CW Taylor : the road to Sussex

It's always the same. I post on an artist and almost straightaway come across fresh material. This time it comes from Valerie Martin and her website http://findonvillage.com/ and I sincerely hope she will forgive me lifting material. (My webmail won't work with the contact link on the site). Valerie has done a good deal of useful research on Taylor. It turns out that he lived in the village (I assume he retired there) and the first image is of a lane nearby. Even more interesting, in a way, is the second image of Smeston watermill near Wolverhampton. Taylor came from the town and began his working life drawing bath-taps for trade journals (and also taking art classes). It appears from what Valerie says he left this work in 1905 and was living in West Kensington, London, in 1908. Presumably he was attending the RCA - no mean feat for someone who started out on bath fittings. He then taught at Dover for two years, married, and moved to Westcliffe on Sea when he began teaching at the Southend School of Art. Interesting all this because other artist arrivals in West Sussex were working not so far away as I noted in the post on Arthur Rigden Read. Also interesting that he went back to make engravings of an area he knew as a boy. And the work on taps paid off because the lower print has a tremendous sense of both depth and structure. Valerie's site also has a number of watercolours by Taylor. (I was relieved to find that here was one printmaker who could at least turn out a decent if conventional watercolour). My thanks are due to her.

Full many a glorious morning : CW Taylor

I wouldn't normally associate the British artists Willam Blake (1757 - 1827) and CW Taylor (1878 - 1960) but both men began their working life as commerical line engravers but went on to make poetic relief prints, Blake's original and important, Taylor's assured and distinctive. This places them in a small but distinguished group of artists, along with the likes of Wim Zwiers and Emil Orlik, who mastered both intalgio and relief methods.

Looking at the first two prints, a wood engraving, probably of Kent, and a line engraving, certainly of Essex, there is little to choose between them in style and nothing really to say why he has chosen one technique rather than the other. So, he is not so much the self-conscious artist as the accomplished practitioner. But engraving produces a cooler, sharper image, perhaps suited to the marshland near the sunniest coast in Britain.

Taylor came from neither of the counties that he went on to describe in his prints. He was brought up in Wolverhampton and proved himself during an apprenticeship with a commercial firm of line engravers because he went on to train at the Royal College of Art in London. Far better known for its etching class at the time, Taylor first found a job as an art teacher in Southend and from 1926 onwards produced a body of prints which are some of the most instantly recognisable in British art.

Despite almost all his prints depicting landscape during the early morning in either July or August, it is still hard to say exactly why they have such a peculiar intensity. It isn't merely that he presents the countryside at its most lush and fruitful. The fact is he employs a complex range of tone, light and shadow, perspective and detail. He also uses more than one method in some prints and it is this attention to both method and detail that somehow lifts him out of the ordinary. The effect of rediscovering lyrical and unprententious work like this after the worst of the brutalism of the avant garde in the sixties and seventies, is hard to exaggerate. It represented both a lost England and a lost clarity.

Many of the images have the immediacy of advertising and they now seem to typify one of our views of the interwar years. But he subtley disorientates us, in some ways just as much as the modernists do, tipping trees and lanes, oast-houses and fields, one way and another. This manipulation of planes and surfaces and his sharp sense of the tactile express as much the sensibility of the poet as the craftsman. Hence the opening phrase from a Shakespeare sonnet. Rosetti described the sonnet as a 'monument to a moment'. It describes the small prints of CW Taylor to a T.