William Lee Hankey, Wilfred Fairclough & Charles Mackie at Parker Fine Art

 

There is a good selection of prints and watercolours coming up at Parker Fine Art at Farnham on 9th February, including fairly expensive work by Laura Knight. Needless to say, Knight is never likely to find approval anywhere on Modern Printmakers. Nevertheless, there is good work by three artists who always will. Top of the list in my own book is Wilfred Fairclough's etching Hambledon orchard from 1943. William Lee Hankey's fine pencil and watercolour of a Pas de Calais scene (above) is the better work, but I would probably go for the Fairclough if I were going to bid (which I am not).

The delicate study of country women finds Lee Hankey at his best - bold, spontaneous and sensitive to light and movement. In fact, everything a watercolour study ought to be. I would guess the scene shown is in the village of Camiers where Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown lived and where the two artists sometimes worked alongside one another. Both were part of the troupe of English and Scottish artists who had settled in and around the town of Etaples from very early in the C20th and who exhibited together after the Graver Printers finally put on their first shows in London and Paris in 1911. Lee Hankey and his wife, Mabel, had a studio in the town, but had a house built at Le Touquet in 1904. He also acted as secretary for the Graver Printers while Brown was a leading figure in the Colour Woodcut Society when it was founded in London in 1920. Their first shows were held at the Macrae Gallery were her brother was proprietor.

It shows if nothing else how closely these artists worked together (and there is another post about Lee Hankey working at Camiers elsewhere on the blog). It may be coincidence, but Charles Mackie also worked near Etaples at the same time though the work offered for sale is from the distinguished and influential colour woodcuts he made of Italian subjects. To begin with, it is beyond me how Parker Fine Art can have made such a mistake with their cataloguing. They describe the print as At the Borghese Gardens in Rome simply because that is what it says on the label. If they paid more attention they would know the view shows San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, a church which also appears in the work of Ethel Kirkpatrick and Carl Thiemann amongst others. I suppose they thought it might be St. Peter's but the correct title is The Palace Gardens, Venice (below).

About 1904, Mackie received a commission to copy a painting by Diego Velasquez in the Prado. On his way back from Madrid, he stopped off at his brother's flat in Paris then went on to Rouen and painted The return of the flock to the fold in the village of Lefaux only three or four miles from the Browns' home at Camiers. I suspect this was when he became interested once more in colour woodcut because the painting became the basis for a print. But it was after a trip to Venice in 1908 with the Laura and Harold Knight and Adam Bruce Thomson that he began to make the large-scale night scenes that Frank Brangwyn took note of when he was planning his seminal Bruges  portfolio with Yoshijiro Urushibara.

Mackie's method were unorthodox and either you like the end result, or you don't. But the Italian prints are impressive, especially the glorious Ponte degli Alpini, Bassano del Grappa, the one I like best. he had come to know the Knights after a hockey match played at Hinderwell near Staithes when the couple had only just left art school in Nottingham. Mackie took Knight under his wing and once a week she went down to his studio in Staithes where he showed her how to organise her palette. But it didn't really work for either of them and both artists were dogged by an inability to find any kind of working style.

I am going to return to Fairclough in a review of Ian Lowe's book about his work, so all I will say for now is Orchard Farm used to be at Hambledon in Surrey until some affordable homes were built on top of it. What I will add is that Parkers have got the title right on this one, the print comes from the period of his work I like best and there is another batch of proofs plus a later print included in the sale. Fairclough was also in Spain, with the resulting work being austere. After Mackie had been there, the Browns and Lee Hankeys visited the south together about 1906 and where the two friends worked at Granada. What strikes me as remarkable is that British artists and writers like Laurie Lee, Gerald Brennan and Fairclough continued to find the country rewarding long after it had gone out of fashion.

See also 'William Lee Hankey's deserted village' for more about Camiers and his illustrations for Oliver Goldsmith.

William Lee Hankey's deserted village

                                                                  
                                                                         

In 1909 a new edition of Oliver Goldsmith's poem The Deserted Village was published with illustrations by the British artist, William Lee Hankey, using the new four-colour offset process to reproduce Lee Hankey's watercolours. By that time Lee Hankey had been experimenting with colour printing for about five years, using a basic combination of etching and aquatint to produce a wide variety of images that were in many ways new to British graphic art. Yet, it was the way that he seems to have worked alongside another artist who was using a quite different medium that I find just as fascinating.
                                                                          

Unlike Lee Hankey, Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown is no newcomer to Modern Printmakers. The pair were both members of the art colony that centred on the town of Etaples in the Pas-de-Calais, with Lee Hankey working in his studio in the town, and Lizzie Brown (if I am not mistaken) at the village you see in these two etchings by Lee Hankey, The full moon and Marie of the fields. The Austen Browns had probably lived at Camiers, a few miles from Etaples, for three or four years before Lee Hankey began to make prints. In the image at the top, you see the chateau beside the Etang du Roy, one of the a series of large ponds to the south of the village; behind Marie I think what you can see is the main street from the ridge, roughly to the north.
                                                                      

The area was small but astonishingly varied, with sand dunes along the coast and sheep pastures on the ridge, and must have seen at the time like a small world unto itself - certainly one that offered more than enough scope to double as a deserted village in C18th England. Although Lee Hankey's work for The Deserted Village has been praised elsewhere on the web, you will see straightaway how far popular illustration led him into conventional ways. Basically, the man in the illustration, above, looks liked he has just been beamed up by Scottie, and the scale of the figure and the arrangement of the houses are far less dramatic than the image of Marie with her rosary out in the fields.
                                                                     

In fact, it was Lee Hankey's wife, Mabel, who I think had developed a nice line in C18th pastiche some years before her husband, so it's interesting to see him working so intently in a village his friend, Lizzie Brown, had virtually made her own. You find exactly the same locations in his work, sometimes from the same angle, and certainly the same activities like haymaking, but seen in completely different ways. Above, we have Lee Hankey brimming with masculine vigour, below, Brown, picking out Lee Hankey's women you can see gathering the hay, but showing one carrying it away beneath the most tenuous of moons in By the lake.
                                                             

It shows exactly why, I think, etching suited Lee Hankey and colour woodcut was the right medium for Brown. Lee Hankey's early colour etchings are certainly atmospheric and often bravura, and while his Harvest Moon is imaginative and powerful, I think Oliver Goldsmith would have also recognised a fellow poet in Lizzie Brown. She started with a basic grey and brought her colour up in stages, true to the essential monochrome nature of great graphic art, but using colour with a sure and selective touch. While Lee Hankey produced editions with a smaller (and cheaper) number in black and white, and then adding colour by means of a muslin wash, with Brown colour is always intrinsic. Both artists often began with monochrome and experimented with colour thereafter, but the end results are quite different. What the Irish protestant, Goldsmith, would have made of the Catholic imagery in Lee Hankey, is another matter altogether, but it does make me wonder whether his own deserted village was a deserted village of the Faith.