Alice Coates & John Platt at Shrewsbury

 

This is a very late alert about a timed sale by Hall's of Shrewsbury. It has been open for about two weeks and closes at 4pm on 31st October. Tomorrow is still not to late to snap up some very choice work bought by a surgeon from Hilary Chapman in 2003 and 2004. There is also an interest modern colour woodcut 'The sower' by John Petts and a wildly misconceived colour linocut by the irreproachable Gertrude Hermes.

There are six epic colour woodcuts by John Platt and a rare and sublime colour linocut by Alice Coates called The signpost. It is England at a crossroads and I am never sure whether it represents Staffordshire or Worcestershire though in a way it hardly matters. No one but Coates would have seen the West Midlands as a hothouse, half-French, half-Grosvenor, the signpost at the foot of the slope subtly lets us know the countryside near Handsworth had found its own poet who unfortunately did not stay the course. She is closest in feel to her great Scottish contemporary, Ian Cheyne, perhaps not surprising because she has Scottish ancestry herself. But her great love was botany and she went on to work at botanical illustration until arthritis forced her to stop. So if you can't buy the print, you can buy one of her books. 

I love Coates' work but I can only admire John Platt's. That said there is plenty to admire in this small but judicious collection of the complete range of his oeuvre. From the scintillating The goat stride to the late dark masterpiece 'Sails' to make the very best of this auction, you will have to buy all six. You may never again get the chance to pick up such a good range of what Platt could do.

I have to say my own personal favourites are his wide angle beach scenes. 'Pilchard boats, Cornwall' is an elegant tour-de-force from his middle period when he took note of everything he saw like a masterful surveyor of British leisure and life. Let no one tell you this dynamic vision originated with the colour linocutters of the Grosvenor School as some would have us believe; it originated here, with John Platt, and derived from sound schooling at the Royal College of Art.

I have never been a big fan of Platt's later work. He tended to take a good idea like a rock guitarist and then do it to death. I mean you either love Led Zep or you can take two or three minutes of them and I think it is something like that with Platt. He had done all those flitting swallows years before on the walls of All Saints at Leek and no amount of appealing to Hokusai could redeem. It is an exercise in aerial effect. 'Sails' on the other hand is hard to explain. Although it derives from his torn paper method which he used with students, he transformed the harbour at Brixham into a seascape of Germanic half-abstraction. 

Platt was very much a man of his time. While some modern artists wanted to expunge the narrative and literary elements from their work, others like Platt took the academic and literary and made it into a new form of modern art which disappeared from view at the outbreak of war and did not reappear until young artists like David Hockney were being trained in the sixties at the Royal College of Art.

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Lamorna & Sennen

                                                                                 

If Laura Knight thought Staithes in Yorkshire was 'life in the raw', when she moved to Lamorna, she must have thought that was la dolce vita. She would not have been the first, nor would she be the last. Not that life was so cushy for Stanley Gardiner when he first went to live in the lush Cornish valley. He had to live in an old Army hut beside the Wink public house, making frames for other artists.

He had started out a house-decorator in Reading, but had first taken evening classes then won a scholarship to study fine art at the university with our own Allen Seaby. But by the time this portrait by WC Weatherby was painted in 1945, he and his makeshift easel were both firmly planted by the sea.

                                                                                          

Nearer to Land's End, there is another cove at Sennen, but less the sub-tropical feel that has captivated so many at Lamorna. I don't know exactly when John Platt found himself there, but I've always found this bird's-eye view one of his most appealing landscapes. The details of the fisherman preparing to take their boats and out and raising the sails as they leave the small harbour are unobtrusively fitted into the complex rhythms set up by all those large shapes along the beach. The would-be engineer and architect are all there is this print to bring the whole thing together. It's the subtle dynamics of a work like this that makes Claude Flight look like he's trying too hard.

                                                                                       

More occasional, I suppose, is Frank Morley Fletcher's similar view of the old derrick at Lamorna. Again, I have no idea when FMF was there, but this print wasn't published untill 1916. He was a habitue of art colonies - Etaples, Walberswick - and this view from the garden of Flagstaff Cottage shows him firmly in Lamorna Birch country because it became his house. He had taken it over from The Times art crtic, Charles Marriott, and I wonder whether it ws Marriot rather than Birch that Morley Fletcher had gone to visit.

                                                                              

Even more tantalising (and for more than one reason) is this view of Sennen by Daisy Boxsius that appears to show the viewpoint that John Platt made use of. Tantalising also because, by the look of this watercolour, she was a better painter than her husband, Sylvan. It's the only work by her I have ever been able to find and it's hard to judge from a reproduction, anyway. She had a better approach to the haphazardness of the boats than John Platt. In his hands, they become technical drawing; what Daisy Boxsius gives us are the rhythms of reality. Her husband was in the photo-lithography business at Bolt Court and presumably arranged to have her work reproduced in this way. She outlived him, and carried on exhibiting after the second war. The only record we have of their trips to the West Country in the 1930s are their pictures: Corfe, Shaldon in Devon, Looe, Marazion, Sennen, but not Lamorna so far.

                                                                                

Neither Lamorna nor Sennen, John Platt's Pilchard Boats must show Newlyn harbour, with the deep anchorage beyond the wall. (You can see a view from the other direction in Ethel Kirkpatrick's Boats at rest on the post about her watercolours). All of Platt's Cornwall prints date from 1921 and 1922 so he was presumably down there painting some time before then. (He was in Edinburgh by autumn, 1920).

                                                                                
                                                                                    
Not obviously a Newlyn woodcut but probably one of the few we know that were actually made in Cornwall, this witty image by Cicely Jesse, showing that young artists studying down in Newlyn with Stanhope Forbes were nevertheless hip to the Vienna Secession. She made this while living at Myrtle Cottage above the harbour. It makes a change from the sea.

John Platt: art & the engineer

You are a first year engineering student at the university of Manchester. One day a lecturer suggests you become an architect because you draw so well. But you drop architecture and decide on the life of an artist instead. Look at this wonderful photograph of IK Brunel and J Scott Russell taken at the launch of the SS Great Eastern at Millwall in 1858 and you will see the heroic image of the Victorian engineer. Was John Platt (1886 - 1967) just an imaginative young man who someone recognised would never be one of them?

He trained from 1903 to 1909, eventually graduating from the Royal College of Art. He had also become a fellow of the national society of art masters and we have to assume he had always intended to become a teacher. Even more interesting is this: he made no colour woodcuts untill his time in the army (1914 - 1918).  In Derbyshire, near Matlock (1917) was only his third. It isn't any easier to try and work out how an officer in the British army began to make exceptional prints as it is to identify exactly where he found this view. But it is recognisably Platt in its love of detail and the distance.

                                                                                 

By the time he came to cut The Giant Stride in 1918, he was taking one of the biggest steps in modern British printmaking. Here, at only his fourth attempt, he made one of the most memorable and dramatic images of all. Almost everything went into it: his own children, his tremendous draughtsmanship, his fascination for dynamics, his love of the sea and boats. (The image is poor but that's a sailing ship and a steam ship in the distance.) It's one of those seminal works that artist's create from time to time: an image of the creative act itself.

                                                                                 

It took him another two years to come up with Snow in springtime (1920). There was a print called Dawn in 1918 but with few proofs printed. His prints were a success but he was hardly prolific. He is very far from the modern artist knocking off bold, experimental images. All his printmaking life he remained true to the ideals of craftsmanship. But he also had to make a living as a teacher, moving from one art college to another: Harrogate, Derby then to Edinburgh in 1920.

                                                                                   
                                                                                   
This was a bold enough move in itself because Frank Morley Fletcher appointed him to the part-time post of head of applied arts, partly on the strength of  two very good prints. His training was wide but his experience actually strikes me as limited. No matter, he was there in Edinburgh alongside two of the best contemporary printmakers - Mabel Royds and Fletcher himself. It's this woodcut, The Scrum (1921) that convinces me that it was the heroic that captivated his imagination. There is already a strong feel for it in the exhuberance of children's play. But here we have the ancient Greek hero, controposto and all, turned out in a Scotland team jersey. The image comes from the time he spent in Edinburgh and this must show a game there, against either England or Wales, I assume - there is always more to Platt than meets the eye. He thought about his images with care. It's also highly original. Try and imagine Siegfried Berndt sketching at Murrayfield while he was studying in Scotland. But at least Berndt made three woodcuts of Scotland. What Platt gives us, though, isn't the Scottish landscape; it's the Scottish people (and their neighbours).

                                                                               
With Staithes, Yorkshire (1927) we are on woodcut number sixteen only. Six of those, including this one, take boats and harbours as their subject. The first was The jetty, Sennen Cove from December, 1921, the same year as The scrum. Most are humble fishing boats and trawlers, though there are also more exotic craft at St Tropez. What we never get is the sheer obvious love of it all so apparent in the work of Ethel Kirkpatrick and Siccard Redl. This image is a module, a set of interrelationships between form, colour and perspective. I chose this image, which is well-known, because heroism is still implied in the life of the people who live and work at Staithes. With Platt we are captivated by his sheer skill but should not forget there is also a teacher at work.

                                                                                                                                             

Teacher, and also father, because I wonder if the young woman shown here in The fruit harvest adopting a truly classical and heroic pose, is his daughter, Anthea. She would have been seventeen when he produced this copper engraving in November, 1929. Few artists, as I've said before, master both relief and intalgio methods. Platt did, but I think the engravings give away some of the weaknesses less apparent in his colour woodcuts. And I mean something of a well-made but sterile feel you find so often in the work of artists who are also teachers. The young woman stares away from us much like the young rugby player but is more impersonal than him. She is as absorbed in herself as the children were. Platt, like the smaller children, looks on - and makes us look, too.

I must acknowledge a considerable debt to Hilary Chapman's The colour woodcuts of John Edgar Platt (1999) and also credit Annex Galleries for In Derbyshire, near Matlock.

Meryl Watts, John Platt & Blackheath School of Art

John Platt (1886 - 1967) arrived at his last teaching job in 1929 when he was forty-three. Before he came to Blackheath, he had held senior positions at Edinburgh College of Art as head of applied arts (1920 - 1923) and at Leicester College of Art as principal (1923 - 1929). It was the part-time position at Blackheath that attracted him, probably as it had done at Edinburgh. He had begun to make colour woodcuts in 1916 but had produced only seventeen by the time he settled into his top-floor studio, smock and all, in south London.

He wasn't prolific; he was meticulous instead. He had started out training as an engineer at Manchester University but was persuaded to go for the art option on the strength of his drawing - and please bear in mind that this was technical drawing, he wasn't at the Slade or anywhere.  I say all this so you can get a feel for the kind of regime that Meryl Watts (1910 - 1992) found herself in when she enrolled. When this was, I don't know for sure - about 1930. She was good enough by 1933 to be accepted as a member of the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour.
                      

                                                                                      

My hunch is that the fuzzy snow-scene you can see above was her first version of the school building. It has something rather strict in common with this kitchen interior, below, and another woodcut she made of a flower seller. Both of these prints rely heavily on the keylock for definition. The interesting thing about her view of the school is that the keyblock is only used to frame the print. This must be the influence of Platt himself. Also interesting is the way she simplifies the facade, removing the brick arches above the first and second floor windows but then adding pediments on the top floor windows. (The image is reversed). Nor does she differentiate between the two types of brick.

                                                                                     

Platt had gradually begun to abandon the use of the keyblock between 1927 and 1932 and in the top image you can see the effect on his student in her use of planes of flat colour and recession to build up the picture. I also think that the collage, below, was work produced by her as a student under Platt's instruction. Though I have no proof of this it is her work.

                                                                                     

A number of these tissue collages her by exist, all using the muted greens and brows that became so prevalent in the 1930s. (This one is remarkably similar to his woodcut Sails, 1933). We might see a more subtle sign of his influence in the way she made three versions of her woodcut of the school building. This was very much in line with Platt's own method. It took him so long to produce prints, it's no wonder he then made alternative versions. But her own print is so simple by comparision, in some ways it hardly merits that kind of attention.

                                                                                       
I don't want to disparage Watts too much by drawing attention to this parental figure. All the same, it's striking that 1930 was quite late in the day to start learning colour woodcut. (And I don't know of anyone else who was taught the technique by Platt at this time). Having said that, I like the blue image, which ignores alot of the architectural detail, the best. You have to work out for yourself if it is the third one she made.

                                                                                     

But was the influence all one way? Platt's approach had begun to change before he arrived at Blackheath and I've already suggested that it was Charles Paine's use of animal imagery that had a decisive influence on Platt. We have no way of knowing really what he learned from his student's work. But by the time Watt's came to make her Chestnut Seller she could make an image just as striking as Platt's - and, let's face it, he did make some of the most memorable images in British printmaking. It's hardly any wonder she stayed so long in his shadow. Her own father owned a printing works nearby. She wasn't one to stray too far from home. As I said, I would think all these images are local to her.

                                                                                      


Even her pelican was nearby. She only had to go to St James Park in London to find them on the lake. Platt or no Platt, this is a fine image, with a lovely use of the grain of the wood at the bottom. Subtle, modern, modulated, beautifully modelled, she has got into her stride. I think it is just a shame that as she moved on to north Wales, the oddness of her images starts to prevail. Flounder I like less.

                                                                                     

It is less modern that it looks. It's a pretty picture rather than analysis. To me, her later work shows she never really understood the modernist outlook - or that she just abandoned it, the way one abandons the keyblock. The print is also the work of a modeller. (She studied under the sculptor, James Woodford).

                                                                                
In some ways she was the permanent student and once  away from the institution, she loses direction. These two later prints of the Welsh landscape, for all their skill, are a touch stilted and fussy. I wonder also whether Flounder shows the influence of yet another of her teachers, the designer of stained glass, Charles Paine? Who knows? It is a refractory work nonetheless; everything shines through.

                                                                                     

                                                                                   
                                                                                   

                                                                              

Tales from ebay: The Vitava at Prague

I wouldn't  want to give anyone the idea that I have a down on seller's on ebay because I don't. And here is a post about the downside to selling prints on the site. I hasten to add the proof above, The Vitava at Prague (1928), a colour woodcut by John Platt, was not for sale on ebay. This one was sold by the well-known Oxfordshire dealer, Elizabeth Harvey Lee, to HM Government in 1995 and it now hangs on the walls of our embassy in Prague. The proof that was sold last week on ebay is the one you see below.

I think we can take it as given that buyers for the British Government collection do not go looking for bargains on ebay. They will go to dealers like Lee for unframed prints in very good condition and expect to pay her much higher prices. This in itself must be pretty galling for the recent seller, stiveshouseart, (and I hope they don't mind me using their image). The seller put the print in at the reasonable starting bid of £60. It sold for the bargain price of only £75. I must admit I was surprised - I certainly thought it would go higher and I expect stiveshouseart were pretty disappointed. Platt is a very good printmaker and it should have fetched more. So what happened?

As I have found out for myself, taking photos of subtle works on paper like this woodcut is by no means a simple thing to do. To start with, you would need the patience of Job and a very steady hand (and a good deal of luck) to get the image perfectly square. But when it comes to the tones of the work - they are almost impossible to reproduce. I assume the government image is the work of a professional and that the colours are close to the original - but I don't know. By comparison, the ebay image is too green and the distortion is offputting. I also know from experience that any little creases or defects on japan of the kind you can see bottom right are certainly exaggerated by the camera. But their photo also gives some very important information: it shows the deckle edge on the right, which lets us know the margins are the ones that Platt intended. (Artists tened to leave the deckle edge margin deeper).

To sell a work, the image needs to be good. I remember Clive buying his Source of the Clitumnus by William Giles and saying afterwards it was the ropey photograph that gave him a bargain buy. The one here is better  but I think you can see the difficulties. This wasn't a specialist print dealer; it was someone who wanted to sell and was rather unlucky. Whoever bought it probably knew the full impact of Platt's image - and no amount of sales talk is going to get that over. As I've said earlier this week, I don't admire the kind of seller who expects the buyer to take all the risks by putting a print in at an inflated starting price. I learned the ropes at Arthur Johnson's auction house down at the cattle market in Nottingham. It was known as a place where the trade would place gear they couldn't shift elsewhere. Ebay can be like that, too.

Charles Paine: Edinburgh connections

The British designer Charles Paine (1895 - 1967) is my lead-in to the next post on the work of staff and students at Blackheath art school in the 1930s. Alot like F Gregory Brown, Paine began work as the arts and crafts movement was coming to an end. Apprenticed as a stained glass designer in his home town of Salford, Lancashire, he went on to train in Manchester, followed by the RCA in London. As studies were interrupted by service in the armed forces, he didn't finally graduate untill 1919. I wonder if he was astute enough by then to recognise the opportunities that work in Edinburgh was to offer him. I suspect that he was.

Edinburgh College of Art  already had two of the best British printmakers at work. Not only was its director Frank Morley Fletcher but Mabel Royds also returned to work there about the same time Paine took up his post in the department of applied arts. This field of work was dear to Morley Fletcher's heart and it was not long before he appointed yet another important printmaker to be Charles Paine's immediate boss. This was John Platt. Paine could not have known just how useful this was all to prove. He left Edinburgh fairly soon afterwards (I'm not sure exactly when) to work in stained glass for the Glasgow firm of Guthrie and Wells. But Edinburgh hadn't left him. As early as 1921, he received his first breakthrough commission to design posters for London Underground.

It's impossible to say whether it was Platt who put him onto Frank Pick at the Underground. Platt was noted for his genorosity towards people and my hunch is that it was Platt who made the introduction. As it happens, 1922 also saw Platt designing his one-and-only poster for the Tube -  his chamaeleon design, too clever and too complicated. Unlike Platt and Gregory Brown, Paine wasn't a painter and was rarely tempted into picture-making when he designed. Paine's training in stained glass led him to concentrate on strong colours and simplified images. In his most effective work, he did exactly that.

But he also made a move that we would now take for granted in advertising but which must have been alot less obvious at the time.  Instead of relating his imagery to the subject in a literal way, he often chose an image for what it suggested. What have fish in a river to do with Uxbridge? Very little other than suggest the countryside that lies just beyond the end of the line. Even bolder was his poster for the 1921 boat race - nothing more than a stylised wake and the ripples left by the oars. He understands that he only has to attract attention, that he doesn't have to represent anything to get a message across.

And looking at this end-paper above and his advertising for Sundour fabrics, no one could accuse Paine and sticking to a formula. One of the remarkable things about him is his ability to match his manner to the job. Whether this meant falling back on historical pastiche or picking up the latest design trend, didn't matter. (Nor do I want to suggest he was only involved in graphics from the twenties onwards but I've been unable to turn up a single textile or stained glass design by him).

I don't know when Paine made his move to California, but in 1924 Morley Fletcher was appointed first director of the new Santa Barbara School of Arts. I am pretty sure it must have been his old boss at Edinburgh who motivated him but I don't know whether his job as head of applied arts at the Community Arts School was under Morley Fletcher's supervision. But he didn't stay, anyway. It's clear that artists like Fletcher recognised his ability but it strikes me that teaching wasn't something he felt committed to - unlike Fletcher and Platt.

But one thing that does remain constant during the period was his use of animal imagery, specially where no animals are really called for. Their appeal to children is strong, their appeal to adults through children even stronger. Around 1930 he was living in Welwyn Garden City, a new garden suburb in rural Hertfordshire, where he was commissioned by the development company to design posters for use on London underground. The choice of the four seasons as their subject emphasised its all-year-round appeal. Not that Paine went for the obvious option. No charming houses and lovely countryside for him. Instead he produced four remarkably modern animal images: a lamb and snowdrops for spring (which frankly was pushing it) insects round what looks like a daffodill for summer, hares in the snow and a chaffinch for winter, and this tremendous red squirrel for the autumn. Yes, they are standard ideas but the execution implies an educated audience. The appeal is both muted, up-to-date and subtle. (Unfortunately, some misguided individual at Welwyn Hatfield borough council has chosen to bung SAMPLE across the other three images - the only ones available to a world-wide audience. I only hope the culprit reads this.) And what else was Paine doing while designing posters for the Welwyn estate? Well, he was back to teaching, this time at Blackheath school of art in London. And who was he working for now? It was John Platt, of course.

Frank Morley Fletcher: Woodblock Printing, 1916

Probably the closest any of us of very modest means will get to owning a colour woodcut like this one is a copy of Morley Fletcher's small handbook, Woodblock Printing. Not only was Morley Fletcher (1866 - 1949) a superb printmaker, for many years he also had a successful teaching career based on his practical knowledge of woodblock printing in the Japanese manner. Beginning with classes at London's Central School of Arts and Crafts, he progressed to University College, Reading where Allen Seaby (1867 - 1953) was also a teacher. 1907 to 1923 saw him director of Edinburgh College of Art where both Mabel Royds (1874 - 1941) and John Platt (1866 - 1947) were on the staff. In 1916 John Hogg published the first edition of his primer.

If you can find a copy of the book for sale, you also acquire this small print because it was included as an exemplar in each copy. The book was so successful it was reprinted by Pitman with the print below acting as exemplar. Interestingly enough, this second edition includes advertisements for pigments and tools. I can only assume the first book had had an effect. Fletcher left Edinburgh in 1924 to take up the post of first school director of the School of the Arts at Santa Barbara. He stayed there till 1930.

And just in case anyone should doubt a student could learn a technique as complex as Japanese woodcut from a handbook, Steven Hutchins, a dealer specialising in Japanese woodblock prints, once did exactly that. He also produced two very passable prints. A good deal is also made of Morley Fletcher's innovations and while I don't wish to belittle his significant work as a teacher, Emil Orlik went to Japan to study printmaking at the same time that Fletcher and John Dixon Batten (1860 - 1932) were experimenting in London. (Orlik's early career is summarised in an October posting). Unlike FMF, he didn't make a career out of woodcut but dropped them before the first war - Orlik was also a wonderful portrait etcher. Either you have it or you don't.