Ian Cheyne's 'The breakwater' at auction in Chicago

 

The great city of Chicago is many things but one thing it is not; it is not the Centre for Ian Cheyne Studies. A reader in Scotland told me on Monday about the current sale of Ian Cheyne's colour woodcut The breakwater in the city. Unfortunately, Hindman Auctions have chosen to use a handwritten description on the back of the picture that says the work is a colour linocut called 'The Great Wave'. Why it is hard to say. It is easy enough to discover the facts about Cheyne's print. Both the British Museum (above) and the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers (below) have correct description of Cheyne's print although the approach taken by the two institutions is different. The British Museum provide details of the inscriptions and of the work's provenance as well as giving the correct date for the first time it was exhibited. All we get from the Zimmerli is the title and a useful photograph of the complete proof. The British Museum's print was bought from them by the Contemporary Art Society in 1941 but we are given no clues about the Cheyne print at Rutgers which lacks the artist's signature as you can probably make out.

It may go without saying you will not find a signature on the Chicago proof either. It hails from the estate of the distinguished American photographer and philanthropist Lucia Woods Lindley and against all the conventions of framing an original print, 'The Great Wave' is mounted to the edge of the image, leaving everyone to conclude Cheyne never signed it. I am not suggesting there is anything wrong with the print. All I know is in the early 1980s, Alan Guest tracked down Cheyne's widow, Jessie Garrow, by the straightforward expedient of going through the Glasgow telephone directory. One result of his diligence was the London dealer Robin Garton visiting Garrow and buying a number of proofs. The artist died in 1983 and in the spring of 1986 twelve Cheyne prints went up for sale at the Alpine Gallery in Mayfair with seven bearing a violet studio stamp.  All the others were signed - and I am not suggesting they necessarily came from the studio. My own proof of Summer picnic came from Manou Sharma Levy on Portobello Road.

The curious thing is The breakwater was not one of them, leading me to wonder where these two unsigned proofs came from (and I admit I cannot be certain the Chicago print isn't signed). The only place Cheyne prints normally come up for sale now is in Scotland. Even by the standard of his contemporaries, Cheyne's editions were small and of the edition of only 20 for The breakwater, all were sold. Cheyne kept meticulous records of all the sales he made from 1925 onwards, though even here there are discrepancies because I have recently discovered there are at least two other colour woodcuts that do not appear on the definitive list. You may also ask yourself where I came upon one of the actual blocks for the print (above). I always believed all the surviving blocks were still in Glasgow but I was wrong. The four blocks made for what I want to call A bigger splash are all at Rutgers University.

I have to leave you to draw your own conclusions because I am not finished with Chicago. To give an idea of what was happening, I am going to quote from my own book. 'In December, 1929, Glen Cluanie (1929) and The fisherman's church (1929) were selected for the Art Institute of Chicago's Third International Exhibition of Lithography and Wood Engraving and yet again Cheyne's talent proved irresistible. Glen Cluanie was awarded the Brewster Prize as a meritorious print, with Cheyne selling eight proofs as the exhibition toured the U.S. As with Read at Los Angeles, originality had won out and it was soon apparent that the lowered blocks and graduated areas of colour first used in Summer picnic were to be the most original features of an unsurpassed series of Highland prints.'

The proof illustrated here is the Art Institute's own. As it is marked '6 proofs available for sale price $10' and the Institute's is 12/20, it appears Cheyne had already sold a further two at Chicago. This suggests Alans Guest's version (which appears in an unpublished essay about Cheyne) was misleading. It all goes to show once more that what we need is a full and proper catalogue of Cheyne's prints. Unlike Seaby, this is not a daunting task. The notebooks should still be in Scotland and there are new prints by Cheyne appearing online, including the etching owned by a fortunate reader, that present a different picture from the one in Cheyne's own well-kept accounts. 

The accounts are all very well but the fact is it is Ian Cheyne we know too little about not collectors, not least the ones in the United States, who were after all the people helping to support Cheyne. Following his success there, Cheyne and Garrow were able to marry and spent their honeymoon travelling in France and Spain. On their return to Glasgow, Cheyne then made Mediterranean bar, the best and most audacious art deco print ever made in Britain and one that has found a good home in a city famed for its art deco seafront. No, this time I mean Miami.

The post also includes Jessie Garrow's The wave and Eric Slater's Rough seas. Lots for the timed auction at Hindman end on 11th September, 2023.

Jessie Garrow at McTears

 

Edward Burne Jones was appalled when he realised that his young friend and follower, Aubrey Beardsley, wanted to be a graphic artist and not a painter like himself. It was so outside Burne Jones take on things, he was unable to comprehend the profound change that was taking place in modern art and the friendship between the young Beardsley and himself proved to be short-lived. Beardsley on the other hand set a standard no serious British illustrator could ignore and some of the most telling work done by young artists like Isabel de B. Lockyer and Jessie Garrow in the twenties was not in colour but in black and white and owed Beardsley a considerable debt.

This means that whatever I say about the watercolour that comes up for sale at McTears on 11th August in Garrow's home town of Glasgow is qualified. Garrow was an able colourist but she had an elegant and descriptive sense of line, which is just as apparent in her illustrations for Wee Willie Winkie as it is in her semi-monochrome colour woodcut, The wave. You will note how far Garrow pared her colours down to cream, dark brown and touches of mauve in this watercolour. The subject may be winsome but the overall control is not. Whether any readers are dedicated enough to buy this work remains to be seen. It is rare, it is interesting, it is Jessie Garrow and, as you all know, Modern Printmakers approves.

Portrait of Miss Jessie Garrow

I cannot be sure that the colour woodcut above is a self-portrait by the Glasgow artist, Jessie Garrow, but I tend to think that it is. Even if it is not, colour woodcut portraiture of this distinction was very unusual in 1920s Britain. A number of people including Arthur Rigden Read, Urushibara, Frank Morley Fletcher and Phillip Needell tried and only Urushibara and Read were in any way satisfactory - and, in Read's case, not always. Garrow's portrait pulls it off, mainly because she was a figurative artist and knew what she was doing.

But I think there might have been another reason for her success and it is Ito Shinsui's masterly colour woodcut 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith'. Again, I have no idea whether Garrow knew Ito's portrait or not, but you only need to compare the two to come to same conclusion that I did. Ito had been working with the publisher Shozaburo Wantanabe since 1916 and in 1922 he asked Keith (who was another of his artists) to sit for Ito. The result was the witty, sensitive and knowing portrait of the thirty-four year old Keith, delectable with her befeathered hat, silken gown and large pink cushion. I also tend to think that Garrow was not alone when she identified the wry splendour of Ito's portrait. Below, I have added Read's portrait of his wife, Kathleen Rigden Read. It had not occurred to me until I began to write that Read might have used the Ito as a source, but as it was made one year afterwards in 1923 and because Read used other people's portraits as a model (notably Edouard Manet's 'Lola de Valence'),, my guess is that he did. Again you decide but this is what blogs are for.

Going back to Garrow's portrait, there are two or three things that stand out. One is the mouth in the pale face, which is so similar to Keith; there is also the hat. To me, this looks like the same  academic cap won by John Swinnerton Phillimore in the portrait painted by Maurice Greiffenhagen in 1924. Greiffenhagen taught at Glasgow School of Art all the time that Garrow was a student there. His work covered a broad range of portraiture, style and other figurative work and the stylised figures and use of white with blue in his painting 'The message' (1923) are pretty close to Garrow's use of them in her colour woodcut 'The wave' which appeared in The Studio one year later. I am not suggesting that Garrow was unoriginal but only like many printmakers she picked up ideas from various sources. Garrow had been making woodcuts by 1919, although they may not have been in colour. Generally I think she and her husband, Ian Cheyne, didn't begin making colour woodcuts until about 1923 or so. He sold his first colour woodcut in 1925. Cheyne was another student of Greiffenhagen, but as a landscape artist, Cheyne had little in common with him. His wife's bold stylisation and wit were more sympathetic to Greiffenhagen than they were to her husband's work, even his celebrated colour woodcuts.

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Three Scottish artists: Jessie Garrow's 'The wave'

 

 

I am starting to think that 'The wave' was the only colour woodcut that Jessie Garrow ever made. Like most people, I only know it from the illustration published by The Studio in 1924 but just on that evidence I would say here is the most professional and stylish colour woodcut made by any young Scottish artist at the time.

Born in Bearsden, East Dunbarton in 1899, she studied at Glasgow School of Art where she met a fellow stylist who she married in about 1920. This was Ian Cheyne. Garrow claimed that they had taught themselves to make colour woodcut. Certainly she had made The wave before Chica MacNab's woodcut classes began at the School of Art. Whether or not she had recourse to Frank Morley Fletcher's Woodblock Printing is another matter but she has little in common with Fletcher and keyblock outline, which he used freely, only appears along two of the women's arms. It was highly unusual to depend on so much white and on contrasting colours to create an image at the time. My first impression was how peculiar the figures looked with their white stockings and shoes but she was bowing to no conventions here, especially in the way she made figures central to a colour woodcut.
                                                                                         

It will not surprise you to hear that Garrow made her living as a fashion illustrator and writer and also illustrated books with the same spare line. But how could it be that such an original artist could leave so little work behind her? In her interests she is closest to Arthur Rigden Read who began making his own stylish woodcuts in 1922. But Read was a generation older. Like her, he didn't make a fetish of the keyblock, was mainly interested in figure subjects, and often used black, white and grey around this time (and just so you know what I mean I've included on of his own 1924-ish prints) but Garrow's sense of style was more acute than Read's. Just look at those overlapping feet on the pier - nothing if not ambitious for a one and only woodcut (and I would like someone to prove me wrong about that).

 

Jessie Garrow, Anna Findlay & Chica MacNab

                                                                                         

I have brought these three artists together because all took part in the 1920s printmaking scene in Glasgow that also included Ian Fleming and Ian Cheyne, both of whom have already had posts of their own. Of the three women, it was Chica MacNab (1889 - 1990) who perhaps played the key role. From a colonial background, she was sent home to Scotland for an education, first at Kilmalcolm School, then at Glasgow School of Art. Not that she learned the art of printmaking there because by 1921, before she attended the school of art, she was a founder member of the Glasgow-based Society of Artist Printers. It isn't perhaps surprising that once she had finished her course, she was offered a job and promptly set up a class teaching colour woodcut at the School of Art in 1925. (Her students included Ian Fleming and Alison MacKenzie). Yet for all her significance, I have only ever come across one of her prints, in some ways a rather disappointing colour woodcut called From the Barr Hill. I say disappointing because her style is more in line with the Scottish genre printmakers of the pre-war years. Elizabeth Christie Brown, Jeka Kemp and Thomas Austen Brown are often hard to distinguish one from the other. So much so that some of the unsigned woodcuts attributed to Austen Brown on this blog are almost certainly by his wife. One lives and learns. (And I will add here that Clive Hazell believes she is the better artist). But it is hard to judge MacNab herself. Her woodcut class ran for only two years and her prints are shockingly rare. All the same it seems to me at least that she provided a learning link between the earlier colour woodcut artists like the Browns and Elizabeth York Brunton and the younger ones who went on to reject the genre and historicist styles of their teachers. Even so, York Brunton and Ethel Kirkpatrick exhibited at Glasgow alongside artists like Findlay and Cheyne with their modernist aura. And at the end of the day, it goes to show how much they depended upon those small societies with their joint exhibitions to make a living. (Not that that was ever a problem for Ethel Kirkpatrick).

                                                                                   

Even more frustrating was the career of Jessie Garrow (1899 - 1993). She was also printmaking before the onset of MacNab's class but the one print I have seen by her is the extraordinary colour woodcut called The wave. The three graces have been transformed into stylish young women alarmed by a wave splashing over the sides of a quay and perilously close to their fashionable stockings and shoes. It's both mocking and stylish and it's such a shame I can't dig up a suitable image for you. (I am hoping when lotusgreen reads this, she will locate it in The Studio for me). But what is highly original about this prints is the complete lack of colour for the figures, which are picked out predominantly in outline and stand pale and stylised against grey and mauve backgrounds. How an artist who could come up with such a strikingly original print could now be so little known is, frankly, beyond me. In the 1980s, when she sold what was left of the work from her husband Ian Cheyne's studio, she had not a single piece of her own work left to offer. Not a thing. Like so many women artists of the period, she also went on to work as an illustrator, but even there I have only ever tracked down one title she worked on.

So, very reluctantly, I have been forced to illustrate this post with three prints all by that coolly beautiful artist, Anna Findlay (1885 - 1968). At least, there is a new one here, a telling colour woodcut of Glasgow tenements where you can see her interest in subdued tones and architectural form at an early stage. Needless to say, her work is also shockingly rare and you have not seen this image online before. It really is a lovely link between the soft focus realism of the earlier Scottish woodcut artists and the linocuts that she then went on to make after studying at the Grosvenor School with Claude Flight. She left Glasgow in the late twenties and went down to St Ives in Cornwall where her brother, James, was an active member of the Arts Club. She may well have studied with Flight just before she began to exhibit at St Ives in 1928. She would have certainly known about the Grosvenor School being set up via Chica MacNab (her brother, Iain MacNab was the principal). She moved back to Glasgow in the late thirties, leaving behind this small poetic legacy of linocuts as elegant as other Grosvenor artists were outlandish. And if for no other reason than this, I have faith in Claude Flight's prophecy of the modern.