Colour prints on ebay this week.

                                                                               

I may as well begin with a stand-out linocut by Norbertine Bresslern Roth. Wolves is such an exquisite print when you see it in front of you, it would be hard to resist if you had £1,200 to spend on a work of art. Right now I don't but that doesn't matter because I was fortunate enough to pick it up at my local auction. I still remember the sharp intake of breath as I told Alan Guest over the phone what it was like and when he saw it later that morning, he simply said, 'You're right.' I say all thus because, as with all good prints, you need to see Wolves yourself to appreciate what a good work of art it is. It is not merely an imaginative design; it has the surface magic that all good prints ought to have.

 

This could not be said for William Neave Parker's colour linocut Lynx (1927). Don't get me wrong. I like everything Neave Parker ever did but he had no formal training and was not a maker of fine prints. Lynx is a well designed and neatly printed work but it comes from a book he published when linocut was just getting going in Britain and once you see Neave Parker's linocuts in front of you, the do not have the glamour that a print should have, so if you have £205 to spare, you would be better spending it elsewhere. Forty and fifty, maybe; two hundred knicker, no.

As for poor Allen Seaby, frankly, they have been scraping the barrel for years. There is nothing wrong with either Twins (above) or Dormice (below) but Seaby had already been at it too long and all he was basically doing was substituting other animals for birds when birds was what he liked and what he did best. They said this in the 1930s and it is still true now. And while I am at it, Twins is the correct title not Goats or The white kid or anything else dealers dream up.

Flight for Seaby had the same soft magic as pulling a proof. In his mind, lifting a proof from the block was no different from lifting a wing and no amount of interest in natural history or animal husbandry in general can make up for the less of his major subject. The awareness of the fleeting moment is where he has most in common with great printmakers like Hokusai or Hiroshige and that, I am afraid, is all there is to it. Stripping back off a tree or crawling through azaleas doesn't really do it though neither of these prints are pricey and I have considered buying Little blighters more than once. 

You cannot go wrong with the bookplates of Alfred Peter. They are consistently good, consistently inexpensive though this one is over-priced at £23 considering the stains on the paper. It's a pity but it wouldn't put me off. Also some are signed and this one isn't and if you have nice signed examples, this one, for all its interest, would not make sense. Interesting though to see how much modern work was being done by 1912.

Last but far from least in S.G. Boxsius' calendar image Spring. I was tempted to add 'notorious' to the description, partly because it seems nigh on impossible to find a good image of this intriguing piece of work. None of this series (as you will know) were ever signed and I assume all of them were printed by students under Boxsius' supervision. Obviously what Boxsius wanted to depict was the peculiar light of an English spring and unless the photos are any good, they will not do the print much justice. But none of the available photos are any good and if you are tempted to pay out £295, remember this: the image here is the best one I have on file and not the one for sale. The one on ebay has nothing of the colour of this one, which is certainly well over-priced. But it has been a round for a long time and no-one will buy it now, I should think.

William Neave Parker: 'March' and other prints on ebay

                                                                             

There continues to be something of a trove of prints by the British artist and illustrator, William Neave Parker, on ebay, and for those who missed the opportunity the first time round, you can have another go at prints like his fetching Bear and his surprising period-piece, March. Who would have thought he could have stretched to satyrs and nudes? And what was he doing calling his print March? It's all rather unlikely and I begin to wonder if there isn't something I have missed about Neave Parker (and, goodness knows, I searched and searched).
                                    

Going by the last round of bidding, there were other people taken with this print. What kind of print it is, I wouldn't like to say. It is described as a linocut (and Neave Parker certainly made some in colour) but the style looks far more like wood-engraving. But I kind of doubt it is either. Does this matter? Hardly. Even with the obvious condition of the prints, these would be nice to have. A mite conventional, yes, but also perhaps deceptive. Parker was never serious about prints. I think they were something of a sideline. He was certainly more Hall Thorpe than Bresslern Roth and once you see his original work in front of you, it is disappointing. The effect is too flat and unexciting, there is none of the thrill of a finely-made print. All the same they are both well-drawn and sufficiently individual and quirky to be tempting. Once bitten, though, twice shy.
                                                         

William Neave Parker (British, 1910 - 1961) animals before Adam

                                                      

Having made mention of William Neave Parker in the last post, I thought I should try and do him some justice. In our ignorance we used to regard him as an also-ran but as you see he was a skilled and flexible draughtsman, able to turn his hand to fine drawing, woodcut and linocut although it is by no means clear to me what method he was always using for his prints. Wild cat, like all his colour prints, is lino. Some are signed and some are not, but all of them were published trimmed as you see here. Many of them also come attached to a sheet, which again is original.

Despite his obvious skill, his father had refused to allow him to train as an artist and he found himself working in a bank where people were kept behind each night searching for errors - they were always his. Service in the RAF during the second war was followed by a request from the Natural History Museum in London to produce drawings to illustrate palaeontological reconstruction. He then also did work for the Illustrated London News from 1950 onwards. It would be easy enough to slip into mild satire but the bear has a nice sense of line and life - it's convincing - and oddly enough he does fit into the British tradition of animal illustration that begins with Thomas Bewick and works its way towards CF Tunnicliffe. I have seen it described as both wood-engraving and linocut but I am a bit dubious about both those claims.

His linocuts are often a touch crude but this is all the work of a man who had to train himself. This tiger is direct, daunting and well-proportioned. I have a friend with a fluid little weasal by him which I encouraged her to buy instead of buying it myself! He carried on working on childrens book illustration, specially the dinosaurs, which seem so true of the time, untill his own extinction in a cinema, aged 51.