Katharine Jowett for sale by auction at Dominic Winter

 

A reader tipped me me off today about a group of seven colour linocuts by the British artist, Katherine Jowett, coming up for sale at Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Gloucestershire  this coming Friday. It includes Lanterns in the wind (above) the most original of all her prints and the complementary Street scene (below). Unfortunately, in order to buy these two striking prints, you will need to buy all seven. They come with a estimate of £400 - £600, considerably less than they will go for. In common with much of her printed work they are all either tipped onto light card and laid down on it.

Not a great deal is known about Jowett and, in particular, how she came to make colour linocuts. This has meant there has been some conjecture about her reasons for going to China. The facts as I know them go like this. She left Britain in 1904 to become a teacher at a Methodist school in China. Six years later she married Hardy Jowett who was himself a missionary and the couple subsequently had two children.

By 1931, she had made  a sufficient number of colour linocuts to exhibit alongside Bertha Lum. Not only was Lum resident in Pekin at the time, the Scottish colour print artist and writer, Anna Hotchkis, was also there. It is always possible that this was how Jowett was introduced to lino. She used an oil based ink and heavy card and had little in common with her linocut contemporaries in Britain.

Hardy died in 1936, leaving her alone with the two children and a deteriorating political situation. The following year, Pekin fell to the invading Japanese Army. This did nor deter the young American dealer and collector, Robert Muller, from visiting her in 1940 and buying work. He made it only just in time. Following the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Japan in December, 1941, she was interned and remained in camps until September, 1945, when she returned to Britain.

The hammer price of the prints was £800.

Katharine Jowett: forbidden city

                                                                                  
Your visual education has to start somewhere but with the British printmaker Katharine Jowett (1890 - 1965)  we do not know where that was. Most readers are probably not familar with the west front of Exeter Cathedral but looking at her prints, they make me think its great carved screen and ornate towers. But then I know that her father was a minister in the town. Even so, almost all her prints are architectural and they have a similar articulate flamboyance.

                                                                           
I can't offhand think of any British artist who achieved such depth of colour in their linocuts. By comparision, some Grosvenor artists look almost insipid. And, of course, this is exactly what she is noted for. How she achieved this is another matter. Because she appears to have left Exeter or Devon in the 1920s when British linocut was was only getting started and went to China where she stayed untill the end of the second war. In that time she made a minimum of about twenty five prints,with variations, and as she was interned by the Japanese during the war, she probably worked for no more than about fifteen years. And for those fifteen years she had one subject only and that was old Pekin.

                                                                                    
It was a ready-made subject because she lived there. But it obviously interested her a great deal. She moves from one view to another, almost to the point of monotony. Many of the subjects are similar but some prints are more expressive than others, the viewpoints less conventional, the vigourous use of colour as fauve as any English artist. But she isn't Bloomsbury; she is remarkably free of affectation for a thirties printmaker.

                                                                                    

Ironically, this is what I like about her. She apprehends the physical world and renders it with tremendous purity. I have to assume this came about becase she had talent but wasn't trained and stood outside the trends at home. Somewhere she learned to make linocut - quite possibly from one of Claude Flight's books and through another printmaker. (The person she has most in common with is Isabel de B Lockyer who also had Devon connections as it happens and occasionally their architectural views are similar). I am not trying to present her as a naive artist in some way; I just think she was independant. In this she is clearly different from travellers like Elizabeth Keith and Charles Bartlett who both turned their watercolours into prints. Funnily enough, the work you see here by Jowett is more intense and painterly than theirs but basically is conceived in terms of linocut and nothing else. For this, if nothing else, she deserves credit.

One facet of her work that I don't think has been commented on are her cloudscapes. They hark back to the British watercolour tradition but have an emphasis that lets you know she was well-aware of what was happening in the visual arts in 1920s Britain. Equally, the bold shapes, merging colours and pattern-making are just as typical of the period but they never intrude too much on her subject. She isn't a show-off; she loves what she sees and this makes her detachment and control all the more impressive.