Print & prejudice: Ethel Kirkpatrick at the V&A

 

The V&A South Kensington cannot have heard about the Ethel Kirkpatrick Society (and perhaps you haven't either). To curators at large institutions like the V&A, artists like Kirkpatrick have been mislaid. But we can let that pass. She was included in a small exhibition of women printmakers at the V&A which closed on 11th May this year. If you missed it (as I did) you can see some of the highlights on the website under  'Print and prejudice: women printmakers 1730 to 1930' where you will find the best reproductions of her work I have yet seen, including Bowl of marigolds from 1922 and Mount's Bay (1914). 

The V&A have done her some justice but the scholarship is poor. Kirkpatrick is all over Modern Printmakers and they only had to get in touch to find out the dates.  The research Alan Guest did in the 1980s on Kirkpatrick (when she really was being rediscovered) was as meticulous as the museum's photography. Getting dates and titles right are basic to appreciation of an artist's achievement. Trying to suggest Kirkpatrick was in some way hard done by is not.

Alan was fortunate enough to own a proof of Bowl of marigolds and believed it was a linocut. He could be right. The V&A themselves have a series of proofs of Brixham trawlers (1924) pulled by Kirkpatrick and donated by her in 1924. (They are now available online but seeing is believing). The way she achieved her subtle depth of colour by canny under-printing is an education in itself. There are also progressive proofs donated by William Giles and John Hall Thorpe at the same time and for the same reason. Giles had been both a student and a teacher at the Royal College (next door to the museum) and knew how useful such examples could be.

The week-end on ebay

 

A round-up of the prints to be found for sale on ebay this week-end has to begin with Helen Hyde's Butterflies made in 1908. To start with I need to say the image above is not the one for sale. At under £200 you will get a print that has almost certainly been laid and down and is also cockled. On the plus side you will get the original frame complete with the label of the fashionable Glasgow dealer Andrew Duthie on the back. This is the only time Hyde has appeared on Modern Printmakers. It is a very well-made print and by the time she had made it, she had studied with block-makers in Tokyo. But it isn't all that cheap considering the condition and you should be able to find a good proof for not a lot more.

Nor will you get a bargain on Ethel Kirkpagtrick's Brixham trawlers. What you will get is an unframed proof in good condition, with the colours looking bright and fresh. Here we have Kirkpatrick at her insouciant best and from her classic period before the first war. As she has recently been featured in a small exhibition at the V&A, you will need to be just as insouciant when you pay. Kirkpatrick has a sense of movement and magic rare in British colour woodcut artists. Only Allen Seaby is her equal but unlike Seaby, she never made a duff print.

Robert Howey has never been cheap either but I thought the U.S. dealer was pushing it on this one. The impression Howey makes is usually good. After the storm is also well-designed. But so far as I am concerned, Howey doesn't follow through. He was really a commercial artist, with a small business in Hartlepool, and used  to use printer's ink so his images tend to look flat on his thin buff paper. Howey was one of the first English artists to make use of lino in the 1920s and provided a bridgehead in the north-east for the 'Exhibition of British Linocuts' tours in the late twenties. All in all, though, if you want sea and boats, stay with the expert.

I am a fan of the Swiss artist Alfred Peter and own a few of his bookplates and would have considered this one myself if it had not been for the condition of the paper. Peter remains good value if you like small prints. He was a fine craftsman and here you have his own New Year print made in 1911. I suspect the photo does not do the meticulous printing and compact design much justice.

Last but not least we have this fine etching of a faun by Hans Frank. At about £25 this looks like a bargain compared to the late colour woodcuts currently for sale in Germany and Austria at almost £500. I know many readers like to have the prints they buy framed on the wall. I keep most of mine loose in portfolios. This means I have am happy to have small prints at negligible prices wrapped in tissue and invariably looking great! Good artists understand the preciousness and intimacy found in small works. It is what gives so many British colour woodcuts their special value though when it comes to very small prints, the Swiss, the Germans and the Austrians are even more appealing than British wood-engravings and a fraction of the price.

Three Ethel Kirkpatricks at auction

I heard only this morning that Dreweatts in Newbury have three colour woodcuts by the British artist, Ethel Kirkpatrick, in their forthcoming sale on 10th February. As readers of long-standing will know, I admire Kirkpatrick and I would happily bid for at least two of these prints, but unfortunately, Dreweatts have decided to sell all three as one lot, which may mean they will all be knocked down to the trade. All the same, I thought it was well worth readers knowing about the latest development and seeing for themselves how the sale unfolds.

Kirkpatrick does not come up for sale all that often and although none of these prints are must-haves so far as I am concerned, she was such a subtle colourist and so good at what she did, at the right price, any of these are well worth buying. But how many people want three boat prints? The classic image is Brixham trawlers (above) from 1923 or 1924 (there were two versions). In common with many of her fishing-boat prints made of Cornish subjects before the first war, the main action is in the centre of the image and where most of the cutting is done. It may not look all that much here, but I can assure readers that once you have this print in front of you, its subtlety and attractiveness will be obvious.

Kirkpatrick almost certainly studied with Frank Morley Fletcher at the Central School of Arts and Crafts about 1899. She was a students of jewellery-making there at the time and I think these fine prints complement the jewellery she was learning to make. Her careful craftsmanship says a lot about the approach Fletcher took and like his, these prints are faithful to the traditions of Japanese printmaking. But Brixham trawlers has a vivacity, spontaneity and magic you could look for in Fletcher, but would not find. Like Seaby, Kirkpatrick became the master of the medium. Fletcher was too often its servant.

The canal (second from the top) from 1922 is closer to the kind of pictures Fletcher was making about 1908. The old imagism has been abandoned in favour of a description of the canal and the surrounding country. Again, it is very well-made and would grace any collection of colour woodcuts. It exists in another version which I have included (third from the top) although the one for sale is the best known. I am entranced as I always am by the hills and sky. This was where she was often at her most Japanese and perhaps her most successful. 

Finally, there is Communications, past and present from 1924. For me, this depends far too much on perspective and is my least favourite of all her prints, but it is nevertheless another very well-made piece of work. Interestingly enough, Alan Guest does not have this on his check-list, which must include all the work she exhibited with the Graver Printers from 1912 onwards. If you include her first watercolours, she had an impressive career of more than forty years, including her first visit to Newlyn in 1894 and her final colour woodcut exhibited in 1932. She made at least thirty-four prints, including the small colour linocut Marigolds, (though Alan Guest included one or two variants in his list). Even so, it is a fair old number and is probably equal to the output of William Giles and Arthur Rigden Read. It needs to be said that neither of them could claim to have worked from the mid-1880s onwards as she had done and, really, it is extraordinary that the span of her career covered such very different periods and that she nevertheless managed to hold her own. Whatever you buy then, almost every print is more than a mere persuasive sheet of enchantment.

To Tangier with Ethel Kirkpatrick

                                                                               

Some months ago a reader sent me this new image of Ethel Kirkpatrick's The orange seller. I had only seen it in a catalogue before and was very glad of the opportunity to make yet another claim for Modern Printmakers' to have the final word on Kirkpatrick. That aside, I think it also goes some way to give more of an idea of her range. I have no absolute proof but I think she was showing here a part of the casbah at Tangier. The orange seller's clothes are right for the period (by about 1910) while the palm leaf baskets behind him are typical of Morocco.
                                                         
Anyway, here she is, far from the dull skies over London or the limpid dawn over the Venice lagoon. For a change she tackles the stunning light of Tangier. Not everybody has taken to it; Francis Bacon complained. Others adopted an orange-seller to give their image local colour, all the time moaning about the white walls. Kirkpatrick turned that to her advantage and let the astonishing light from the sea speak for itself. Just look at the way it bounces off the building beyond those signature mauve shadows. Fifty years or so later, the British playwright. Joe Orton, noticed the same kind of light. 'The town lay spread beneath us, and the bay and the mountains in the distance, a soft almost purple light covered the whole scene.' And while it would be easy to mock Orton for seeing Tangier through a Hendrix haze, he went on to describe the way life was enhanced by the light as if one were living in a painting by someone French and famous. (He was more than a touch naïve.)
                                                                  

Eugene Delacroix was French and very famous and found Tangier brimming with subject matter. Before I had saw anything from his Journal, I was struck by the way fifty-year old men digging a hole in the street in the old town had the dignified faces of Masaccio saints. Delacroix went one better, and I know exactly what he meant when he said, 'The Greeks and Romans are here at my door, in the Arabs who wrap themselves in a white blanket and look like Cato or Brutus... ' I think Kirkpatrick might have noticed something similar, judging by her orange-seller, and even if she didn't, here we have another version of the Latin Quarter, done with that searching sensitivity she always brought to her work.

I have added Ada Collier's Sweet market, Tangier  (courtesy of William P Carl Fine Prints) and Mary Macrae White's intrepid view of Fez, in case anyone missed them the first time around.

Ethel Kirkpatrick & Isola San Giorgio Maggiore

                                                                                       
It takes an artist who knows what they want to do to go on returning to a view of the same small, island. Not any island, I have to admit, but the extraordinary Isola San Giorgio Maggiore at Venice as seen here by Ethel Kirkpatrick in 1898.

It was at that time she began to first make colour woodcuts, but she had already been painting and exhibiting watercolours like this one for at least four years. But what we have seen untill now are the watercolours painted in the west of Cornwall, even though she and her sister Ida went on various sketching trips in southern England and beyond. What we have seen so far may only be a matter of what has turned up, so I am very grateful to the reader who sent in this unusual view of the island with the domes of Santa Maria della Salute at the entrance to the Grand Canal just to the right.

It shows San Giorgio from the west, possibly from the Giardini Pubblicci, or from a boat. Almost all the views of the island you find tend to emphasise its isolation, but Kirkpatrick takes a viewpoint that recalls Istanbul seen across the Golden Horn.

                                                                                  
The restricted palette of blues and reds is telling. Here is an artist who was about to embark on a career making colour woodcut, and it shows just how much that medium would suit her style.  Early morning, Venice (above)  involves another view of the island, with the campanile apparently missing. It was made years later, when the topography of the city was of less interest to her than the nature of its light. But watercolour gave her the opportunity to create a panorama with a real sense of depth that colour woodcut does less well.

By the time she came to make Evening, Venice  (above) in 1913, I think she was on the top of her form and it just shows what expressive freedom she had gained when she came to colour woodcut. It has her taking yet another view of Isola San Giorgio, probably from St Mark's Square this time, and it is fascinating to see her looking at the same subject in three such different ways. So, many thanks to Kia for sending the watercolour in today. We now know more about Kirkpatrick than we did on Tuesday.

Ethel Kirkpatrick: an outgoing fleet

                                                                                  
Thomas Kirkpatrick died only a very few years after he had had a house called The Grange built at Harrow-on-the-Hill in Essex. I did wonder whether it had been named after Edward Burne Jones' house at Fulham and considering Kirkpatrick had two daughters who were making their way as young artists, there was one important thing missing. It was a studio. The year after their father's death, Ethel and Ida (see her post) put this right.

Although Ethel Kirkpatrick's take on home-life in On top of Harrow Hill (see above) is witty and convivial, just as one would expect from someone whose father had been born at Coolmine in County Dublin, the domestic gets short shrift in her work. The nearest that we ever get is a simple bowl of marigolds. If it was wings that interested her near-contemporary, Allen Seaby, with Kirkpatrick it was sails. She did sails like no one else.

                                                                             

It took a few years before she found what she wanted. Moving from Brittany to Chambery in Switzerland and then on to St Ives in Cornwall, she finally began to work around Newlyn in about 1893 or 1894. I've already talked about her watercolour Boats at rest painted that year, but when she learned how to make colour woodcuts, probably only a few years after that, she found a metier that helped make her sails something not just special, but unique. It doesn't come across on a pc monitor, but occasionally her printed boats move across the picture like ghosts being blown along to a seance. She achieves a sense of something unearthly in those prints that no one else quite gets near. Not to my mind, anyway. Of all the artists I have written about here, you need to have one of those Kirkpatricks in front of you to fully understand what her achievement was.

                                                                                  

As I've just suggested, she was in the first wave of British artists to learn to make colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner. She was certainly one of the earliest students at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and must have studied the craft there with Frank Morley Fletcher. For a craft that required such discipline, there was still an emphasis on experiment at the time and Kirkpatrick was one of a few artists who tested the range of the medium in a way that was similar to the approach taken by the Japanse themselves. Alongside Sidney Lee and Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown, she worked on colour variations of her prints. With Lee, if he changes from night to day, nothing much is gained. Brown, as I've said recently, is more subtle. She builds up the image from pure monochrome to strong colour. It wasn't just a change of the time of day with her. Oddly enough, though, there is an early print by Kirkpatrick called The full moon (bottom) where the time of day is so ambiguous, I have still not convinced myself it isn't sunset. I think she was obviously experimenting, even if we only have one version that has come down to us. But for her print An outgoing fleet, we have three. This second, silvery variation is so close in feel to Brown's colourless version of Largs harbour it is hard to believe they didn't know each others work well.

                                                                                  

We have to remember that colour printmaking of this kind was something new to Europe in the late 1890s and for me it has become clear that Brown and Kirkpatrick both became interested in the effect of colour, but of all three artists, Kirkpatrick was the most evocative. She doesn't make herself unnecessary work. The images are kept to the centre of the picture and the cutting is often kept to a minimum. What she does excell in is tone. She achieves this not just by her jaunty use of colour, but by the way she applies the medium to the block, and the way she underprints.

                                                                                  

She knew what she was doing. The complete set of build-ups she gave to the V&A in London makes that clear. More's the pity the set was for Brixham Trawlers rather than for An outgoing fleet. All the same, it just goes to show the striking lengths she went to to gain an effect that is far from obvious in the final proof. The underprinting, above, is for two trees, believe it or not, in The canal. There is a kind of planning and calculation in her work that is all the more surprising when you consider the effects she wished to achieve. If Allen Seaby once described colour printing as 'a sort of magic', the magic in Kirkpatrick's prints isn't only one of colour, or tone. It is more contrived than that. It is hard to conceive the way she managed to plot colours and shapes in the way that she did and come up with something, as I said earlier on, that is just so purely strange. It's an over-used phrase, I know, but what we sometimes get in Kirkpatrick is a dream-world. Of all the colour woodcut artists, she grasped what she might be done with the medium, in a way perhaps no one else did. She was not just vigilant, she was uncanny.

Ethel Kirkpatrick & watercolour

                                                                                        
What we know so far about the early training of Ethel Kirkpatrick is sketchy and but she had begun to paint in watercolours early in her career when studying either at the West Kensington Schools (which soon became the Royal College) or the RA Schools in London and then at the Academie Julian in Paris. Watercolours by Kirkpatrick are not so easy to come by and so I was very fortunate to have this earlyish watercolour Boats at rest sent to to me by Clive Christy.

It provides a number of clues, not least that her interest in maritime subjects began early on. Funnily enough, the patterns and dark colours also suggests to me the way her interest in enamalling and jewellery might have developped. The watercolour dates from 1894 three years before she took a course in jewellery at the Central School in London. It shows part of the pilchard fishing fleet at Newlyn in Cornwall. (You can see the lighthouse at the end of the pier to the left of the larger vessel).

                                                                                  

The date is interesting. 1894 was the year Lily Kirkpatrick moved to St Ives. It's generally assumed that Lily was a member of the larger clan Kirkpatrick. They were landed people from Coolmine on Dublin Bay but Ethel had been born in London. Her father had joined the British Army, was wounded during the Indian Mutiny and eventually joined the prison service. Over the years Ethel did time at Coldbath, Exeter, Wormwood Scrubs and most notoriously at Newgate. By 1894 Captain Kirkpatrick had had a house built at Harrow-on-the-Hill near London. Curiously, a studio for his two artist daughters had not been included in the plans. Ethel and Ida soon put this right. One was built after his death in 1896. It's been suggested that the sisters moved back to Harrow after the death of Lily in 1902. I somehow doubt this. Ethel was studying weekly at the Central School during the autumn and winter of 1897/1898 and the watercolour itself was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895.

Another maritime piece follows on (made presentable by one of the members of the Ethel Kirkpatrick Society) but I  don't want readers to assume Kirkpatrick was a maritime artist, straight and simple. She may have relied heavily on boats and water for her later colour woodcuts but she also painted figure subjects. Her Cornish Floral Dance finds her working in the style of Thomas Gotch. I think she was a more flexible artist than she might appear at first glance. Basically, we still know very little about the range of her work - even the colour woodcuts, which she is best known for today. I came across a new one to me called Thames Barges only on Friday. This is why it was so good of Clive to send his image on. It extends what we know about her work. And that was what was important to her.

                                                                                

Nor is there a simple jump between her watercolours of boats and the colour woodcuts. The earliest woodcuts depicting sailing boats that I know of appear to date from about 1912. This date is also significant. Generally, there had been no real opportunity for British artists to exhibit their colour woodcuts until the formation of the Society of Graver Printers in Colour in 1909. Nor was Kirkpatrick a founder member. (In fact, none of the leading colour woodcut artists were in at the beginning). But the opportunity to exhibit may well have led her to interpret some of her watercolours.

                                                                                         

But there are subtle differences between the paintings and the prints. She continues to group boats together but there are fewer of them and, by and large, they often occupy a restricted space within the picture. She didn't believe in making it difficult for herself. Virtuoso printmaking of the kind practiced by William Giles (and he was very good at it) and John Platt was not for Kirkpatrick. The outgoing fleet is fairly complicated so far as her seascapes go. But what she loses in impressiveness, she gains by way of expression. Look at the way the boats and their sails turn with the wind and the water. This is what she was about. (One of her titles was With wind and tide). She is no formalist; she describes. Her watercolour training, the way she observed and sketched what she saw, led to the later colour woodcuts that she was proud of, the ones like Early morning Venice, Mount's Bay and a blue version of The outgoing fleet, that she gave to the nation. All of the six depict boats but all the scenes are different. The poet in her was at work, from London to Cornwall to Venice. She didn't let colour woodcut become too laborious for her, she let it set her free.

                                                                                  
[I include Hiroshi Yoshida's Morning at Abuto as Klaus refers to it in his comment below].

The two Kirkpatrick sisters

I need to point out an error in 'The definitive Ethel Kirkpatrick' post - an over-confident title as it turns out. A niece of Kirkpatrick wrote to me while I was away pointing out that Lily Kirkpatrick was not a sister of Ida and Ethel and I shall be amending the post. I also want to thank the family for contacting me so promptly and offer them my apologies.

Ida Kirkpatrick (1867 - 1950)

As a parting shot, a painting by Ida Kirkpatrick alongside one of her younger sister's colour woodcuts. Just to show perhaps the complexity of the relationship between them. Unless disaster intervenes, this really will be the last post untill mid January. Once again, happy hunting and happy Christmas to all readers.

The definitive Ethel Kirkpatrick

I need to completely revise the few details I gave about the life of the British artist Ethel Kirkpatrick (1869 - 1966). Needless to say, I haven't changed my view that she fits well within the British topographical tradition, is both a keen and accurate observer, a talented colourist, a skilful woodcutter and, last but not least, has the kind of appeal many modern British printmakers can only dream of.



She was born in Holborn, London, the daughter of Mary and Thomas Sutton Kirkpatrick. Her mother was from Yorkshire, her father a professional soldier from a landed family at Coolmine in Dublin. He had left the army the year she was born and the family eventually moved to Exeter when her father was made governor of the prison and then to Harrow-on-the-Hill near London when he became governor of Newgate. There was an older sister, Ida Kirkpatrick (1866 - 1950) who also became an artist.

Ethel had the broader art education, studying at the RA Schools and the Central School of Arts and Crafts before taking the well-worn path of British artists at the time to the Academie Julien in Paris. Some time after this Ethel moved to St Ives in Cornwall where the artist Lily Kirkpatrick lived and worked and where there was a growing colony of artists. Ethel Kirkpatrick also exhibited in the town.

Ida also moved to St Ives but both sisters moved back to the family home, The Grange at Harrow, in 1906. Ironically, it is still impossible to date much of the work shown here except on the grounds of style and subject. The second image of the woman walking towards the full moon could be a Cornish scene but has a French genre feel to it. Both I would think are early woodcuts. The river scene above, variously described as the Clyde and the Thames, is dated 1911. I think the hills are too close and the river too broad to be the Thames but a work of this skill suggests she had taken up colour woodcut a few years before.

The third image with the windblown hedge may be somewhere like Carbis Bay near St Ives. As she probably used watercolour sketches as a basis for her woodcuts, she could have made them quite a lot later. Even so, she must be one of Morley Fletcher's earlier followers, along with Sidney Lee, and once the two women returned to Harrow they made frequent trips to join the artists at Walberswick in Suffolk. Lee also made a colour print there.

The rocky, hilly coasts I think we can safely say are Cornwall rather than Suffolk and I've included another fine proof of Kirkpatrick's view of Mousehole near Penzance. As a woman of independant means and mind, she travelled elsewhere and I especially like this view below of Venice. It shows just how much she took note of the light in Cornwall. Her Cornish pieces are never as limpid as this.

She could quite obviously ring the changes, both in mood and style as you can see from the second, strikingly expressive view of the city from the lagoon. Even if she did train initially with Frank Morley Fletcher, the way she handles those reflections is closer to Munch. Everything depends on the subtle and brilliant tonality and disparate array of shapes. You can hardly believe it is the same artist whose keen eye apprehended the pilchard boats as they left Mousehole.

Readers will have seen this view of the Thames before as well but this is a better image and will appear in larger format. It is strikingly fresh with all kinds of subtle reflections.

 

The print below of nesting rooks is still near London. In fact, it's at Harrow-on-the Hill, with what looks like a subtle smoggy dawn. Her mauves are as improbable as they are irresistable. The rooks are also a bit flat and unconvincing but she has top marks for the original bird's eye view. One wonders how she got so close. It shows by just how much her work depends on empathy and imagination.

I think the last two images are later work. The first is a Swiss view, the second is called 'Communication, past and present'. The line is sharper and more modern but the tone alot less sympathetic but we have to acknowledge that she always varied her approach. Boats and colour woodcut may have been great loves, but her style changes.

It's fascinating to see her take on the world of the inter-war years even if the print itself is less appealing - at least for me. And I need to add that I was totally dependant on the London dealers Abbott and Holder for these images. They all come from their Christmas exhibition and some are still for sale: abbottandholder.co.uk/ . If you go onto the site, just scroll down to the prints section.