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.

Results of the sale at Banbury (and what you did not see there)

                                                                         

I would like to say that any one of the colour prints you see here came up for sale at Banbury rather than the ones that did, but all of them are as rare as anything is going to be and would attract any serious collector. But I have brought them up from my records and thought it was a good idea to let readers see some of the work that does not come up for sale at all often. This is not to disparage the prints that were sold. I would have bought any of them but I needed to a bookcase and fridge instead.

I have been warned to let you know that online buyers needed to pay 40% more than the hammer price. The buyers premium of 31.2% includes VAT and on top of that online sales are subject to a further fee of  8.2%, also including VAT. The effect was to depress prices and meant that once the vendor had paid their own fee, they would not be getting very much. Overall it probably means you would be better off selling on ebay if you did not have to pack up all the stuff you have sold.

I was surprised Allen Seaby's woodcut Pewits was the most expensive at £500 (and altogether you would almost pay £700 which is not all that cheap for a piece of work that I personally think falls flat). The barn owl print was much better value at £240 and more attractive than a fridge. It would end up costing you about £330 and as I could have got to Banbury on the train I could have picked it up.

The Phillips went cheap at £420 although the auctioneers did themselves and their vendors no favours by putting up poor photographs. Considering the photos have to be paid for by the vendor, it makes the whole situation even worse. It's all a bit of a stunt but there you are, and going by what you can pay for a Phillips from a dealer, someone will be pleased.

As predicted, John Hall Thorpe's prices are going nowhere and are well below what they were in their heyday ten years ago. We all knew he was overpriced then and scoffed but I would have gladly paid £130 for this pair of prints. The fuss over Hall Thorpe tended to obscure the fact that his work is well-made indeed. He had been a professional block-cutter in Australian before he came to Britain and had a good eye for colour. What he did not do was print the work himself, something the labels make clear. This never seemed to put buyers off in the past and for that type of decorative work it hardly matters.

The Urushibara was another reasonable buy at £250. Read's Venetian shawl was even better at £270 given the poor condition of so many of the proofs I have seen and the place the woodcut has in British colour woodcut history. Read was the only British colour woodcut artists to pull portraiture off. Not only that, he singlehandedly reinvented the medium for a post-war audience who no longer wanted the earnest work of the pre-war arts and crafts movement.

I have no doubt you will also want to know what the prints are that did not come up for sale at Banbury (and which will probably not come up for sale anywhere soon). First of all comes S. G. Boxsius' diminutive masterpiece Bowsprits. Despite the poor quality of the reproduction, the work stands out as Boxsius at his most Boxsius, with all that that means. Far more rare is Phyllis Platt's stylish portrait of her daughter, Una, lying reading on a sofa. This has never appeared online until today and very few people  have ever seen it. I found the illustration in a catalogue that was sent to me. I probably don't need to say she was the wife of John Platt but typically we know very little about her. The third print is Seaby's Karnack from 1925, followed by a more interesting early colour woodcut of a St Ives shop window by the Scottish artist, Frances Blair. Below that is Edward Ashendens's Old Icelander. He is best known as a designer of dioramas but here is making a creditable colour woodcut. Continuing the theme of ships and the sea, there is Hugo Henneberg's important colour linocut Dalmatia and then Kenneth Broad with all his originality and sense of style to the fore in a subtle and sensitive colour woodcut he simply called Hastings.

A catalogue of the colour woodcuts of Allen Seaby

I once tried to get hold of the exhibition catalogues owned by the writer on colour woodcut, Alan Guest, but was unsuccessful. I was told they were 'only lists' even though such catalogues are invaluable to anyone putting together a detailed catalogue of an artist's work. They form the basis for any scholarship and are no less important for the collectors who preserve the work itself. A number of catalogues for both American and British colour print artists have been published over the past ten years or so. Robert Meyrick's work on Sydney Lee was a model of its kind and of the books published in the U.S., Dominique Vasseur's Edna Boise Hopkins from 2008 is the most attractive and useable. A catalogue was beyond the scope of Martin Andrews and Robert Gillmor's 2014 book Allen W Seaby, art and nature but it was a missed opportunity nevertheless. To my knowledge there are at least eighty colour woodcuts made between 1900 and circa 1940. Mabel Royds was the only other artist making colour prints over that same period. She started out only about a year before Seaby and continued to work up until long before her death in 1941. Unlike Seaby we know what all of Royds' prints look like (though one or two may not have appeared online).

The main resource I have for Seaby is Alan's list of prints exhibited with the Society of Graver Printers in Colour between 1910 and 1938. Alan could be circumspect and how he came to see the exhibition catalogues he based the list on, I do not know. What the National Art Library in London have, I don't remember offhand. All I possess are photocopies of the six or seven catalogues owned by Seaby himself but from what I see on the internet, about eight exist which cannot be found on the main list by Alan Guest. None have titles and some of them would only appeal to a serious collector of Seaby's work. But they are all interesting. What is more you only need to look at Old English pheasants at the top to see what has been missed. If the image above can be identified as Porta Pinciana, at least we have a date. The pheasants find Seaby in the unfamiliar territory of the Scottish wildlife artist Archibald Thorburn who was old seven years older. As a general rule, Seaby appealed to the naturalist rather than the sportsman but here we have him giving the sporting print a go. It is a good print and one i would like to own but it may have been too genre for Seaby to exhibit. Without a catalogue with the relevant details, we can only make guesses about what his intentions were.

It was not until I began to try and sort out sundry lapwing woodcuts this week that I realised how much work still remained unaccounted for. It is not enough to say that Seaby was prolific; he was obsessively hard-working. Even so, it surprised me how little we knew. But judge for yourself. How many of you have seen these cows before? And does anyone know the title? I am sure this must be a very early work made before Seaby was competent with the keyblock. So far as I can make out, he has used silhouette and black-and-white instead and though few of us would rush out and buy it, it is very informative about the progress the artist was making with the medium But where exactly does it fit in? 1900, 1901?Without the catalogue, we just have no real idea. It has to be said, Seaby never made it easy for us. Few prints have titles and so far as I know none have dates. Nor was he beyond selling unsigned prints if he believed the standard of printing was inferior. This is why he took care to sign them in the block and again a catalogue would contain all the relevant information and it would be possible to say when the habit of signing in the block began.

Now you may be saying to yourself, why is he going on about Seaby when he could be telling us more about Helen Stevenson or Sylvan Boxsius? Good question. And I have an answer. If Seaby had made exceptional colour woodcuts for ten or fifteen years, it still would not have mattered so very much. The truth is Seaby is everyone's idea of a colour woodcut artist and is archetypal in a way no other artist could be. He was already forming his ideas about design by the late 1890s, a process that only came to an end when war broke out in 1939. This means his output lies at the dead centre of the story of British colour woodcut and that a full catalogue of his prints would be of much greater use than any of the ones we have including for John Platt, Yoshijiro Urushibara and Arthur Rigden Read. It does not matter how good those catalogues are, Seaby should have come first and the prints you see here tell us why. 

If this is the kind of work he did on an off-day or for some reason decided not to exhibit, how much does it say about the colour woodcuts he did put on show? What is important about Seaby is not only the standard of his work; the influence he had has not been assessed at all properly. It is easy enough to detect the influence of Hokusai or Koson on his own work. What is harder to ascertain is how far he set an example. I have to convince myself the beach scene actually is by Seaby at all, but for my money, it is where John Platt's famous The giant stride begins but again, without details, how can we say? The kingfisher was first exhibited in 1910 but by then Seaby had found his own way with the intractable keyblock. The kingfisher finds him struggling to make the bird stand clear of the confusing marks behind it. By the time he made the pheasants he had perfected the technique of experimental cutting where he kept taking trial proofs as he removed more wood from the background. By anyone's standards, The kingfisher is an expressive print but the background remains unresolved.

Many artists have been praised by Modern Printmakers but how many of them produced a body work you could follow through as I have just tried to do with Seaby? Seaby is all about identification. He was less concerned to encourage us to look at animals from the outside as Thorburn did; he wanted them to live in front of us. This exceptional gift is not found everywhere in his work. This does not make prints like Bay of Salamis from 1929 unimportant only less crucial. It has come up online recently but if you want to find Assisi (1928) The Parthenon (1928) Acropolis, Athens (1932) or Crossing the Nile at Luxor (1932) you will search in vain. I know surmise is often foolish but all I can say is he sold so few of them, none has have as yet come up for sale again. Bay of Salamis was itself bought up from the vaults by an academic from the University of Reading but has not as yet stood the money test like an unattractive print of The Adoration I remember going fairly cheap on ebay. Kings of Orient is much better but you will need to ignore the hackneyed figures if you buy it. Whether we like these prints or not, they help to suggest what his real strengths were.

No one could fault Seaby for not trying even if Lake Lucerne from the end of his woodcut career in 1937 is more of a watercolour than it should be. Taking a broader view, two remarks made about Seaby by his contemporaries come to mind. A reviewer of one of his books noted signs of deterioration in his drawing and wondered whether Seaby 'had drawn too much'. Another critic who went to see his second one-man show may have been the first person to say what we tend to take for granted, namely Seaby was at his best with birds. I have tried to suggest what it was about birds and their habits that meant so much. All the same we are still in need of perspective about his work and in the end a catalogue will be the only way we can find it.

Classic British colour woodcuts for sale at Banbury

 

It is not often we are presented with a good choice of colour woodcuts in a single sale but the forthcoming auction at Banbury has an old collection of prints put together with care and good judgement. All seven come in their period frames and some have well-known dealers from the 1920s like Redfern, Bromhead and Abbey Galleries on the back.  I say this partly because the labels suggest the prints were bought framed but mainly because I prefer the way prints were placed in good-sized mounts at that time. Apart from the Arthur Rigden Read, the frames themselves are not up to much (and one has bowed outwards).

                                                                           

Heading the post is Rigden Read's bravura early masterpiece from 1923. Here is one of the most irresistible of all British colour prints with Kathleen Rigden Read in a sumptuous golden shawl worn over a plain linen shift, presumably of her own making. Read has dated the proof 1924 but that was the year it was pulled. It first appeared the year before. It has a large area of unprinted paper and this may have led to many proofs being discoloured. The one you see at the top is not the one in the sale. You can see that above. So far as I can see this one is in good condition and has been housed in a sympathetic frame.

The downside to many prints by Read is firstly they are small and secondly he often used drab colours in order to team up with the vegetable dyes his wife was using for her fabrics. The Venetian shawl was made before they held joint exhibitions and stands out, even though it is remains quite small. My mother had my own proof on loan for many years and everyone who came into the room for the first time commented on it. Read was a showman and that characteristic is to the fore here. This is not to say that Allen Seaby's owl does not have the necessary sense of drama but his theatricality was different. Read was just as observant as Seaby the naturalist. What Seaby has on offer in this print is poetry. Half-owl, half-ghost, what you have here is Seaby's presiding spirit, the constant search for what is always absent. 

The auctioneers give the title as 'The owl'. This must be wrong. To begin with, Seaby was a dedicated ornithologist and would have said it was a barn owl. Secondly, he made two similar but different prints of barn owls. One was more the work of the naturalist, the other more expressive. Regretfully, these are two of the only prints of Seaby's I have no record for. His output of about 100 colour woodcuts is too large to catalogue easily and the only records I have are the exhibition dates for the Graver Printers.

In 1910, Seaby exhibited fourteen colour woodcuts alone at the Graver Printers. This was the society's first exhibition and Seaby already had many prints in hand, including one entitled Lapwings. As with his barn owl, Seaby had two tries at the same subject and also made a print of young birds, which the National Gallery of Scotland call 'Lapwings' too. With no proper catalogue being available, the confusion is understandable. Seaby rarely put titles on a print. What you can see bottom left is the edition number. My guess is the one you see here is the first one and the better known one with the birds facing the opposite direction is Lapwings prepared for the Graver Printers exhibition of 1910.

For all the effort Walter Phillips put into making colour woodcuts, I remain unenthusiastic. Even so, his strong links with north America make him sought after over there and I have no doubt Norman Bay no 2 will be pricey. Phillips liked to present himself as a backwoodsman who taught himself how to the make colour woodcut by dint of his own ingenuity and hard work. This is tosh but Phillips was an able journalist with a regular column who could present himself as he wished. He was as earnest as Seaby (who was also a friend) but lacked Seaby's broader interests and his sense of humour. His prices are commensurably high without being an out-and-out joke. 

John Hall Thorpe on the other hand has had his day, partly because people are better informed about colour woodcut than they were ten years ago and partly because the fashion for art deco has died the death. All this will should make Cowslips and Forget-me-nots affordable and, I will admit, I was tempted recently by Marigolds mainly because it was still housed in its original frame. It is a glorious decorative print and was the first colour woodcut I owned but I decided against. If I found these two in a junk shop for £1.50 (as I did Marigolds) I would buy them. But that will not bring the 1970s with all its fads and bargains back. They are gone for good. And so is John Hall Thorpe.

While Seaby's Lapwings was hanging on the wall at the Goupil Gallery on Regent St., a twenty-two year old called Yoshijiro Urushibara was giving demonstrations of colour woodblock printing beyond even Seaby's capability in Shepherd's Bush. Only eighteen years later he became one of only four colour woodcut artists to ever have a solo exhibition of prints in London. (It says a good deal about what we have here that the other three were Hall Thorpe, Phillips and Seaby). Grasshoppers was among the exhibits at the Abbey Gallery in 1928 and provides firm evidence of the breadth of his work by the age of forty. One of the most thoroughly Japanese of all his many woodcuts, the series of images and his prominent signature are played off one against the other in a virtuoso display of nuance. Nowhere in the annals of British art has the relationship between image and calligraphy been so well made (unless we take his Crayfish into account as well). But where the detachment of Crayfish  is unnerving and creepy, Grasshoppers introduced collectors to the muted colours of the 1930s a good two years before the decade began. And if that doesn't sell it to you, nothing will.

The sale will be held at Holloways Auctioneers, Banbury, on 2nd September, 2023. There should be a follow-up post regarding prices once the sale is over.

Classic British black-and-white prints (plus another Seaby) from the Cirencester hoard

 

By now, readers may have drawn the same conclusion as myself about the current trend we are seeing. It looks very much like the British prints now coming up for sale were collected during the great revival of interest during the 1980s and come from estates of deceased persons. Nothing else can explain a lot of seventeen wood-engravings including work by artists as diverse as George Soper (below), John Farleigh, Bernard Rice and Reynolds Stone. Another artist whose work was never inexpensive even then is Stanley Anderson. Dominic Winter have his fine copper engraving The hedger from 1934 (above) in the sale.

You have got to like this kind of thing. And I do (and always have) but could never have brought myself to paying the price for an Anderson. Instead I contented myself with finding good prints at modest prices (as you could do) and only handing over larger amounts of cash when I had to. From the Cirencester hoard, it looks as though other collectors were doing much the same thing. How else would you end up with seventeen prints in a lot? Take it from me, we are living through good times and this treasure trove of prints by commendable artists is proof of that. Soper was never in the top league, but he has the correct amount of period glamour that frankly is hard to resist. OK, I sold the one print I had by him years ago at Phillips. But Phillips is rather grand today and if I took it back to them now, they would turn it down. From Yorkshire to Gloucestershire to Kent, the action has moved to the provinces.

The presence of Richard Shirley Smith's very fine Rhinoceros beetle from 1978 (above) says everything about the level of discrimination of both artists and their collectors back then. People had had enough of the dreary semi-abstraction of so much British post-war art. Let's face it, the British had never been all that good at modern and by the fifties and sixties it had all turned into a horror story of artists dependent on the art school system. Craftsmanship of the kind found very obviously in Shirley Smith was out the window. 

Yet again, you may well pay less for Anne Desmet's superb Rotunda series than the buyer in the 1980s. Her work was not cheap at the time and rightly so. She was one of the best. The two images I have here show only half of the work for sale, but you get the idea. This means that anyone with a taste for the classical past or Italy or sheer bravura craftsmanship is going to be tempted. I know I am. I was recently saying to a friend who is a professional librarian and bibliophile, I thought now was a good time to buy second-hand books. More than that, it is a good time to buy second or third-hand prints. People look at me with my map spread out on the big table at Caffe Nero in Carrington St in Nottingham as if I am Martin Frobisher or Vasco da Gama. The very idea of anyone looking at a map let alone owning one is beyond anyone under forty. Likewise, old prints and old books. 

Although I said the other day there were no Seabys from the great years before the war in the Cirencester hoard, I was wrong. Half-hidden in a lot that includes a Horace Brodsky linocut, is Seaby's Lapwings. I remember a friend buying this from Garton & Cooke and not being smitten. Nonetheless, it is from his best period and was certainly made in the first decade of the last century because it was exhibited at the first exhibitions held by the Graver Printers in 1910. It looks great simply because as always it was printed to such a very high standard. Its period value is considerable as well assuming you can forgive Seaby the Arts and Crafts mannerisms. Look also how easily he sits alongside the monochrome prints here. The mood with him is often dawn or twilight when colours are uncertain as opposed to secure. He said much the same thing himself in a 1909 essay he contributed to.

Another artist who was always in the lead on standards is Gertrude Hermes. There are a number of other wood-engravings by artists who adopted a brilliant modern manner, including John Farleigh and Eileen Mayo, but I thought Hermes' Borage stood out. It would be untrue to say I did not enjoy the style. The downside is Hermes does not always do her plants many favours. Style always gets the better of botany and if you like borage (as I do) you will miss the luxuriance of the plant. Now this could never be said of Allen Seaby and his birds. A.W.S. was an artist who both loved and knew his subject. For a moderniser as stylish as Hermes, subject gave way to sensibility and the lack of life in the work gets to be a drag.

Allen Seaby colour woodcuts at Cirencester

 

It makes a change to have two lots of one colour woodcut each being offered for sale by auction instead of everything being included in one lot as happened with Ethel Kirkpatrick not long ago. This time it is the turn of Allen Seaby at Cirencester. On 8th March, Dominic Winter have Twins and a print of a lone rabbit sitting in a field of buttercups and daisies. No-one ever gets the title of the first print right although I must admit I have never known the title of the second. Seaby rarely, if ever, inscribed his prints with the title or the date.

So far as colour woodcuts alone are concerned, Seaby had a long career lasting from about 1900 to 1938. In all, there were at least seventy-two prints and the difficulty with buying Seaby is this. Over that complete period the interest and worth of the woodcuts varied. Seaby often did not know where to stop, which can make buying him an art in itself. At the outset when still a student at Reading, Seaby struggled with the Japanese method. Once he devised his own way of working, the masterpieces began to happen. Most of them were made before the war even if on a number of occasions there was a return to form though I have to say it was almost always with bird prints like Redwings calling (1925) and The cuckoo, also missing from my list. This was commented on at the time but Seaby never took the hint and tried everything from rabbits to ruins and back. The one big exception was the remarkable Trout from 1927 which won the Storrow Prize in Los Angeles in 1927 as was only right.

                                                                       

Twins is a good print but it is still not Seaby at his very best. His best work has a subtle and uncanny atmosphere unique in modern British printmaking. Like Trout or Redwings calling, one way or another they depend on suspension and in a telling phrase, Seaby went so far as to describe the new proofs floating off the block. By the time he made Twins, his method involved removing wood from the background and taking trial proofs till he was satisfied. I have seen a number of working proofs of both these prints and though I was unconvinced at the time, I can see the approach set the central image free of extraneous detail and left them to hover. Whether Twins achieved the necessary Seaby magic is another thing. As you will see, there were at least two different versions. At the top is the one up for auction in Cirencester while the one above is for sale at the McEwan Galley on Deeside in Scotland. Around that time, Seaby tried out a number of monochrome images which were largely successful though you tend to wonder what the point of it all was. You may wonder whether it is just faded. This is what is both good and bad about buying prints by artists like Seaby. In the end, there is no proper catalogue to refer to and you can sometimes get a bargain. 

At £450, Twins is not in that category. The Easter rabbit is probably not as satisfying but the array of buttercups and ox-eye daisies are pretty good and you will probably pay no more for it than the purchaser who had it from Garton & Cooke in 1988. In those far-off days, Robin Garton and Gordon Cooke had an ancient place in Lancashire Court off Old Bond St and had built up a reputation for selling modern British colour woodcuts at prices that took you aback. In 1986, Seaby's The Cuckoo had been on sale at the very modern price of £350 when a Helen Stevenson at £50 from Ayre's bookshop wasn't cheap. Now I only wish had bought two.

Some classic British colour woodcuts on ebay

At last something has turned up on British ebay that I am sure is the kind of thing collectors will be looking for. I mean one of the two images Allen Seaby made of magpies in the classic bird print years roughly between 1903 and 1910 when he turned out masterpieces like Heron, Bittern and Ptarmigan. This is not up to that standard (but then few British colour woodcuts are) and does not have the same impact as his other magpie print. The paper is wrinkled at the edge which probably means it isn't laid down - one of my bug bears.

The print was probably made in the first five years of his career as a colour woodcut artist and (but not necessarily printed then) and before he had the additional responsibility of the post of professor at Reading and before he embarked on his book Birds of the sea and air. I never thought Seaby regained the freshness, creativity and distinction of this period. The blacks are superb, especially in Heron, and the keyblock never dominates.

By comparison with Arthur Rigden Read's Night wind, which maintained current prices for that artist and sold for £1,1170 only last night, this is by far the better print. Seaby had the advantage of studying woodblock with Frank Morley Fletcher while Read could only work from his book Woodblock printing and although Seaby suffered from Fletcher's rigorous teaching in the early stages and struggled with the Japanese method, by the time he made this print he had adapted what he had learned from Fletcher and developed his distinctive manner.

Another little masterpiece but of  different kind coming up is John Hall Thorpe's Forget-me-nots from 1922. For all the easy appeal of Hall Thorpe's prints, his economy of means in this particular one is startling. Hall Thorpe was quite clear that these prints were intended for home decoration and he was careful to introduce a variety of colours and give buyers the chance to adapt the prints to their colour schemes and although he said they were suitable for both a London flat or a country cottage, it seems plain he was providing pictures for people who had both.

Whether we should consider them as works of art is another thing. Hall Thorpe took a pragmatic approach to making prints - not surprising if you consider he had no success until he began exhibiting prints in 1919 at the age of forty. He had originally worked as an engraver on Sydney newspapers where all the images were printed at the press and he always had his colour woodcuts printed at a commercial press. No one has ever said where (and he certainly didn't) but I have a good idea, I think. Printing by hand would have meant two things: the prints would not have looked so polished and it would have entailed a lot of work because large numbers of prints were made.

Also up for sale is The Chinese vase (which I think goes tomorrow) and The caravan. Personally, I don't think either have the appeal of the classic series of flower prints. The Chinese vase has an oriental-looking key-block. What is striking about Forget-me-nots is the way he pulled it off without using a key-block and instead arranged contrasting shapes and colours to define the flowers. The black backgrounds were also an important part of the effect, another reason why I don't think The Chinese vase comes off as well.

                                                                                                   Annex Galleries

Finally, there is Rigden Read's Strangers at the gate, back on after failing to sell with a starting bid of £300. I can't say I am surprised. If you are going to give a woodcut like this the remorseless hard sell, you have to know what you are doing. It is one of the many prints Read produced using a limited palette, an approach that went against the basic tenets of the colour print movement. The founding fathers all put colour first so how did Read come up with dowdy prints like Strangers at the gate? The answer is he read about C16th chiaroscuro woodcuts in the introduction to Woodblock printing and took it from there. The sweep, which was the first one in 1924, was the best, but after that almost all of them were less accomplished, mainly because the thinking behind them was conventional.

I need to add that none of the images you see here are the ones currently for sale on ebay.

Allen W Seaby, Art and Nature: Martin Andrews & Robert Gillmor

 

 

 

Anyone who sets out to produce a small book about the British artist, author and educationalist, Allen Seaby, will be faced with a large predicament: what to make of it all, the bird illustrations, the pony stories, the colour woodcuts, the art history, the ornithology, the animal carvings? He died in 1953 but was essentially a late Victorian, erudite, thorough, encyclopaedic and are any of us a match for that?
                                                                              

 

Martin Andrews and Robert Gillmor have sensibly shared the task. This was the option taken for recent books about Lucien Pissarro (2011) and Walter Phillips (2013). The specialist can deal with history and technique while a descendant of the artist can write a memoir and appreciation, as happened with Phillips. In Robert Gillmor, Seaby is fortunate enough to have a grandson who is also a distinguished linocut artist and writer and who has already given talks about the life and work of his grandfather. The task of writing about British colour woodcut given to Martin Andrews was in many ways far more complex. The history of the subject, and the part that Seaby played in it, has not so far been written and nor, as it turns out, was this the occasion to do so.
                                                                            

There is a good deal to admire here. The first part of the book takes the scrap-book approach, giving a strong flavour of the varied life that Seaby led and the final section takes an all-round approach to Seaby's work as an artist. To readers of this blog, much of this will be new. Illustrations from his sketch-books are very rewarding. Personally, I would have liked to have seen more of them and fewer of the later work on linen. The watercolour sketches takes us back to the days of John Ruskin, William Holman Hunt and Edward Lear, with Seaby himself achieving the balance of description and form his work is noted for. Unfortunately, the key document that shows just how he developed his approach is missing from the book. It is certainly all helped by the high standard of reproduction and the scanned images you see here are unworthy of the book but the best I could do.
                                                                          

This is not a book about Seaby's colour prints and producing a scholarly catalogue, useful as it would be, would have been a long and very difficult task. High standards have recently set by James Trollope for Eric Slater (2012), Timothy Dickson for Leonard Beaumont (2013) and most remarkably Robert Meyrick for Sydney Lee (2013). Seaby produced more prints than any of them, around 100 full-size colour woodcuts over his long career, many without titles, and none that I can think of with dates. Yet a check-list for many of his woodcuts, with titles and dates, has been in existence for many years (and I have a copy) and what mars this book are the mistakes with both dates and titles that could have been avoided. Unaccountably, the authors also give descriptive ie invented titles without placing them in brackets to make clear the titles are unknown. So, Twins (1936) becomes 'Goats and kids' early 1930s, Tutankhamen's burial place (1925)  becomes 'Valley of the Kings' Egypt, early 1920s, Rotherfield Mill, Sussex (1935) is relocated to Brill in Oxfordshire during the 1940s, and what must be Black, white and grey (1936), showing a hutchful of rabbits, becomes the delightful 'Happy family'!
                                                                                 

I could go on but should now deal with the tricky topic of early colour woodcut in Britain. No one should approach this minefield without considerable preparation and absolute caution. Robert Meyrick did a concise and informed job as part of his essay on Sydney Lee (and there was perhaps only one mistake) and James Trollope, not being a specialist, wisely left his remarks about colour woodcut to the final section. What made Martin Andrews attempt the write a five page summary of  'The colour woodcut movement' and where did the material come from? There are no notes, and I wonder how any of this will strike readers new to the subject. 'Artist and teacher' and 'The colour woodcut movement' are riddled with errors and what I can only take to be assumptions.

It would be easy (and unkind) to go through everything, but I was bemused to learn for instance that John Dickson Batten was studying at Reading School of Art  in 1876 (and perhaps he was) when he was still at Amersham Hall School, but then the notes are lacking. But the worst is reserved for Walter Crane who is made to give up an important post as principal of the Royal College of Art to take up a part-time position as director of an art department at a provincial extension college of Christchurch, Oxford. Crane left Reading for the Royal College when it was set up in 1898 and, frankly, it would have been sensible to have left Reading and the Royal College well alone. Suffice to say, more research was needed, or a lighter touch. It wouldn't have broken the bank if the history had been left to another day. Or to someone else.

Allen W Seaby, art and nature is published by Two Rivers Press at £12.99 and is available directly from them.

                                                                                   

Allen Seaby 'Art & Nature' at Reading Museum

                                                                         

To add to the list of early C20th British colour print artists with new exhibitions and books, we now have the most deserving so far. Following Sydney Lee, Eric Slater and Leonard Beaumont, an exhibition of Seaby's work opens at Reading Museum on 11th October, 2014, and runs until 22nd March, 2015. So, you have ample warning and plenty of time to go.

This is far from being his first solo exhibition at Reading (where he taught for many years) but I am not going to give away details here. The museum hold a good collection of Seaby's colour woodcuts and gouaches and no one should assume that only colour prints will go on show. It will be very interesting to see what they do exhibit. Seaby was an indifferent painter; not only that, his colour woodcuts over a very long career were uneven and not everything was as sublime as Heron, a print made when I think he was at his best around 1905 to 1910. But I don't want to prejudge a show, which most people with a serious interest in colour woodcut will want to see.

                                                                             

As part of this concerted push on Seaby , there is a book, to be published in mid October (the publication is delayed) and written by Martin Andrews with the help of Seaby's grandson, the linocut artist, Robert Gillmor. I've not had my copy yet but Andrews did a meticulous job on Robert Gibbings some years ago and I know that Robert Gillmor has long wanted his grandfather's work to gain the recognition it deserves.  I will be posting a review just as soon as I've read it. In the mean time, if you can't wait, you can buy a copy online from Two Rivers Press at £12.99 plus postage. It has 76 pages, they will send it anywhere and they aren't expensive, but you will need a PayPal account to buy it from their website.

Take my advice and buy your Seabys now. You certainty won't be able to afford him after all this.

Allen Seaby's 'Burghfield Bridge'

                                                                                      

Speaking of Reading, what should now come our way on British e bay but an early work by one of Frank Morley Fletcher's students. For all its faults, will make a fascinating addition to any serious collection of work by Seaby. It is Seaby as we have never quite seen him before. The lack of gradations of colour on the bridge and the banks are very much like his very early print of mallards. It is just as awkward as that one and he is very much Morley Fletcher's student here, especially in the large expanse of water, the delicately drawn trees and the flat areas of colour.

I must say it is exciting to see Seaby respond to Fletcher's work after looking at Ethel Kirkpatrick's The full moon on the last post: get his use of purple. It is exactly like Fletcher's on the woman's dress. Seaby was more ambitious here but Kirkpatrick was more successful. She was the more experienced and better-trained artist at this point; Seaby had had to fit in training with earning a living at first so it's not surprising if these early works don't quite come off. I would think that this was a student piece - I am being vague about dates and etc, I know, but you must all wait for the full story.

To fill you in on this rather enthralling find, Burghfield Bridge crosses the Kennet just south of Reading and will be near the area that William Giles also worked in when he produced his first colour woodcut September Moon which shows Shinfield Woods. It couldn't be better!

As it happens, I have now heard from Tara Heinemann, the seller. It was quite late when I posted this and I didn't realise who the seller was when I wrote this. So my comments are quite unprejudiced. But this I will add: it is good to see a dealer operating a true auction system by starting at 99p. So many don't. The link to Tara's lot is:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/190678722775?ssPageNarr

Good luck to all concerned.

Thirty-six views of Allen Seaby

                                                                            

A number of colour woodcut artists have attempted to use the same block to suggest either a different time of day or a fresh view of the subject. In the early days of woodcut in Britain, Sidney Lee commonly used the same woodcut using different colours to express day, night etc. It hardly ever works partly because the differences just aren't obvious enough. Ethel Kirkpatrick was less of an offender but took the opposite approach to Lee and tried to bring up stark and frankly unconvincing contrasts.

                                                                                      

Seaby liked birds in the way Kirkpatrick liked boats. He also had his favourites - kingfishers, for instance. These owl prints are fairly similar and probably both belong to early in his career. But the atmosphere of the prints is quite different. The second uses representational colours more than the first and both adopt the standard Seaby approach of precise images against an impressionistic background.

                                                                              

We are so used to this by now, we probably fail to see how innovative Seaby was. So many early C20th British painters went in for these impressions but Seaby had the sense of the naturalist to describe the bird and suggest its habitat. This remained a standard approach in birds books for many years.

                                                                            

But what is most apparent to me that given a choice betwen either owl or either kingfisher, I am not at all sure which one I would buy. This tells me how successful he was. The block of the kingfisher is the same one but the images are tellingly different. His sense of colour shifts the atmosphere cosiderably but there is an element we will never be able to see for ourselves: Seaby applying those colours with his brush. It is the subtle effects he achieved by the methpod that make the difference.