The ones that got away: Eli Marsden Wilson at Scarborough

I was only told about the recent sale at Scarborough after it had taken place, but included was a mahogany artist's cabinet and contents (below) that once belonged to Eli Marsden Wilson (it went for £3,100) as well as a some very fine atmospheric mezzotints and very likeable bookplates by him. Wilson is not an obvious artist for Modern Printmakers and the name didn't really register when it was used, but my readers are a canny lot and one way or another, nothing much passes them by, so I decided to check Eli Marsden Wilson out.

Wilson trained at Wakefield School of Art where he won a place to the Royal College of Art and studied intalgio printmaking under Sir Frank Short (and was presumably a fellow student of William Giles and S.G. Boxsius). Short had revived the use of mezzotint at a time when many old techniques like enamelling and painting in tempera were being rediscovered and introduced the technique to Wilson. For many years, Wilson made etchings and mezzotints, but after the market for them collapsed, he turned his hand to other things, including painting, designing dioramas for the Natural History Museum (bottom) and designing stamps. This is what an art school training did for you. Walter Crane may have described the Royal College as a mill for teachers, but it provided Wilson with the means to make a living, even when the etching boom came to a sudden end.

I do not know when he was making mezzotints, but it was presumably prior to 1929. What I do know is it takes an artist of considerable dedication and skill to pull it off. Some of the best mezzotints were made in the c18th. I used to look at them when they were going for next-to-nothing in my local saleroom. The subtle effects it is capable of as a medium has also attracted contemporary Japanese printmakers, but like copper engraving, it may be too difficult for many artists. Wilson came right at the end of the reproductive tradition that had once had mezzotint and steel engraving as two of its mainstays and between them Short and Wilson helped reintroduce mezzotint as a way of making original prints.

You will find many artists using demanding techniques just as Wilson did on ebay in Austria and Germany. The format they use is often small and subtle, but many are worth buying simply because they are unfashionable. It is all very well going on about colour woodcuts, but quite often unfashionable artists were better trained and this can make their work particularly rewarding. Wilson is no exception and if you missed out on last week's sale (as I did), do not give in to despair. Modern Printmakers likes to keep its ear to the ground and I have it on good authority a few of those delightful Wilson mezzotints will soon be back on sale.

The experimental Mr Batten: John Dixon Batten & British colour woodcut

 

John Dixon Batten's father, John Winterton Batten (above) had wanted him to be a lawyer and, like many of the young men of the time, including Frank Morley Fletcher, Batten went along with his father's plans for him. He gained a degree in law from Trinity College, Cambridge, was called to the Bar and promptly gave it up for a course at the Slade School. There he encountered the debonair Frenchman, Alphonse Legros, who was professor of fine art. Legros believed he had wasted his life teaching young artists but Batten's approach to art depended on the example set by Legros. Unlike Mabel Royds who had studied at Chester before she went to the Slade, the school and Legros was all Batten had to go on. It was probably enough because from engraving on cornelian to theatre design, Legros had a broad range of skills he could impart to the students and his attitude to colour was obviously one of them.

   

The role Legros played in preparing the way for British colour woodcut has never been considered except on Modern Printmakers. A good deal has been made of the example of Japanese ukiyo'e prints but far less of the influence of European artists. When Walter Crane went to Rome with Legros, he was astonished his friend spent all his time there copying the corner of a fresco by Raphael. As it happens, I recently come back from Florence where Masaccio and Masolino's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel are undergoing their second modern restoration (above). I told the guide it was like Prada and she said, 'Prada want to come here and look at these colours'. But it was not only colour. Legros had looked so carefully at the Raphael cartoons in the V&A, it could show students like Batten the difference between Raphael's hand and those of his two assistants.

    

What this amounted to was a serious interest in graphic design and colour and both played a part of what Batten did in The centaur. This was made in 1921 twenty-two years after The tiger (below) the first print he made more or less independently of Frank Morley Fletcher. Batten had a great admiration for the work of Hokusai and was not beyond pinching good ideas from him like his hobyahs, but what he borrowed was always translated into a European idiom and what is best about European tradition is here. It may not be to contemporary taste but Batten was simply being true to the central tenets like perspective, realism, the nude and respect for past art but providing students with a practical way of making colour prints. 

He knew what a struggle it had been for Fletcher and himself. It also knew how easy it was to be led astray. By 1921, the post war revival of colour woodcut had begun and new artists on the scene like Frank Brangwyn and Yoshijiro Urushibara were heavily influenced by Japanese style and subject matter and Batten had never believed that was the way to go. Nor was he alone. Mabel Royds had never showed any interest but more canny artists like Ian Cheyne went to Japan for  sense of chic. It was all in the interpretation. The centaur was made that year in two versions, one using four blocks and suitable, he said, for a portfolio or illustration and a second with six blocks like the one above and suitable to be framed and hung on the wall where it would need more impact. He was trying to be open-minded and suggest there was considerable potential for printmakers as the New Year card designed for his parents suggests.

    

Another development that mattered to Batten was the growing reaction of important traditionalists like the etcher, Sir Frank Short. (The shadowed valley 1927, above). Short had been put in charge of the etching class at the Royal College of Art in 1891 two years before Batten began to try out colour woodblock (below) and, as he was there until 1926, remained very influential and was able to uphold what he saw as a tradition that went all the way back to Mantegna, Durer and Rembrandt. The problem was this view of tradition was partial. Italian and German artists had made colour woodcuts well before Rembrandt was working and W.R. Lethaby went so far as the suggest colour print had been introduced to Japan from Europe. So far as he was concerned, it was all down to method and as Fletcher had written in 1916, 'Batten... had attempted, and partially succeeded in making, a print from wood and metal blocks with colour mixed with glycerine and dextrine... As the Japanese method seemed to promise greater advantage and simplicity, we began experiments together... ' and the rest is history. Fletcher not only became a proponent of Japanese colour but of Japanese style and was as unrelenting as Short.