From the shadows: the prints of Sydney Lee at the Royal Academy

                                                                                    
My own view of the prints of Sidney Lee may well be equivocal, but there is no getting round the comments left in the visitors book during the opening days of this new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. 'Inspiring' certainly suggested that a number of people there made prints themselves. 'A revelation' would have been less of a revelation if such comments had not been so prevelant about many printmakers featured on the pages of this blog. And there was no gainsaying the blunt appeal of  'More prints like this'. It is a long time since any public gallery in London has shown prints from this period and the academy may look a mite out-of-touch and self-regarding when it comes to choice of artist. Lee, after all, was one of their own members. But to some extent it seems the road was chosen by a small group of dedicated Lee followers. There are other contemporaries of Lee who I would consider more deserving of a show in Piccadilly before him, Ethel Kirkpatrick and William Giles amongst them, but the die is cast. Sydney Lee it is.

                                                                               
I have to say the show looks good. The size of the rooms suits the large scale of Lee's prints and the gilded architecture brings out an old masterly touch to Lee I hadn't noticed before. Being a pedant, I could have done with another glass-fronted case, and it was frustrating to read about Lee's watercolour sketches he used to make his colour prints and not to see any. But it is apparent now that alot of Lee material has simply not survived, and it is a credit to all those involved, Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser above all, that the show has taken place at all.

                                                                                  
Malcolm Salaman came up with one of his phrases when he talked about 'the verity of textures' in Lee's prints. Certainly, the range of his printmaking is impressive. Etching and aquatint, woodcut and wood-engraving, and mezzotint, all worked to a point where the prints begin at times to look like photographs. But Lee, it has to be said, is transitional. Some of the work hovers between the reproductive finesse of C19th engravers and the decorative flair and expressiveness of C20th work. The effect may be mysterious, but the marks Lee actually makes lack interest. What  Samuel Palmer did with pen and ink or Claughton Pellew achieved with his tools, was as individual as it is entrancing, so it certainly isn't a matter of fashion or changing styles.

                                                                                
Lee started out at Manchester School of Art learning sculpture and relief modelling. Unsurprisingly, the stones and buildings he choses as subjects are often sculptural, he harries his prints the way a sculptor might, the light and shadow shifts and glimmers the way it does on a Rodin bronze. At times I found myself wondering whether Lee could actually draw or not, but you only need to take a close-up look at the head of the woman crossing the Ponte Paradiso to undertsnad how much Lee's imagination worked in three dimensions. All the same, the flatness of some of the work is disconcerting.

                                                                                 
Ironically, this is especially true for some of the colour woodcuts, not so much Boatbuilding, St Ives as in Drying sails, St Ives.  There is as much interest in structure as there is in surface, and in Boatbuilding he begins to make marks that have a touch of individuality about them. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect he may have learned this from the lithographs of Henri Riviere. What the early history of Lee's prints is, though, is hard to say. Nothing is dated and everything tends towards the circumstantial. It won't matter very much to people if the odd date is wrong. I would have also thought Lee was making colour woodcut prior to the first date given, which is 1904, but again my own take on Lee is just as circumstantial.

                                                                             
But, all told, this is a fascinating and enjoyable show. The colour woodcuts in particular come up really well. But what comes up most, for all his travels to glorious Italy and sunny Spain, is Lee's northern Englishness, as dour as it is evocative, and he is clearly well inside the main interests of the British printmaking tradition if one considers John Sell Cotman or Valerie Thornton or Norman Ackroyd even. He needs more context. I am dubious about the claim that he was 'experimental'. Original artists prints, especially in colour, were relatively new when Lee began. They were all of them finding their way and, as I've said before, when I talked about the 1910 show in Paris, all of those artists, British and French, were trying out different ways of working. Lee was only one of them. He presented himself in the summer of 1897 as the nineties aesthete. It was an experiment in living that was not to last that long.

                                                                                      

                                                                                   

Sydney Lee at the RA & Aberystwyth

                                                                                

I know that I have not always been kind to Sydney Lee, but the forthcoming exhibtion of fifty prints at the Royal Academy in London is nevertheless a must for your diary. Lee played a pivotal role in the early days of modern British printmaking. He was one of the first practitioners of colour woodcut, then took over Frank Morley Fletcher's class at the Central School, which morphed into Noel Rooke's famous and highly influential wood-engraving class.

The show runs from 27th February to 26th May, 2013, and will be held in the Tennant Gallery and Council Room, and coincides with the publication of Robert Meyrick's catalogue of Lee's prints. Robert, who is professor and head of the school of art at Aberystwyth University, has also curated the show. (Some years ago Robert published a very enjoyable and must-have book, 'Edgar Hollway and friends' about the artist's personal collection). The exhibition then opens at Aberystwyth on 17th June and runs untill 6th September.

                                                                                 
Of the three British print exhibtions I have posted on over the past year, this will certainly be the most thorough. I know that Robert has been buying Lee's colour woodcuts far and wide and this will be a one-and-only chance for you to see these rare and unusual prints at first hand.

                                                                                   
You can see some of Lee's large, painterly wood-engravings propped up behind him in the photograph, including one showing the Kissing Bridge at Walberswick to the right, eventually made famous for readers of Modern Printmakers by SG Boxsius with his glorious At Walberswick. But you only have to look at Lee's 'Sloop Inn' and this view of St Ives, above, to see what Boxsius learned from Lee.

 Easy to get to, not to be missed. You will find his colour woodcuts in December, 2011.

                                                                                     

Sydney Lee: colour woodcuts

Sydney Lee (1866 - 1949) is the kind of artist who often interests me because they don't seem to quite fit in with the general pattern of things. And I always find there's something almost maladroit about his work, which seems to go with the individualist trend. He was brought up in Prestwich in Manchester and went to the school of art there (where I think Walter Crane was principal) and then made the move that was almost inevitable for people of his generation: he went to Paris. He trained at Colarossi's and once back in England, he became a habitue of art colonies in true European style: Walberswick, Staithes and, as you can see here, St Ives, in Cornwall.

The Sloop Inn shows a public house that was popular with artists. How much time he spent there, I do not know but he dud spend alot of time in St Ives in the mid/late 1890s. This print dates from 1904, a very early date for a British colour woodcut of this kind. Teaching of the Japanese method had only begun seven years before he made this print, so this places Lee at the start of the colour woodcut movement, along with Royds, Seaby and Giles. He was certainly no slouch.

As images go, it is classic Lee: a night scene that gives him the opportunity to make use of muted colours. It looks pretty straightforward, but the perspective is handled with subtlty. Nothing is aloowed to disrupt the intriguing mood. And I am quite sure, looking at this and other colour prints by Lee, that his skill and lyricism was recognised by Sylvan Boxsius who used the same combination of blues and pale orange light for his linocut Winter over twenty-five years later. (I think Boxsius also adapted Lee's print of Whitby - and improved on it, as you have to do).

Boatbuilding, St Ives certainly lets us know he knew the work of Henri Riviere. There is a similar naive draughtsmanship which comes across as more sophisticated in the Frenchman than it does here. All the same there is a lovely balance of tone and colours and no sign of his favourite colour - blue. This was also a subject that another artist also tackled.(See The definitive Ethel Kirkpatrick). She would certainly have known Lee through their mutual visits to St Ives and also as habitues of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. Kirkpatrick took part in the first student exhibition after the founding of the school in 1897 and I strongly suspect that both Kirkpatrick and Lee attended Frank Morley Fletcher's trailblazing classes there. Fletcher moved on to Edinburgh in 1907, fatefully handing the class over to Lee. He continued to teach colour woodcut in the Japanese manner but by the time Noel Rooke took over from Lee a few years later, the class was set to become the crucible for modern British wood-engraving and Lee himself is primarily known as wood-engraver today. Like Emil Orlik and LH Jungnickel, Lee gave up making colour woodcuts after only a few years and by the time the Society of Graver Printers in Colour came into being in 1909, Lee was not amongst the founding members.

                                                                         
The image above also looks to me like one of his earliest. If it's by far the most French of the prints and not the kind of image many colour woodcutters would go on to make, it also suggests he knew the pictures of young men that Henry Scott Tuke was painting in Falmouth . It doesn't quite work as image for the medium in much the same way that John Dixon Batten's choice of subject may strike us now asn inappropriate. But this onlt shows that both artists were not prepared to simply follow Japanese conventions. Interestingly, both went on to other things soon afterwards. The use of blue here also reminiscent of early Batten and I wonder whether the figure of the half-submerged boy had found its way into the woodcut from Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres in the National Gallery. Needless to say I am deeply grateful to Robert Meyrick who sent me this fascinating print. (All three belong to him and anyone who missed the two St Ives images at auction in Germany earlier this year will probably never get the chance again). Mabel Royds was the only colour woodcut artist who went on to tackle male figure subjects with any seriousness and this woodcut of Lee's is as rare as any of them get.

                                                                               

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.