A trove of linocuts by SG Boxsius

 

It beats me where all the Boxsius woodcuts and linocuts that have have come up for sale in the past few weeks and months actually come from. One reader believes the prints recently for sale on British ebay were part of a collection. This may be true but I wonder how a collector has found unsigned proofs and why they should be a damaged print in a collection. It is always possible they have come down through the family of Daisy Boxsius or were sold in a sale following her death. But that was a long time ago.

Spring morning, Arundel (top) has never appeared online until the past few weeks and then to my surprise not one but two unframed proofs turn up. This is very unusual even for Boxsius. I happened to already know the print well because my old friend Alan Guest owned a proof which he thought highly of (and I coveted), so making  a purchase was the obvious thing to do. It was under-priced and in good condition. There is no sign of framing, no scuffing or deterioration caused by exposure to light so it looks like both proofs have been lying undisturbed somewhere for a long time. 

                                     

Having bought that, I was then encouraged to get A Devon village as well (second from the top) and did not regret the purchase either. Also available was an unsigned proof of Seaside (above). This is a great little print but I was suspicious about the lack of a signature and resisted the temptation even though figure subjects by Boxsius are rare. I have copies of a number of watercolours of Shakespeare characters that show another side to someone who we all tend to see as a landscape artist.

His use of figures was carefully considered. As you will see from the design above, the two young women on the left were an addition. Others may disagree but I believe they refer back to figures in both Georges Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres and Giorgione's The tempest (below) which had been exhibited in London in 1929. (Boxsius exhibited Seaside in 1931).

Boxsius had always had an interest in the history art and he and Daisy had books about the old masters at home. What is impressive is the way he used very different sources to put together his prints. On the face of it, Twilight, Winchelsea (below) (which also came up for sale on ebay but was damaged) draws on the modern stylishness of Grosvenor School artists who Boxsius exhibited alongside in the early 1930s. But both William Giles and the Giorgione are also in the mix. Here was an artist of wide sympathies who took a great interest in the work of others.

The white railings and orange roof-tops are direct borrowings from Giles' bizarrely wonderful At eventide, Rothenburg am Tauber (below) for about 1906. What is missing in the Boxsius is the eccentricity of Giles' railings. Also compare the buildings in the Giorgione with the array of chimney pots in A Devon village. A trained artist's visual memory should work in that way but you have to be sympathetic in the first place to retain the information.

I have come to the conclusion that Boxsius was a holiday and weekend artist. He had a responsible job as art supervisor at the London School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, which sometimes involved taking evening classes. But the palces he visited mattered to him and what is worth remarking on is the strong sense of place he achieved. As a person, he was always north London and never strayed far from Highgate Cricket Club all his life. Even when he and Daisy moved from rented rooms into a proper flat in Fortis Green, he made sure the club wasn't far way. Look how closely he places the figures between the rocks and the way the half-timbered building at Arundel is made to fit into the image.

The black bull (above) has turned up twice, once in Britain and once in the US (where it was wisely bought by a reader). With its reading of the weather, it is a classic Boxsius image. The others appearing recently include Noon-day and the early woodcuts Houghton Bridge, Sussex, The broken plough and The old mill, most of which appear elsewhere on Modern Printmakers. The only reason I say 'early' is because I have never found a record of any of them being exhibited which means they all probably belong to the period prior to 1928.

I also want to say there is an article in preparation (and almost finished) 'Yoshijiro Urushibara, Arthur Rigden Read and S.G. Boxsius' which I hope to place in a journal or magazine. I am aware this has all been a long time coming but the issues with reproduction rights and copyright are most trying.

William Giles 'Midsummer Night': the story so far

I would like to dedicate another post to Midsummer night first exhibited in 1912 by William Giles. There are various reasons for this. Firstly, there is the sheer unforgettable impact of the method Giles dreamed up for the print. It was not simply a matter of the image being a work of the imagination; the whole process involved inventiveness at such an astonishing level, I find it hard to credit Giles gave his work so much care and attention. When Mabel Royd's husband, E.S. Lumsden, made his sympathetic portrait of Giles in 1921 (below) he decided to depict him with the tools of his trade, emphasing the artist-craftsman distracted from his work rather than a portrait that suggested traits of the personality of the sitter. It was the same dedication and power of concentration that his friend, Walter Phillips, noticed when they went out on a sketching trip around the same time Lumsden made his portrait. Phillips had left Giles sketching in front of a tree only to find him still there in front of the same tree when he went back hours later.

It perhaps goes without saying that Giles work is stylised and lack spontaneity. It can also be a touch hackneyed. As one of the curator's said at the V&A when we were looking at Midsummer night, it was typical of the era (not his exact words). What is astonishing is the intricacy of the branches of the tree and the way depiction is so intense it begins to look like fantasy. There as an occult side to Giles. Here was a man for whom the ancient places of Britain and the phases of the sun and moon had a strong meaning but a man who also held back and always kept his occult tendencies in check. How he did this is another thing and it leads on to the second remarkable aspect of this print.

In 1899, the French dealer, Goupil, held an exhibition at their London gallery of some diminutive but sensational etchings and aquatints by Theodore Roussel who lived at Parson's Green in west London. Eight years later, Goupil came up with the idea of an exhibiting society of printmakers with Roussel as nominal leader and then about two years after the exhibitions started, Roussel began making colour versions of the metal plates he had shown at Goupil in 1899. More to the point, in 1912 he exhibited Summer night at Abingdon with the Graver Printers. Whether it was was this print that gave Giles the idea for Midsummer night is hard to say exactly, but I tend to think it did simply because until that point Giles had never made a metal plate. I also tend to think Roussel and Giles were working in collaboration. Both artists were used to this. Roussel had worked closely with James MacNeill Whistler till inevitably they fell out and Giles had worked in collaboration with Allen Seaby in their final year at Reading School of Art. Abingdon is also in Berkshire where Giles came from and Giles had also studied in Paris in the late nineties before he returned to do that final year alongside Seaby.

In other respects, Giles and Roussel were unalike. Roussel was an artist in the great French tradition - objective, detached, given to formal experiment but with an inwardness and delicacy that marks out so much of French C18th and C19th art. In my view, the example he set for Yoshijiro Urushibara with the colour version of L'agonie des fleurs (above from about 1912) was more important that any of the designs he adapted from Brangwyn. It may not seem obvious now but Roussel was full of ideas, which he expressed in a series of prints where both spontaneity and subtle allusions to the art of the past were keynotes. Meanwhile Giles described himself as an art worker but followed the traditions of the British romantic movement, most notably William Blake who had been the last person to make artist's prints in colour in the 1820s.

For Roussel, printmaking was a subsidiary art he could use to explore new ideas, as French artists had been doing since Edouard Manet began making etchings in the 1860s. For Giles, it was an end in itself and if Roussel had class, Giles had appeal and I think you can see from these few examples how far each artist learned to modify their approach from the other. Roussel's Moonrise in the New Forest, 1914, (above)  is  case in point. It would not have been possible for him to make a print of such luminosity and depth of colour without the example of Giles. Too much emphasis has been placed on the importance of the Japanese manner of printmaking to these artists. Method and styles owned just as much to French art although in the end it is the sympathetic dialogue between them that provides the most interest. Take for instance, Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown's French landscape, By the lake, from much the same time  (below) to judge how far this period of creativity came out of the rapport that existed between them.

Midsummer night is the only print that I know of from the period to ever come out in three editions. The first was published in 1912 and the second was brought out by the dealer and publisher, Bromhead, whose gallery had become home to the Graver Printers in Colour after Goupil closed its London base during the war. Following the appearance of a third and final edition in 1922, Giles consigned the plates to the Print Room of the V&A for the use of students, along with six successive proofs like the one below. This meant that no-one could publish a further edition, all very well but strictly once he had fulfilled one edition, a second should not have appeared let alone a third. But artists like Giles needed to make a living so you can hardly blame him. It is also possible that the third edition came out only in the U.S. Generally, this was accepted practice. Frank Morley Fletcher issued a second edition of 100 of Meadowsweet after he had moved to California but it was not fulfilled (number 43 I think was inscribed to Seaby) and after the success of Goose Fair in 1929 and 1930, Edward Loxton Knight bought out a second edition in the States. There were also a second edition of at least one linocut by Cyril Power in Australia but the lino gave out before that could be completed.

 

The gospel according to Walter

 

Walter Phillips was never slow to give an opinion and often had the opportunity to do so either in his newspapers columns in Canada or in books he wrote like The technique of colour woodcut. Amongst  number of other things he had done, Phillips had been a journalist in South Africa and came from a family where literature and the Bible were important. He had also been a tutor in Latin at Great Yarmouth and he  knew how to write well. What was unusual about Phillips and what doesn't doesn't helps to sort out fact from fiction was the publication of a biography by Duncan Campbell Scott in 1947 when Phillips was sixty-three. I have not read the book but it has meant there has been far more of Phillips' biography available than there has been for comparable artists. The problem is that all the information appears to have come directly from the artist and as I read through some of his other writing, I soon became sceptical.

The only training Phillips ever received was the classes he attended at Birmingham School of Art as a schoolboy in Worcestershire. There was nothing unusual about that. Young people who had had to go to work at fourteen or fifteen often put in long hours at evening classes where they studied for national exams. Once he left school Phillips' working life seemed to have little plan. But then his upbringing has been unconventional. As a minister his father would move from one place to another on the preaching circuit and his family would follow and moving to Winnipeg may have been a way of finding a stable life his wife and young family as finding a satisfying way of making a living himself. Either way the most important thing for Phillps was to be self-sufficient in whatever goal he set himself whether it was making prints or writing books and in this respect he was quite a lot like Allen Seaby.

Many of his friends and contemporaries like William Giles and Yoshijiro Urushibara had had very thorough training and both had spent time working in Paris where he said he had always wanted to go himself. Giles had taken Frank Morley Fletcher's class in colour woodcut at Reading (at least for a while) as Seaby had and Urushibara had trained as a carver and printer with the firm of Shimbi Shoin in Tokyo. How Phillips came to make colour woodcuts is another thing and given all that we know about Phillips it has always perplexed me that we know so little about he began. That he learned to make very good colour woodcuts like Mount Rundle (top,1951) and Gloaming (above, 1921) I would not dispute but the story he tells about how he got there doesn't always add up.

He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1913 and he found a job as art master at St. John's College in Winnipeg. Up until then, he had been a water-colourist but when a friend went to serve in France, he left Phillips with access to his etching press, equipment and paper. Phillips made 29 etchings and then completely stopped in 1917 and suddenly began making colour woodcuts like Winter (above) instead. This was pretty good for a first colour woodcut and presupposes a lot of experiment before he could produce such an attractive print. The American curator and pioneering scholar, Nancy E. Green, said Phillips had had an epiphany; Phillips said he was at heart a colourist and that he was not very interested in line and for those reasons found etching unsatisfactory. But what did happen that was so important to him? Neither Green nor Phillips say but Modern Printmakers believes it has the answer.

Phillips himself confused the issue when he recalled a short piece about colour woodcut technique written by Allen Seaby for The Studio in 1919. He said he went back and looked at this article and it helped him improve his technique but this has never really rung true for me. Green says this was 'his first professional encounter with other woodcuts artists' but I wonder because the Seaby article was accompanied by no less than six of Phillips' woodcuts, including one in full colour. This must have been co-ordinated. Apart from that, you would hardly forget such an important breakthrough and the following year the National Gallery of Canada bought nineteen of his colour woodcuts, possibly as  result. I don't think Phillips was being disingenuous but I do think we have all been guilty of reading too much into what Phillips himself said about the matter. Facts count.

Phillips was not only hard-working, he was also a perfectionist and placed importance on being self-sufficient. Self-improvement was also high on the Victorian value scale and you would expect someone as productive as Phillips to make advances. All the same it is true that after 1919 Phillip's woodcuts became more proficient. By the time Phillips was writing, he and Seaby were friends and exchanged cards every Christmas. Seaby also owned three of Phillips' woodcuts and Phillip's as a friend naturally wanted to acknowledge a debt. What Phillips did acknowledge in 1919 was that Studio articles had already provided 'helpful stimulus'. Possibly the first was a mention of Ethel Kirkpatrick's Mount's Bay in a review in 1917. Colour woodcut was in the news. The previous autumn, John Hogg had published Fletcher's Woodblock printing, the first account in English of the Japanese method and in the next volume The Studio published Malcolm Salaman's article 'The colour print' accompanied by five illustrations including Giles Sand dunes, Denmark (above) and E.A. Verpilleux' Search lights, Trafalgar Square (above). These are the colour woodcuts Phillips saw in 1917.

Other prints included were Ada Collier's Venetian boats and Giles' A pastoral. I have never been able to track either of these down but have included Collier's image of a Venetian trabacola (above) as a useful substitute. These were the cause his epiphany (and I think Nancy Green was correct to place such emphasis on the moment) and puts the remark he made about Seaby into perspective. The Collier print and Gloaming have a good deal in common. The same can be said for the Giles print and Winter, especially in the detail of the background. Perhaps more importantly, Salaman says that Collier 'learned the craft of the woodblock from Mr. Giles.' Some time after this, Phillips began a correspondence with Giles and when Phillips explained that sizing the paper was presenting the most difficulty, Giles bought Urushibara in to give advice. So what happened here?

Phillips admitted he had never seen a Japanese colour woodcut when he began making them himself and it was not until he found a shop selling them on a visit to Chicago that he was able to buy any and start a collection. All he was doing here was following the contemporary art school method of giving the student a teaching example to follow as a model of good practice. But there would have been no need to have taken them home to study. The exceptional surface quality achieved by the Japanese printers would have been apparent to Phillips straightaway. This was so significant to him in 1925 Phillips went to Giles studio on the Kings Road in London to meet Urushibara who turned up with alum and brushes and proceeded to apply the size with the expertise that impressed everyone who was lucky enough to see him at work.

But there was even more to his epiphany than this. England did not have one school of colour woodcut, it had two. Salaman's article listed a number of artists who had studied with Fletcher, including Giles and it might have been as easy for Phillips to have written to Fletcher. At the time he had not heard about Woodblock printing and said he would have saved himself a lot of difficulties if he had. Nevertheless he eventually aligned himself with Giles and later joined in the criticisms that were made of Fletcher and the doctrinaire approach he took to teaching and to colour woodcut method. Salaman (whose sympathies lay with Giles) characterised Fletcher's followers as the Anglo-Japanese. Being more forthright, Phillips described colour woodcut as a cult. At face-value this looks surprising coming from someone who is now famous for colour woodcuts but it only shows how far Phillips was a creature of his time and perceived important differences that no-one today would bother about (unless you were studying the subject that is). But he said it nevertheless and one clue to what he meant is the judicious way Phillips used the key-block. Winter did not have one at all and even as he moved forward, the key-block never played the role that it did in the work of Fletcher, Seaby, Mabel Royds or John Platt. As the son of a non-conformist minister, Phillips would have been all too aware of cults. What I think he was talking about was the cult of the Japanese print followed by the Anglo-Japanese and which Salaman summed up as 'a local fetish'. These divergences of opinion and the coteries that gave rise to are lost on us today. We are all too busy with our own.

A tale of two prints: William Giles and 'Midsummer Night'

                                                                                 

 

For a long time I used to wonder why it was that William Giles was considered the leader of the colour print movement in Britain. I always found some of his work rather insipid, in the way that minor Edwardian artists often are. What I didn't do was to take my own advice and make sure I saw more of his prints in front of me before I made that kind of judgement. I only say all this because all too often Giles doesn't appear to cause much enthusiasm. This attitude changed some months ago when I saw a middle period work showing the Isle of Jura, and again, when I saw a print of Midsummer Night only a few weeks ago, I could see that there was one good reason for his leadership, at least.

It was quite straightforward. Both images were faultlessly printed. Here was someone who lived the arts and crafts ethos to the full, and was simply very good at what he was doing. The period was full of these sheer productions, of course. Ruskin and early Royal Lancastrian pottery come to mind. Like Giles' best work, they have that marvellous sense of craftsmanship and finish. As much as they were friends, Allen Seaby's experimental approach to woodcutting, with all its tantalizing loose ends, was not for Giles. Everything with him was bought as close to perfection as he could get it. No wonder he became friends with that other arch-perfectionist, Walter Phillips.

I am not suggesting everything Giles produced was in some ways perfect; it wasn't. But it was the quest he undertook for such high standards that captured the imaginations of other artists. In the box alongside the print I saw, was the baren he had used to print this image. He had had it made from green glass and had had a pine handle attached (which has come off). You might wonder why he had gone to such trouble and whether this was just another of Giles' eccentricities. But this was no ordinary woodcut; in fact, it was not a woodcut at all. In his search for the finest of images, Giles had first abandoned cherry wood for his blocks in favour of Kauri pine from New Zealand, but still not content, he had employed a zinc aquatint plate to make  a print. Finally, he opted for steel (I believe) and this is why he needed a glass baren to rub over the back of the print. You will notice the fine print at the very bottom of the image. You would not associate that with any kind of woodcut. You can also make out that telling word 'copyright', which brings me to the second reason for his leadership.

This was probably the first commercially published British colour print. In fact, the image you see at the top isn't the one from 1912, as is so often stated. It dates from 1919. The first image from 1912 so far as I know is the one immediately above, as published by the French dealer and publisher, Goupil, who had a gallery in London. 1912 was the same year that Verpilleux was taken up by the Bond St. dealer, Colnaghi, who published all his work from then on. What was interesting about Giles' approach to commercial publishers is that he wished to show that colour prints made to the highest standards could be sold successfully by publishers, and I think this was another side to his leadership.

Goupil closed during the war, and soon after the war ended a new gallery and publisher opened called Bromhead, Cutts, and it was they that brought out the second edition of 150. But Giles was by no means finished with Midsummer Night. I suspect the development of what he called the Giles method took up alot of his time and he also needed to make money, and he finally allowed a third edition to be published in 1922. So much for limited editions. You can see the Bromhead Cutts version is different from the earlier one, but these second and third editions show Giles not only trying to sell prints after a long war, but, in fact leading the way both in making superb prints and in selling them properly. To his credit, he then handed plates, baren, and a proof over to a museum 'for the use of students', putting the print beyond further re-publication.

This did not stop other artists from taking his lead and making versions of their own. I am far too much of a fan of S.G. Boxsius to call him a plagiarist, but I am sure you will agree he looked with care at Midsummer Night before he made his updated version in his woodcut, Noonday. That Boxsius made the print out of admiration, I would say is obvious. I also think he made Giles modern, and brought in something new, as you must do when you borrow an idea. I was lucky enough to come across this beautifully printed woodcut during last summer and, again, just take my word for it, here was Boxsius and his hero at their best.

William Giles' 'September Moon'

                                                                                  

Up for sale on British ebay this week is William Giles' print September Moon at the astonishing starting bid of £500 (that's US$790). [NB Gerrie Caspers is quite sure this is a reproduction from Malcolm Salaman's Masters of the Colour Print series. This is why the label is attached as a title. The one you see here is not the one that is for sale].

This was his very first colour woodcut, published in 1901. This was soon after Giles had gained his art master's certificate at University College, Reading, where he had also learned the colour woodcut technique from Frank Morley Fletcher, who was head of the Department of Art.

It is also one of the very first of the colour woodcuts produced by a member of the British school. I have already posted some of the very early Cornish prints by Sydney Lee and also Ethel Kirkpatrick and I include Kirkpatrick's The full moon for comparison.

                                                                                
I think we can safely assume that the artists knew one another. Kirkaptrick studied enamel work at the Central when Fletcher was teaching the colour woodcut class there and she must also haven been one of his students - stay posted. But Giles owes something in this first print of his to his teacher. The delicacy of colour and line are to be found in Fletcher's own early prints Meadowsweet and The flood gates. But Giles was almost thirty when the print came out and it is fascinating to see that he was already his own man and that many of his real interests are already there, namely his interest in the effects of light and the making of an impression (without being Impressionist).

You can see, I think, that Kirkpatrick was always more Japanese than Giles and what is of course important about this work as a first print is that he dispensed with the keyblock. It was experimenting by then and went on to abandon colour woodcut altogether for a while and use zinc plates instead. But at this point, Kirkpatrick and Giles had quite alot in common, including a striking similarity in colour scheme. Both tend use a more a restricted palette than Fletcher and in some ways they were both more strict in their approach to print-making than their teacher was.

                                                                                     

I suppose I have to include Fletcher's well-known first print Meadowsweet of 1897. This was the first fully independent British colour woodcut and the effectiveness of Fletcher's teaching and personal example are proven in the considerable quality achieved early on by both of his students.

A M Shrimpton's 'Almond blossom in Appennines'

As Gerrie Caspers brought up the subject of the techniques that both Ada Shrimpton and William Giles used for their printed work, I thought I ought to say something about the Giles method and what happened to it. Giles made no woodcuts between 1911 and 1926. Instead he used acid to etch zinc plates which were then printed progressively in the same way as a colour woodcut, to build up the final image.

I don't know offhand what medium he used for his own prints but when he came to issue the final edition of his Colour Print Magazine in 1926 (the year after Shrimpton died) he used the original five etched plates with watercolour to produce the image you see above, which is quite different from the effect achieved by his wife (see previous post). This is an original posthumous print, the paper being tipped onto the page of the magazine. [I am grateful to Paul Ritscher  for the image.]

The artists made a significant bequest of prints, plates and notes on the method to the V&A in London, which now has the best collection of their work as a result. But the method effectively died with Ada Shrimpton as did the magazine. She had provided the funds and quite possibly some of the motivation to develop the method. After all, it was well-suited to someone who had come to printmaking as a painter.

I deliberately avoided saying anything about the methods they used in the main post only because I thought it would complicate matters when I wanted to concentrate on a joint achievement. In fact, I was wrong to do so because the methods they both developped were as much a part of their achievement as the prints they made. Giles went on making woodcuts after Ada Shrimpton's death but he eventually left the King's Road in Chelsea to live in Essex. That says it all.

Mr & Mrs: Ada Shrimpton & William Giles

From what I can see this colour woodcut by the British artist Ada Shrimpton (1856 - 1925) suggests a good deal about the nature of her marriage to her artist-husband, William Giles (1872 - 1939). The complex image of the ageing tree overcome with spring blossom that shelters a pair of saints beside an Italian church door is both subtle and affecting. [The image is courtesy of Annex Galleries]. The wedding itself took place at the British Consulate at Venice on 7th September, 1907. The bride was already 51, the groom only 33. So, from the beginning it was hardly a conventional partnership.

It's the tone of their prints that says so much of how closely they affected one another. (You could never have said this about the etchings of Ernest Lumsden and the colour woodcuts of Mabel Royds who had also married beyond their twenties). Shrimpton was also a painter and this comes across strongly in the freedom of handling that she adopts in her prints; despite his often sparing use of the keyblock, he is always more graphic. But the colours they use speak to one another without a doubt. (You can tell the artists from one another by the monogram Giles always uses).

His peahen exists as a singleton in a preliminary study but it becomes far more interesting once shadowed by the exhuberantly coloured peacock. That Shrimpton did adopt something of his colour system and manner for her own prints seems pretty clear to me (though it is hard to find many examples of her earlier paintings). The pairings and intertwinings they both use are a constant source of interest. It's less easy to identify some of the subjects. For instance, I can't say for sure that the seaside couple are Shrimpton and Giles or whether the sea itself is the Adriactic. But Italy meant a good deal to both of them and images from a small area of Umbria are some of their most lyrical and telling.

Here is Shrimpton with her view of Norcia, clean and bright in a very modern way. They had begun to perfect between them the art of the colour print. One after the other, these shimmering landscapes are as much manifestos as anything produced by the avant garde. They were very much of the age they lived in with their agendas and proselytising and with her financial support Giles was able to start publishing his 'Colour Print Magazine'.

I assume that Almond blossom in Appenines is in Umbria, too. (Shrimpton also produced an image of Spoleto in the same area). It's strikingly similar to some of the work of Gustave Baumann but with none of his arch, deco-ish mannerisms. That splattering of blossom across the brilliant Italian sky has more in common with the attitudes of DH Lawrence. (And if you think the grass is too bright a green, then you must compare it with photos of springtime in Umbria).

Still nearby, we have Giles now at The source of the Clitumnus. (The rather young willow trees were only planted in the C19th). And he may have been the younger partner by eighteen years but he nevertheless adopts the classical name of the river Clituno. He is the more pedantic of the pair, she the more carefree one and funnily enough the more modern one as a result. There is something of the teacher in him, something in her of the student who outshone her master.

William Giles: modern printmaker

It was 1976. I had just bought my first colour woodcut, John Hall Thorpe's bland and beautiful Marigolds, which I was very pleased with untill a friend came round who had done a course in printmaking and damned it with one cruel word 'misregistered'. By that point in the C2oth most printmakers had achieved a professional cleanliness and a sin such as misregistration had been consigned to the dim & dirty past. Fortunately for him, the later work of William Giles (1872 - 1939) like Rainbow, Island of Jura (Hebrides), above, is in some ways, more 1976 than 1922. (I need to credit William P Carl Fine Prints for this one + one of the others). If it weren't for the Arts & Crafts WG, at first glance it would be hard to tell apart from the innumerable colourful nonentites that were churned out from around 1976 onwards. He differs from all that tosh in the claims that he makes: for all the vividness of the colours he employs, this was something he experienced, and that he is presenting us with the facts about the light you can find on the isle of Jura.



It certainly says something about his constant experimentation, first with woodcut in the Japanese manner, then with a combination of etched zinc plates and wood without a keyblock, before he finally left tonality behind and returned to pure woodcut in the mid twenties, that he achieved something that looks both like Romantic watercolour and the iridescence of contemporary etching. His exact titles of course owe a good deal to JMW Turner who also insisted that what he was representing were 'stern facts', albeit not the kind of facts that many of us are used to.

He was born in Reading, studied at the local art school before moving on, first to the Royal College of Art and then Paris. He then came home to Reading to learn the art of the colour woodcut from Frank Morley Fletcher in 1901. His subjects, or rather his excuses, were of the nymphs and shepherds variety, but as you see from Midsummer Night (1919) what he really wanted to do was improve the standards of British printmaking and show exactly how colour prints could convey both light and experience in ways that monochrome could not. This was a man with a mission that led him and his wife, Ada Shrimpton, to give many fine prints to the British Museum.

September Moon from 1901 must be one of his first colour woodcuts and although the sheep and poplar trees and general atmospherics are in line with Fletcher and the French school, and even though in many ways his imagery remains much the same for 25 years, he is already on a bold course of his own that led to he and his wife taking up metal plates from 1912. He wasn't content to find a craft that he could excell in, he wanted to achieve the best effect that he could. I would certainly think that this was the attitude that led an artist with the skill that Ada Collier possessed to go to him for instruction when she wanted to take up woodcut.

The last glow, central Corsica and particularly The last glint of a summer's day, Vejle Fiord, Denmark (1920/21) see him stretching the medium as far as it will go before he returned to colour woodcut, pure and simple, after about 1927. The pink and purple strain our credibilty but only perhaps because we are now so well-used to the outlandishness of so many 1920's colour schemes. But then we have to remind ourselves how far he travelled - to Jura, to Denmark and Corsica - to see just how peculiar light could be. He is no Engelbert Lap with his technicolour Tirol; what we see here is not so much the last glint of a summer's day but a man of very considerable energy and intensity seeing just how far that energy would go.