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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Shinsui Ito 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith'

                                                                                     

One day in 1923 the Canadian artist, Walter Phillips, was taken to Notting Hill Gate in London to meet the critic and writer, Malcolm Salaman. There was something provincial and naïve about Phillips' reaction to Salaman's flat, heaped as it was with prints of all kinds from old master to whatever peccadillos or whim had appeal in the market for etchings. For instance, there was Arthur Briscoe's manly array of rigging and seafarers and Elyse Lord's foppish, oriental confections. And there Miss Elizabeth Keith. And what did they think about her? Because, as with Phillips, there was something naïve in her own make-up. Phillips' work looked fine until it came up against real printmaking talent like Ian Cheyne and then, I'm afraid, it was sent packing. In a similar way, Keith's Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe, was possibly tempting fate when he arranged to have an artist as talented as Shinsui Ito prepare a design with Keith as its subject simply because Keith's weaknesses would be made all too obvious.
                                                                           

                                                          

To start with,  Keith would have been incapable of the bold candour of Shinsui's blues, pinks and marmalade orange. Nor could she have achieved the subtle simplicity of the hands, the uprightness of the back nor, most importantly, the scepticism of that steady gaze of hers. But here were two artists bartering gaze for gaze and while it is obvious that Keith was in no way intimidated, Shinsui rose to his subject as Keith could not. Only look at the brilliance of that swirl of marmalade feathers around her head, that frivolous crown of glory. Who chose the hat? Shinsui, Keith or even her zealous publisher? It sets off the pale north European skin so perfectly. Nothing remains of the young Japanese beauties that were Shinsui's stock-in-trade. Instead we have a perceptiveness so acute it verges on satire. The outlandishness of the hat, the tumbled folds of her blouse, the intrepid eyebrows, that crooked mouth, they all invites us, by way of minute exaggeration, to take pleasure in this rather extraordinary European with her tomboyish, adventurous ways. Look at her in front of that sumptuous car sharing a garland with her friend and fellow-Scot, Kate Bartlett. What amuses us is what amused Shinsui.

I need to credit and thank Darrel Karl at Eastern Impressions for the photograph of Keith and Kate and Charles Bartlett.



                                                                                                                                                    

Elizabeth Keith: an honourable eccentricity

                                                                          
When Elizabeth Keith published a set of caricatures in aid a war-time charity in Tokyo in 1917, the men who made up her subjects who found themselves dressed as teddy bears or sailors must have felt hugely relieved. Any chap who had been unwise enough to grow a moustache, or even to grow bald, found himself in a tutu, fairy wings, an evening gown, a bustle, anything that would diminish them. It was all daintily camp and the net effect was to make her victims not just vulnerable but available to public scrutiny.

Would she have got away with this back home in Aberdeenshire? Probably not. Would the idea even have arisen? She was certainly not the first traveller to note the emotional differences between the East and the West. But she may have been the first to turn the tables on the Western community so pointedly. When the bond forms between Ishmael and the Polynesian islander, Queequeg, Herman Melville has Ishmael say, 'I felt a melting within me. No more my heart was turned against the wolfish world. ' The emotional effect on Keith of being in the Far East was just as great..

                                                                               

On the Phillipine island of Moro she attended a wedding where she described the couple as 'the boy and girl culprits'. She was most affected by the girl, with her whitened face and downward gaze, sitting in a room where men predominated. 'The unhappy bride was high enough for all to see her, and the people stared and stared with a curiousity that seemed unquenchable'.

No less than her own, then. She describes being overwhelmed by her first visit to Pekin. 'I had not dreamed of such colour. The place overpowers me. I have not been able to sleep. The crowding impressions are too excting. The longing to understand has been almost unbearable.'

                                                                       

This vision was soon recognised by the canny Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe. He had already had the watercolours of the British artist, Charles Bartlett, translated into colour woodcut. But Bartlett was in Hawaii and it is quite possible that when Wantanabe visited the department store exhibition of her travel watercolours and told Keith that East Gate, Seoul, by moonlight could be made into a colour woodcut, he really had had a vision of his own, for Elizabeth Keith went on to be his most successful and his most loyal artist. 'He declared that it would be a great success,' she said. 'I took his advice and he was right.'

                                                                             

Unlike the arts and crafts printmakers back at home, she only produced the designs. Even so, her close involvement with Wantanabe's blockcutters and printers was not without a fine sense of pantomime. By her own admission she had limited Japanese and was reliant on her wily publisher. 'I constantly break with tradition, much to the disgust of my printer,' she said, only to find their own behaviour just as disconcerting. There was, she discovered, a fine line between chance and intention. The blockcutters were so scrupulous, they would faithfully reproduce haphazard marks she regarded as flaws, flaws they couldn't comprehend.

                                                                               

Her stay in Japan lasted untill 1924. Then, back in London one day, on a visit to the critic Malcolm Salaman, she met the leader of the British colour woodcut movement, William Giles. Now Giles was no great fan of reproductive work, which he soon afterwards described as 'replicas' and the ensuing fame 'false glory'. While there Keith was shown a proof of Giles first colour woodcut, September Moon, which Salaman owned, 'a masterly print,' he said, 'done after only a year's study,' and Giles assured her she was quite capable of cutting and printing her own blocks, just as he had. What Keith herself thought of the print, we do not know. And whether this pep-talk was quite the antidote to Wantanabe that Salaman made it out to be, is doubtful. The idea that Keith returned to Japan and set about making her own prints starts with Salaman who went on to say that her activities were tolerated as 'an honourable eccentricity'. She certainly opted to study etching with WP Robins at the Central School, not woodcut, and there were exhibitions at the Beaux Arts in November, 1924, with another one in Paris but personally I know of only one print that she cut and printed herself and this is her Japanese carpenter (below) from 1937. But she was unable to settle in Britain, and returned to Tokyo in 1932.
                                                                       

 

But by then, political conditions were beginning to deteriorate and she never made the return trip to China she had so much wanted to make, and 1936 found her back home yet again, after sell-out exhibitions in the US on the way. The next year there was a second exhibition at the Beaux Arts in London. It may be that she only began to cut and print her own work (as you can see from her inscription) once she knew she was unlikely to go back to Japan. Even so, after the war, she found herself marooned and out-of-fashion, and even unable to support herself by selling her prints, and went live with Elspeth and John at Idwell just as she had done all those years before in Tokyo.