in for. Really quite a lovely image and one that came up on ebay not so long ago.

Finally, two prints in rustic mode and which I assume are earlier. I like the geraniums ranged around the garden table. It's personal and has genuine charm. Only four colours used here but already her tendency to put canopies over her prints is there.

Finally, a rural image which she actually doesn't do as much as you might think. The Mass trees and clouds are present. A bit awkward and perhaps too readily descriptive but I like the flowering bush tumbling over the fence. She obviously delights in that kind of thing.