S.G. Boxsius 'October' coming up at Exeter.

Here is a colour linocut by S.G. Boxsius that has a lot to recommend it but leaves me feeling perplexed. It was first exhibited with the Graver Printers in 1931  and suspect it was originally designed as as the calendar image for 'Autumn' but the well-known image of the large trees on the Devon coast took it place. The great strength of the print is its use of colour and I also suspect Boxsius typically went to another artist for a starting-point.

So far as I know, it is the only flower-piece Boxsius made. I would think most of you would not even regard him as a flower artist. The leader of the pack was Yoshijiro Urushibara who first exhibited his Chrysanthemums at the Society for Original Woodcuts in Paris in 1922 but did exhibit the print with the Graver Printers until 1934. So far as I am concerned, the grey version is Urushibara's best print. It manages to combine the subtlety of Japanese printmaking with the western talent for perspective and description but I have posted already about this celebrated group of flower prints in 'Yoshijiro Urushibara visits Kew Gardens' so I have used the blue version here.

This all means I have assumed Boxsius saw the Urushibara print at his exhibition held at the Abbey Gallery in 1928. I do not have a catalogue but there were many prints in the show and it is likely to have been there. I say all this because it is instructive to compare the two different pieces. Without doubt, the Urushibara is austere and the Boxsius surprisingly approachable; one floats in a ambiguous way, the other is fixed inside the frame. It was unusual for colour print artists of the period to work outside the conventional print area but Allen Seaby pulled it off with Heron though the Boxsius leaves me wondering what the actual position of the vase of flowers is. He lets us know the light is coming from the right and leaving a reflection on the vase and casting a shadow on the left. But there is no sense the ginger jar is an important part of the picture in the way Urushibara's vase is, even though we can tell it is round and stands a little above us. That kind of thing would be too literal for a Japanese artist. For them, the vase is not a mere container and in a great masterstroke, Urushibara turned his vase into a wintry tuber. In terms of colour it is close to Giles and his pairs of peacocks, one brilliant, one drab.

What I do like about October is the crowded sense of fullness. What he gives us is a happy bunch not a sophisticated arrangement. What the background is I do not know. Nor can I explain why there is some much unused space above the flowers other than what I said about it being a calendar image. But all of those were woodcuts and this is not. It is lino used in a way it had not been used before. For all their buoyancy, the refreshing colours are arranged in a way no one was doing. With lino you necessarily paint with a broad brush or produce something schematic. Boxsius has managed both detail and expression in a satisfying way that is very different from the large scale detailed colour linocuts made after the second war. For all its occasional awkwardness, October was done with a light and carefree touch and this is what makes it worth buying.

You can do so at Bearnes, Hampton & Littlewood at Exeter at 10.00 GMT on 14th May, 2024. I have my own proof, so feel free. The one illustrated here is the one for sale. It is not in perfect condition as you can see, but is a lot better than the one I have. 

Chrysanthemums is for sale from Hilary Chapman at £700, but it is the blue version and I think the grey one is the best. 

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.

Yoshijiro Urushibara visits Kew Gardens

Quite a few years ago, someone had a blog where they identified at least some of the vases Yoshijiro Urushibara made use of in his flower prints. It was not a pottery I was familiar with, I don't remember what it was called and for some reason the blogger has since removed the post. But this said a lot about the reproductive training Urushibara had received with the firm of Shimbi Shoin he worked for in Tokyo. He had not only to reproduce the work of artists to a high standard in colour woodcut, he was also been trained to imitate their styles. But this was not unique to the workshops of Japan. Frank Brangwyn once complained that British arts schools did nothing but train clever imitators. On a more subtle level, when George Moore tactlessly described Edgar Degas as 'a revolutionary painter', Degas response was, 'We are tradition'. And it is that French 'we' that is so important once we begin to try and assess the work of Urushibara with any seriousness because in the current age of pick 'n' mix pronouns, Ursuhibara was certainly in the plural.

I wilfully misrepresenting what Degas meant when he referred to himself in the first person plural. In common with other British artists, Urushibara spent a fair amount of of time to-ing and fro-ing between London and Paris where the people he knew were artists in the French decorative tradition. London itself was home to other French artists, notably Theodore Roussel who was president of the Graver Printers in Colour. It was Roussel who had begun making prints of vases of flowers in the 1890s and who exhibited colour versions of them when the Graver Printers had their first exhibitions, I am saying this all over again because not everyone who actually reads what I say was convinced the first time.

 Far from being copyist, the best of Urushibara's flower prints like Chrysanthemums (above) an early tour-de-force from 1922, drew on both modern French decorative art and the Japanese tradition of bird and flowers prints they called kacho-e  This print not only depicts a vase of orange spider chrysanthemums, it suggests November. The icy atmosphere, the frosty table, the frozen dribbles of glaze are all chosen with the care of a very sensitive practitioner where the interior of his studio is transformed into a wintry garden. At the time, Urushibara's work on Brangwyn's drawings were aptly described as 'translations'. When it came to his own original work, the sense of transformation was greater. Everywhere the power of suggestion is at work, notably in the vase itself. This has turned into a tuber, lifted from the earth ready for storing in the greenhouse. With this print, everything is turned around. The studio has become a landscape, what was contained in the earth has become a container.

Peonies made about three years later in c 1925 works in a similar way but in two versions, the one above and the well-known aniline blue version. I like the way the table suggests the earth in the blue version but I prefer this one mainly because Urushibara gets closer to engraving and the way the decoration on the vase suggests a garden more clearly. You can also seen i this print why modern Japanese printmakers have adopted the  European difficult technique of mezzotint. This was widely used in ritaon by professional engravers reproducing paintings or designs by fine artists in much the same way craftsmen at Shimbi Shoin did. One strength of mezzotint is that is allows for fine gradations of tone, which makes it very suggestive of atmosphere.

Different rules apply in Japanese fine art because the sensibility is a different one. Take Dahlias (above). A friend once had the pale version on loan for a number of years and had it hanging above his television so I came to know it very well. (It was also the way I came to recognise Urushibara's signature). Unfortunately, the edition was probably only twenty so it is now very uncommon. This may be because dark prints like this were less popular. Nevertheless, this is another personal favourite and suggests exactly the way Urushibara's sensibility worked. Which modern British artist would combine montbretia, dahlias and chestnut leaves or would have used two receptacles instead of one so he could place the larger vase off-centre?

Unless you own a copy of Hilary Chapman's Yoshijiro Urushibara, you will probably not have seen the darker version because this is the first time it has appeared online. Despite all its obvious faults, Hilary's book is worth buying (and was reviewed on Modern Printmakers in 2017 when it first came out). I have had to take a photo of the reproduction in the book, not ideal because the light reflects off the glossy paper. I have included an illustration of the pale version, too, so you can decided for yourself which you like best. Either way, I would buy the one that turned up first and then the other one when it turned up afterwards. If only.

Hilary Chapman & Libby Horner Yoshijiro Urushibara, a Japanese printmaker in London is available in softback in the UK on Abe for £52 and on Amazon Books for £56. 

The gospel according to Walter

 

Walter Phillips was never slow to give an opinion and often had the opportunity to do so either in his newspapers columns in Canada or in books he wrote like The technique of colour woodcut. Amongst  number of other things he had done, Phillips had been a journalist in South Africa and came from a family where literature and the Bible were important. He had also been a tutor in Latin at Great Yarmouth and he  knew how to write well. What was unusual about Phillips and what doesn't doesn't helps to sort out fact from fiction was the publication of a biography by Duncan Campbell Scott in 1947 when Phillips was sixty-three. I have not read the book but it has meant there has been far more of Phillips' biography available than there has been for comparable artists. The problem is that all the information appears to have come directly from the artist and as I read through some of his other writing, I soon became sceptical.

The only training Phillips ever received was the classes he attended at Birmingham School of Art as a schoolboy in Worcestershire. There was nothing unusual about that. Young people who had had to go to work at fourteen or fifteen often put in long hours at evening classes where they studied for national exams. Once he left school Phillips' working life seemed to have little plan. But then his upbringing has been unconventional. As a minister his father would move from one place to another on the preaching circuit and his family would follow and moving to Winnipeg may have been a way of finding a stable life his wife and young family as finding a satisfying way of making a living himself. Either way the most important thing for Phillps was to be self-sufficient in whatever goal he set himself whether it was making prints or writing books and in this respect he was quite a lot like Allen Seaby.

Many of his friends and contemporaries like William Giles and Yoshijiro Urushibara had had very thorough training and both had spent time working in Paris where he said he had always wanted to go himself. Giles had taken Frank Morley Fletcher's class in colour woodcut at Reading (at least for a while) as Seaby had and Urushibara had trained as a carver and printer with the firm of Shimbi Shoin in Tokyo. How Phillips came to make colour woodcuts is another thing and given all that we know about Phillips it has always perplexed me that we know so little about he began. That he learned to make very good colour woodcuts like Mount Rundle (top,1951) and Gloaming (above, 1921) I would not dispute but the story he tells about how he got there doesn't always add up.

He and his wife emigrated to Canada in 1913 and he found a job as art master at St. John's College in Winnipeg. Up until then, he had been a water-colourist but when a friend went to serve in France, he left Phillips with access to his etching press, equipment and paper. Phillips made 29 etchings and then completely stopped in 1917 and suddenly began making colour woodcuts like Winter (above) instead. This was pretty good for a first colour woodcut and presupposes a lot of experiment before he could produce such an attractive print. The American curator and pioneering scholar, Nancy E. Green, said Phillips had had an epiphany; Phillips said he was at heart a colourist and that he was not very interested in line and for those reasons found etching unsatisfactory. But what did happen that was so important to him? Neither Green nor Phillips say but Modern Printmakers believes it has the answer.

Phillips himself confused the issue when he recalled a short piece about colour woodcut technique written by Allen Seaby for The Studio in 1919. He said he went back and looked at this article and it helped him improve his technique but this has never really rung true for me. Green says this was 'his first professional encounter with other woodcuts artists' but I wonder because the Seaby article was accompanied by no less than six of Phillips' woodcuts, including one in full colour. This must have been co-ordinated. Apart from that, you would hardly forget such an important breakthrough and the following year the National Gallery of Canada bought nineteen of his colour woodcuts, possibly as  result. I don't think Phillips was being disingenuous but I do think we have all been guilty of reading too much into what Phillips himself said about the matter. Facts count.

Phillips was not only hard-working, he was also a perfectionist and placed importance on being self-sufficient. Self-improvement was also high on the Victorian value scale and you would expect someone as productive as Phillips to make advances. All the same it is true that after 1919 Phillip's woodcuts became more proficient. By the time Phillips was writing, he and Seaby were friends and exchanged cards every Christmas. Seaby also owned three of Phillips' woodcuts and Phillip's as a friend naturally wanted to acknowledge a debt. What Phillips did acknowledge in 1919 was that Studio articles had already provided 'helpful stimulus'. Possibly the first was a mention of Ethel Kirkpatrick's Mount's Bay in a review in 1917. Colour woodcut was in the news. The previous autumn, John Hogg had published Fletcher's Woodblock printing, the first account in English of the Japanese method and in the next volume The Studio published Malcolm Salaman's article 'The colour print' accompanied by five illustrations including Giles Sand dunes, Denmark (above) and E.A. Verpilleux' Search lights, Trafalgar Square (above). These are the colour woodcuts Phillips saw in 1917.

Other prints included were Ada Collier's Venetian boats and Giles' A pastoral. I have never been able to track either of these down but have included Collier's image of a Venetian trabacola (above) as a useful substitute. These were the cause his epiphany (and I think Nancy Green was correct to place such emphasis on the moment) and puts the remark he made about Seaby into perspective. The Collier print and Gloaming have a good deal in common. The same can be said for the Giles print and Winter, especially in the detail of the background. Perhaps more importantly, Salaman says that Collier 'learned the craft of the woodblock from Mr. Giles.' Some time after this, Phillips began a correspondence with Giles and when Phillips explained that sizing the paper was presenting the most difficulty, Giles bought Urushibara in to give advice. So what happened here?

Phillips admitted he had never seen a Japanese colour woodcut when he began making them himself and it was not until he found a shop selling them on a visit to Chicago that he was able to buy any and start a collection. All he was doing here was following the contemporary art school method of giving the student a teaching example to follow as a model of good practice. But there would have been no need to have taken them home to study. The exceptional surface quality achieved by the Japanese printers would have been apparent to Phillips straightaway. This was so significant to him in 1925 Phillips went to Giles studio on the Kings Road in London to meet Urushibara who turned up with alum and brushes and proceeded to apply the size with the expertise that impressed everyone who was lucky enough to see him at work.

But there was even more to his epiphany than this. England did not have one school of colour woodcut, it had two. Salaman's article listed a number of artists who had studied with Fletcher, including Giles and it might have been as easy for Phillips to have written to Fletcher. At the time he had not heard about Woodblock printing and said he would have saved himself a lot of difficulties if he had. Nevertheless he eventually aligned himself with Giles and later joined in the criticisms that were made of Fletcher and the doctrinaire approach he took to teaching and to colour woodcut method. Salaman (whose sympathies lay with Giles) characterised Fletcher's followers as the Anglo-Japanese. Being more forthright, Phillips described colour woodcut as a cult. At face-value this looks surprising coming from someone who is now famous for colour woodcuts but it only shows how far Phillips was a creature of his time and perceived important differences that no-one today would bother about (unless you were studying the subject that is). But he said it nevertheless and one clue to what he meant is the judicious way Phillips used the key-block. Winter did not have one at all and even as he moved forward, the key-block never played the role that it did in the work of Fletcher, Seaby, Mabel Royds or John Platt. As the son of a non-conformist minister, Phillips would have been all too aware of cults. What I think he was talking about was the cult of the Japanese print followed by the Anglo-Japanese and which Salaman summed up as 'a local fetish'. These divergences of opinion and the coteries that gave rise to are lost on us today. We are all too busy with our own.

A tale of two bridges

 

In 1915, the writer Walter Sparrow Shaw published 'A book of bridges' with illustrations in black-and-white and colour by Frank Brangwyn. Shaw was a great admirer of the work of Brangwyn in a world where the critical reaction to his work was more sceptical at home than it often was abroad. He and Brangwyn also had a fair amount in common. Shaw had been brought up in the Welsh town of Wrecsam but had been educated in England and at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, a background that must have appealed to Brangwyn whose mother was born in Brecon and whose father was born in England of Welsh parents. Brangwyn himself had been born in Bruges where he had lived until the age of nine when the family had gone to live in Shepherd's Bush in London.

So far, so similar. Brangwyn spent more time in his father's workshop and at the South Kensington Museum than he did at school and wangled an apprenticeship with William Morris. Shaw, on the other hand, was very well educated. Apart from the seven years he spent in Brussels, he had attended Chester College followed by  a stint at Newton Abbot College in south Devon. In the late 1870s he then studied for 15 months at the Slade School of Art under the exacting but multi-talented French artist, Alphonse Legros, before moving on to Brussels. This was exactly the kind of a person to recommend themselves to Brangwyn whose bravura style was always in need of sympathetic adjustment. What is astonishing is how many bridges Brangwyn was capable of and wherever he went there was a succession of dramatic arches and theatrical weather.

At face value, the black-and-white illustrations were woodcuts, but in reality were no more than the approximations of a man who could apparently turn his hand to anything but depended on others to do the work, a man who could criticise the art schools for doing nothing but turning out clever imitators but had no scruples about working with artists who had studied there. Enter Yoshijiro Urushibara, a man who followed the longest apprenticeship of anyone I can think of. At the time Shaw and Brangwyn were collaborating on 'A book of bridges', Urushibara was printing a large number of blocks mainly prepared by Sugasiki Hideaki for a reproduction of a copy of an ancient Chinese scroll painting Admonitions of the instructress by the C3/C4th artist,  Gu Kaizhi (below) . He then moved on to a short series of colour woodcuts of Stonehenge roughly based on a print by William Giles remarkable for all being so alike.

Brangwyn knew a good thing when he saw one and there followed a unique collaboration with Urushibara and the curator and writer, Laurence Binyon, on a superb portfolio of colour woodcuts simply called Bruges which Brangwyn designed and Urushibara cut and printed (below). Binyon had an intererest in Chinese and Japanese art for a long time and it was Binyon and the head of prints, Howard Colvin, who had recognised the significance of the Admonitions when it had been brought in to the British Museum a few years previously. Bruges was published in 1919 and Urushibara must have set to worked on Ruins of a Roman bridge soon after the portfolio was finished. The image had appeared in Shaw's but the success of the later image depended almost entirely on Urushibara's interpretation. His work, The Studio Magazine said, were translations of Brangwyn, though interpretation is more like it  and I would find it hard to believe that Urushibara hadn't chosen the image or the time of day. In the original,  there was no obvious time of day and the left hand side of the sky is filled with a shower of rain. In the Urushibara colour woodcut, it is a lucid twilight with a crescent moon hanging above the bridge.

This was the kind of imagery and symbolism that attracted western artists to the work of Japanese printmakers in the first place. On a simple level, the two bridges are images of collaboration, but the ruin in the foreground and the complete bridge seen beneath the single arch suggests the life Urushibara was leading in a way that would be natural for a Japanes artist Within you/without you is crude but it is something like that. Today Urushibara has a reputation for skillfulness but within that over-arching reputation there was more. He was also ambitious and would not have taken the job at the British Museum if it had not suited him and aside from the work with Hideaki and Binyon on the Gu Kaizhi he was asked to supervise a long-term project which involved the unrolling and conservation of scrolls excavated at Mogao in China by Sir Aurel Stein (until the Chinese government put a stop to his activities). Urushibara was not only a professional conservator, he had a professional interest in archaeology and the choice of subjects like the ruins of Stonehenge and the Roman bridge across the river Loire at Brives make sense.

In the original Brangwyn image, the new bridge seen through the one great arch of the old bridge is a neat visual trick. By casting moonlight on the far bridge and making it more prominent by emphasising the small islands in the river, Urushibara made the series of arches the focus of the image. All this came about only because Urushibara handled the colour and printing with such subtlety and care. Niot many artists could use only blues and greys to express the last light of the day and keep a print so varied and of such interest. It is not simply evocative, it suggests the sympathetic relations of one thing and another which no one looking through Shaw's book would have been concerned with.  I am not suggesting Brangwyn didn't understand all of this only that he was too restless a man to be so thoughtful. All too often western artists have concentrated on the means rather than the end of Japanese printmaking. Urushibara's real achievement was to put new energy and poetry into British colour print. As Giles said, all of us owe him a debt, a debt that was not only to do with technical things.

You only have to compare S.G, Boxsius' Houghton Bridge, Sussex (the smaller bridge above) to see the effect Urushibara's image-within-an-image had other artists during the 1920s. Phillip Needell's colour woodcut of the old bridge at Avignon was less subtle and had none of the understatement typical of Boxsius but bears in mind the grandeur (and overstatement) of Brangwyn's original idea. The interesting thing is that we would not have associated Boxsius or Needell with the Japanese school of printmaking but obviously neither of them were immune. Urushibara's version was not about the past because we search for more bridges in the print than we can find, no, the little bridges of Needell and Boxius only go to prove that Ruins of a Roman bridge looked forward to the future,

From Corot to Urushibara: Corot, E.C.A. Brown and Theodore Roussel

                                                            
                                                                          

In 1907, the National Gallery in London acquired Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Marsh at Arleux (below). The picture had been painted in Artois in 1871 during the revolutionary period of the Paris Commune. Many artists had left the city and moved to the Pas-de-Calais and continued to paint whatever they saw there. But Corot's picture is strange, lacking in detail, laden with atmosphere and with a deliberate lack of finish. There is a sense of dislocation and foreboding that looks forwards to modern art. Corot is not an artist  I would associate with an image, pure and simple, but it does show exactly why French artists had so much to learn from colour woodcut artists like Hiroshige to whom the meaningful image was naturally a part of what they did.
                                                                  

By the lake (at the top) by E.C.A. Brown was first exhibited (so far as I know) in February, 1911, and shows one of the lakes at the village of Camiers in the Pas-de-Calais where she lived with her husband. The couple moved backwards and forwards between France and accommodation in London and while I do not know whether Brown saw Corot's picture newly-arrived at the National Gallery, you will agree, her woodcut takes so much from Corot, it is uncanny. The picture was given to the Gallery by Mrs Edwin Edwards. She and her husband had made strong links with French artists, including Henri Fantin Latour and Alphonse Legros, as well as Whistler, who had been close to Theodore Roussel, and it is always possible that all these artists had already seen the Corot.n at their home.

Brown knew Charles Bartlett who went to work in Tokyo with the publisher Shazaburo Wantanabe and, as Modern Prinmakers said some while back, used Georges Seurat's A Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte as a basis for his colour woodcut Silk merchants, India. What you see here is the first time a British colour woodcut artist made direct use of modern French art rather than a Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut. Roussel's  Moonrise from the river made in London (where he lived) in 1914 is an interesting variation. The mood has changed again to something far more neutral. There is more I could say, but what you can see here is the beginning of Urushibara's work with Frank Brangwyn and this is why.

                                                                                 

All of these artists - Corot (above and below), Fantin-Latour, Whistler, Legros and Roussel - made prints and all of them, apart from Corot, knew London and some of the artists working there. For Corot what mattered most in a picture was what he called himself 'the value of tone' - and he meant the tone of the overall picture, so it made particular sense for him to produce etchings because he could explore and use tonal value in a new way. Corot was remarkably diverse in the things he did. Despite the basic similarity of the subjects, The dreamer (made in 1854 but not printed until 1921), is very different in approach - basically a type of northern expressionism, if you like - from his etching, Near Rome (1866) He was a translator and an interpreter and that would make him interesting to other artists.

                                                                                    

One of them was Brown. By the lake was not the only print she made that drew on Corot. With others, it is just less obvious, but I think it is still there and the French art historian and critic, Gabriel Mourey, who saw Brown's prints when they were first being exhibited in Paris, said the same thing: 'the countryside between Montreuil-sur-Mer and Etretat is the countryside of Cazin and Corot'. Corot was based at Arras in 1871, but he and his biographer-friend rented a house at Arleux 30 km to the east during July and August, where Corot made a prompt return to the scratchy technique of the first etching.

There are two points here. The importance of French art to the first British colour woodcut artists like Brown hasn't been talked about. It has been very easy to discuss the importance of Japan simply because so little is known about what they were doing and what the artists were actually thinking and doing (and because some of the people doing the writing knew more about C19th Japanese colour woodcut than they did about C19th French etching). The fact that Brown and her friends and colleagues were using the Japanese method is almost beside the point; her husband's prints were mainly colour etchings and as she was the better printer, she printed at least one of them herself (above). And what she achieved there was a sense of tone; it was already an interpretation of Thomas Brown's work because he was never as subtle as that.
                                                                    
                                                                              

Urushibara's main contribution to Frank Brangwyn's Bruges portfolio (1919), above, was its tone. This wasn't a by-product of being very clever when it came to making prints. As The Studio said in 1920, he was translating Brangwyn and to me, at least, that is what Corot was doing, and what Brown did, when she printed her husband's fishing fleet at  Etaples. She was a co-artist on that print and signed it on the left. This was where Urushibara's work with Brangwyn began; this was the environment Urushibara came into when he arrived in London in 1910. People talk as if he were some kind of boy-genius who has arrived from the wilds of Tokyo and did it all by magic. Urushibara was in Paris over the winter and where By the lake, as well as Roussel's etchings, was exhibited and I would think it likely that he saw all of them, along with other colour woodcuts by British artists, simply because his French colleagues were interested, too. So, I am not saying he began by studying Corot etchings; there was no need to, he was surrounded by people who had.

Yoshijiro Urushibara, a Japanese printmaker in London: Hilary Chapman & Libby Horner

                        
                                                                          

The problem with quite a few people who write about art is that they do not know how to look at pictures and they do not know how to look at pictures, because they have not looked at enough of them and do not know their  Manet from their Mategna. This may not always matter all that much, but in the case of the subject of this book, he was not only Japanese, he had been trained to work in the style of other artists, and then worked with many artists in France and Britain and no-one is more nuanced than Yoshijiro Urushibara. Ignore this at your peril. Unfortunately, the authors do.

                                                          

But there is more. It is imperative, if you want to study any artist properly, to have a chronology of their work and, basically, a catalogue like this ought to do the job. What is lacking with Urishibara is an adequate number of dates for many of his prints and no amount of other detail can make this book do what it says it does. In that case, why did they try? And the answer is, 'Because they wanted to'.

                                                                           

They are not the only writers to divide a catalogue into rather naff sections like 'Florals' and 'Creatures'; Dominique Vasseur inflicted the same indignity on poor Edna Boies Hopkins in 2007, but what else could they do?  The predicament was a predicament of their own making, but producing a catalogue is one way of avoiding too many critical judgements, except of the very obvious sort. All we get is Chapman saying she believed the work he did with Brangwyn was his best. She doesn't explain why, so I needn't say why I disagree (although I think earlier work like 'Ruins of a Roman Bridge' are very good): what you see here is what he did best.

                                                                         

Obviously, not only these; there are others, but I have written about Urushibara's prints elsewhere on Modern Printmakers. Libby Horners' essay on the artist is very good and well-researched though some material is still missing. Hilary Chapman's essay 'Urushibara and the British colour woodcut in the Japanese manner' is thirty years out-of-date and counting. Why bother?

                                                                             

One criticism that has been made about  this book concerns the size of the illustrations. The standard of photography is good and I would say that everything you want to see is there, along with a lot of things you would not want to, minor work after Frank Brangwyn being my own bugbear. It's the same with the text in the main catalogue, which has you wading through details  about exhibitions and incomprehensible lettering. If you enjoy flipping backwards and forwards, this may well be the book for you. This is a missed opportunity to do Urushibara justice. The authors only had to look at Robert Meyrick's 'Sydney Lee' of 2013 to see how this new book should have been done, but  this is all we have and I am afraid Chapman & Horler will be the standard text, whether we like it or not.

                                                                              

For a different view of the book, read Darrel Karl's insider take on things on 'Eastern Impressions'

Yoshijiro Urushibara, a Japanese printmaker in London: Hilary Chapman and Libby Horner

                                                                          

It was in the nature of things, I suppose, that  Yoshijiro Urushibara went to live somewhere on the boundaries of Holland Park and Notting  Hill  (according to which source you go to) when he first came to live in London. Never an easy printmaker to get  quite right, the first attempt to locate this intriguing artisan-printmaker, teacher and friend has been made by Hilary Chapman and Libby Horner in this book published in  May, 2017. It is essentially a catalogue of his prints and includes essays and other biographical material.

                                                                             

My thanks are due to Darrel Karl who alerted me to the publication on his blog and who  helped the authors with his considerable expertise. (The link is on my list). I will be reviewing the book once my copy arrives.

                                                                          

'Laurence Binyon' a colour woodcut by Edmund Dulac

                                                                       

                                                                           

In the spring of 1910 the Tokyo firm of Shimbi Shoin sent two young craftsmen called Sugizaki Hideaki and Yoshijiro Urushibara to give demonstrations of woodblock cutting and printing at the great Japan-British exhibition at White City in London. If the intention was also to demonstrate just how fine their workmanship was, Shimbi Shoin were perhaps too successful because staff from the Department of Prints at the British Museum were so impressed, they offered to employ the two men themselves.

The wheeze was quite a simple one. Since 1903 the department had owned an early copy of an ancient Chinese scroll painting ascribed to the C4th artist Ku Kai-chih, which had been looted from the Imperial collection during the Boxer Rebellion and then offered to head curator Sidney Colvin and his oriental specialist, Laurence Binyon. The two men immediately paid £25 for it. Seven years later they decided tempt the craftsmen with the job of cutting and printing reproductions of the great Chinese scroll, which eventually went up for sale between 1912 and 1913 with a text by Binyon.

                                                                

All the portraits by the Toulouse artist, Edmund Dulac, seen here you date from about 1913 and after and all the individuals belonged to a circle of artists and writers that included Ezra Pound, William Rothenstein and Dulac himself who would meet at the Vienna Café on New Oxford St not far from the museum. The portrait of Binyon's assistant, Arthur Waley (above) imitates a brush drawing but I think is pen and wash while the witty and unforgettable portrait of Charles Ricketts (below, right) alongside his other half, Charles Shannon, dressed as Dominican saints, is in watercolour. But the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge describes the superb portrait of Binyon himself as 'woodcut, colour printing'. (Their print came from Ricketts' and Shannon's collection).

Binyon's face bought out the best in artists. William Strang produced one portrait of him that stands out against all of his many, many portrait etchings. Likewise Dulac was able to combine the unusual face and another aspect of Binyon's personality and interests in one masterful little woodcut. And wonderful draughtsman he may have been but was Dulac - or was any English artist - capable of reproducing their own design with such refinement in colour woodcut? I think the answer has to be no. Surely, only Hideaki and Urushibara (below) could have done anything so sophisticated as that.
                                                                                       

  

 

 

Yoshijiro Urushibara: 2 more images from 'Ten Woodcuts'

                                                                              
I have had to add these two further images because I was unable to upload anymore on the last post. So, please just scroll back to the first part.

It's a good opportunity to say a bit more about the nature of the prints. The first one on the previous post is called 'The resting place' and I believe it shows people picnicing by the grave of a family member. I have visited these old Ottoman cemeteries above the Bosphorus - that is Istanbul you can see on the other bank - and it may have reminded Urushibara of Shinto practices at home in Japan. People still pay gardeners to tend the graves like gardens at modern Uskudar.

Another woodcut shows the court of the mosque of memory. I assume this is Cairo as the other one you see here shows the mausoleum at the wonderful mosque of Ibn Tulun., but I have tried in vain to identify the building. But you will now see that there is a drift of meaning, that the prints act in part as commemoration.

                                                                                   

This second woodcut is simply called 'Trees' but the title page also indicates that it is Montreuil in the Pas-de-Calais in France. In the distant past, Montreuil was the westernmost town in Flanders, the country of Brangwen's birth. You will also note the way Urushibara depicts different trees - the poplars of Picardy and the cypresses of the shores of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. If you look back at 'Moonlight, Bournemouth', you will also see his depiction of pine trees on the heaths of Dorset. Recurrent images are as much a feature of Japanese art as recurrent artists are with Modern Printmakers.