Isabel de B Lockyer & the Islington Hoard

I came across Leigh Underwood in a guide where the gallery was described as specialists in colour woodcut and before not too long I was making my way to Camden Passage to see what they had. In the early eighties, Islington was having its moment in the sun and I soon discovered that 'specialist in colour woodcut' was hype. The truth was Leigh Underwood had come across a pile of colour woodcuts and colour linocuts they liked and framed them up to sell to the fashionable people thronging the High Street.

By the time I got there, they only had two left, namely what I think was a green version of Arthur Rigden Read's Valencia (and the red one is no better) and de B. Lockyer's The striped sail. Even by then, Sylvan Boxsius and Isabel de Bohun Lockyer were a cult waiting to happen. We were as beguiled by their improbable names as much as anything and, looking back, I now understand we were already followers of the little god of colour linocut, with all his glamour, chic and frivolity. I remember seeing Spring morning, Arundel on Alan's wall like an icon from another age.

Day nursery (top) comes from the Islington Hoard. It was last sold a couple of years ago in Eastbourne. A far cry from Islington but if you own it, at least you now know its history because de B. Lockyer signed and fully inscribed each print and in so doing created a precious object.

For a while, I saw her figure studies as mystifying. In fact, she is often interested in the human figure and the landscape prints she made between about 1923 and 1930 are more of a phase between her early book illustration (edited, second from top) and later prints like Day nursery (from 1935). Very unusually for one or our artists, we more or less have her own words to clarify what interested her. Following a six-month visit to Provence in 1921, she remarked on 'peasant women... of an almost Moorish type' in the country near St. Tropez. She had travelled there in a boat with her sea-going mother and father and returned to London for an exhibition at the fashionable Dorien Leigh Gallery. Here she exhibited her distinctive pen-and-ink drawing (below) of a remarkable figure, a professional mourner with a large candle walking through the streets of Toulon like an unexpected visitor from the past. She gave the impression of a countryside half gone wild again, full of boar and houses lacking sanitation. Ironically, her figure draws on an illustration from The yellow book with its unmistakeable sense of city life.

                                                     

  

                                                   

Isabel de Bohun Lockyer: a pioneer of British colour linocut

 

Isabel de B. Lockyer was the first British artist to make exceptional colour linocuts wothout trying to ignore the colour prints other artists had made. She began exhibiting them in 1923 the same year that Claude Flight did. Flight made his first colour prints in 1921 but gave up conventional picture-making after visiting an exhibition of Austrian child art in London and based his  and radical modern style. De B. Lockyer concentrated on colour and form and, so far as I am concerned, no British artist ever made more interesting and imaginative linocuts than she did between 1924 - the year she made her view of the Italian Riviera coast, Afterglow, Bordighera, (below) - and 1928 when she made The ship of Ulysses, Corfu (above). These were some of the the first and remain some of the best. 

The first prints we know about are a couple of woodcuts (which I have never seen) and the black-and-white linocut San' Abbondio. Here she used used lino in the same way an artist would cut on wood. Up until then most of the work we know about were book illustrations, one book of illustrations from the Ballets Russes in colour but with the strongest ones in black-and-white. Like many illustrators, she drew on different styles, including the designs of Edward Burne Jones, Aubrey Beardsley and Edward Gordon Craig. She even visited the same places the figures of the nineties liked to go, including Dieppe and Riviera towns like Rapallo and Villefranches-sur-mer. But they were Burne Jones and Beardsley with a twist and always modern - meaning they were exploratory, topical, witty and observant (below, from The life of St. George,1920).

So far as colour went, she owed her biggest debt to William Giles simply because he believed that colour came first and the materials an artist made use of came second. So long as an artist obtained a good image, it didn't matter whether they used steel or lino and when it came to woodcut, he abandoned cherry (or pear) in favour on Kauri pine from North Island New Zealand. This meant it was easy for Lockyer to gain early acceptance for her colour linocuts and she and Geraldine Maunsell became the first artists to exhibit linocuts with the Graver Printers in 1924. (Giles became president two years later). Afterglow, Bordighera was in the manner of Giles. Even the title was like one of his. This doesn't simply make her a follower of Giles and what is interesting was the way she took older artists seriously, particularly the stylists of the nineties. Near Vevey (1924, below) was already moving away from Giles Edwardian eloquence, but her use of Giles' rose du Barry took him on an unexpected art deco ride.

But form in the end began to matter more, something you can see in  the way she piled up shapes of different kinds in Chateau de Blonay (1924, below). This was the first time she made use of lino great strength and played off expressive cutting against broad planes of colour. Flight had begun ti do the same thing with abstract-looking planes of colour, but Lockyer wasn't a technical artist in the way he was. From bushes to buildings, everything pies up, suggesting a vivid and fertile imagination that provided with the energy to apply old lessons to modern circumstances.

When people write about the early history of linocut, they tend to talk about the way lino lends itself to  flowing lines and to under-printing. Lockyer was the first artist to show how it good it was at expressing texture and mood in the way that a classic technique like mezzotint can. Few people have followed the kind of example she set with La Torre, Rapallo (1926, below). Not surprisingly, perhaps, she made two different versions expressing two entirely different moods. Admittedly, this was not a way everyone could go. Unlike many lino-cutters, Lockyer made use of powder colour not printer's ink which accounts for the brightness and delicacy of the impression. I am not saying she was alone in this. In the United States, Gustave Baumann was applying a thick, water-based ink over another colour, leaving only a artial impression of the block behind. Where I think Lockyer was better than Baumann was the way she didn't let all the forms dissolve but let them do some of the talking.

Unless you were going to make a habit of it the way Baumann did, there was only so far anyone could go with that particular approach. Not that she lost interest in surface texture; she only turned back to monochrome and made sure the forms she was using remained distinctive. The cheese-seller (1930, below) is the best example of that approach and above all shows how far she was finding out what the medium was capable of as she went from print to print. Very few people have ever had that kind of opportunity with a relatively new medium. You only have to compare the conventional techniques employed by Norbertine von Bresslern Roth and Carl Rotky in Austria at the same time, to appreciate how ground-breaking Lockyer's experiments with the medium were. The towers and isolated chateaux she opted suggest she enjoyed the isolation but it was based in the experimental approach adopted by the previous generation of British and American printmakers. Claude Flight liked to emphasise the uniqueness of lino as a medium, partly because Frank Morley Fletcher had wanted to insist on the superiority of wood over lino. Lockyer went her own way and, as Allen Seaby had done with wood, she made the lino speak.

Isabel de B Lockyer

I used to know someone who would say 'Isabel de B Lockyer' so grandly I got it into my head that, of all the forgotten artists, she must be the most glamorous, the most desirable. So when I eventually found a linocut of hers in a shop in Camden Passage, Islington, I was inevitably confused. It was called The striped sail; it was quite small; it was rather abstract. It had none of the bravura I liked to associate with colour woodcut or linocut and I left it there in the shop. I have never seen another one since.

But, if I was wrong to leave The striped sail down in Islington, my other instincts were proved correct. There is chic and glamour in these early landscapes - the little temple screened by trees in Near Vevey (1924), the Italian coast, above, in Rapallo (1926) and the stylish The lagoon, Corfu (1928). They all make me think of house-parties in the country and holidays abroad. And indeed I think she chose as mentor an artist with the most glamorous light of them all. I mean William Giles (see WG: modern printmaker, March, 2011). There is no record that he actively taught her anything but we only have to look at Near Vevey to see that she knew his work very well. But this is Giles without any pretence at realistic lighting. He went to extremes to get that kind of pink; I don't think Switzerland is quite so northern lights as that.

As I said  'Ada Collier, ancient and modern' (March, 2011), we do know that Giles taught Collier and this does suggest to me that other artists may have gone to him for tuition. We not only find the same improbable colours in her linocuts, she also goes in for his precision. She is not only exact about titles, at times she goes in for describing the light the way he does. But in almost all other respects, there the tutorship ends. Although they may look like colour woodcuts because of the water-based inks she uses, all these prints were made from linoblocks. The works from the twenties are also landscapes, very much in line with many British colour woodcutters of that period, including Ian Cheyne and Helen Stevenson. By 1930, though, there is a change.

The shop window from 1930 is typical - schematic and with more of an interest in the human figure. Inevitably, again, it hard to really know what these changes mean without knowing more about her or seeing more of her work. I've deliberately placed these prints in chronological order (she always dated her work) but we only have a run of eleven years here, which isn't very much to go on. What I do think we can see is the influence of the Grosvenor School, especially when she chooses social or popular activities like shopping or picnics as her subjects. Bear in mind that both Giles and Claude Flight were the kind of men who very much wanted to show what could be done with their chosen mediums. So far as Isabel de Bohun Lockyer went, it seems that work had its effect.

Which brings us to Wembury Church (1933). The Lockyers came from Plymouth and one of them bought Wembury House in the early C19th. He later moved to Australia with the British Army but the family connection clearly took Lockyer to south Devon to produce this rather unsual offshore print. (It's been pointed out that you could have only see the church this way from a boat). The de Bohun bit of her name is something of a mystery. So far as I can see, the de Bohuns only had a residual Devon connection and my own feeling is that this rather grand addition to her name was made by Lockyer herself. It makes her name as complex as one of Giles' titles.

I like the name, as I said; and what I do like very much about her work is the variety. She uses a wide range of colours but usually doesn't let her interest in them predominate  - one of Giles' failings. If she has no interest in natural light (even at its Giles' weirdest) she does have a strong sense of the social world around her. I suspect her early voguish landscapes suggest a social milieu as much as the portrait etchings of Emil Orlik do. These are very specific types of places she is recording. It a view of them as pleasurable with their isolated old buildings. The fur coats, the cloche hats, the Japanese sun shade only add to the general feeling of fashionable exclusivity. [It would also be wrong of me not to credit joseflebovicgallery.com/ in Sydney for five of these prints.]