A bookplate by Carl Moll

                                                                        

I am sorry about how few posts there have been on Modern Printmakers recently, but here is something for everyone who is colour woodcut at heart: an early bookplate with an attribution to the Viennese secessionist, Carl Moll, who I featured quite some while back.

You will find it on British ebay. I would take the date of 1897 given by the dealer with considerable caution because this would make it one of the very earliest of all European colour woodcuts, and interesting as Moll can be, I don't think innovation of that kind could be attached to his name. Only Peter Behrens, and possibly Emil Orlik and Bernhard Pankok, were active in the field in central Europe around then, so you would be paying at least £89 for something with a dubious date. Add to that £8.50 for delivery, and you have the perfect ebay money-spinner.

Half-colour colour woodcuts

                                                                                   

On Monday a print called A Highland Loch by the Scottish artist, Helen Stevenson, went for just over £200. This may well be the highest that one of her colour woodcuts has gone for on on ebay. The irony is that someone paid that amount for one of her cheaper prints. How do I know this?
                                                                           
I will admit I don't have any exhibition record for the woodcut with a price, but all the prints that used a limited number of blocks as this one did, with its three colours and the keyblock, were designed to be cheaper. Eric Hesketh Hubbard (below) specialised in this kind of print and even went so far as to collaborate with Frank Whittington, who cut the block for him. Hesketh Hubbard would have been quite capable of making colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner, but what he wanted to do was produce affordable prints at his own Forest Press.
                                                                               

But what is affordable today? And do you seriously go out and spend that much when you could buy directly from a dealer for the same amount? It's not as if Stevenson is rare by colour woodcut standards. But the point I am making is that I think Stevenson, like Hubbard, made a conscious decision to limit the work she put into the print in order to make it cheaper and much as I like Stevenson's work, I don't think A Highland Loch finds her on top of her form. Frankly, what Hesketh Hubbard did with his gypsy encampment is superior - and he only used one colour. Where he gains is partly with Whittington's complex cutting and unusual use of hatching.
                                                                                 

The master for them all was William Nicholson (above), with the illustrated books he made in the late 1890s. Almost all of his prints, though, were hand-coloured, and were not woodcuts at all. But he showed what could be done with black and a few complimentary colours. And I think this was where Stevenson fell down. Like Nicholson, Hesketh Hubbard wisely opted for black and a pale-ish sepia. The colour of the tree, similar to the other two artists is fine, but the green strikes me as intrusive. You have to know when to stop.

A later master of this sub-form of black and yellowish tones was the much-loved and lauded Arthur Rigden Read. As it happens, one of his prints that took this approach failed to sell on ebay, even though the starting-bid was reasonable. Unfortunately, I don't have an image, but his cat (above) is better, anyway. What Nicholson and Hesketh Hubbard achieved in their rather austere way with their umber and ochre, Read softens and enlivens with a complementary grey. It remains easier to print, but dumps the chapbook manner.

Like Nicholson, Read knew that no matter whether he was depicting a cat or a cowman, these limited tones suited portraiture more than landscape. But if the few colours help to give Read's farmer in his Sussex smock great rustic charm, he was one of the few to use the same approach with far greater subtlety. Read was not a one-note printmaker. Obviously, many artists limit the colours and tones they use to great effect. What Read did was to achieve a lovely balance between the black-and-brown style and the greater sophistication of an artist like John Platt. It all depended on what you could do with grey. Or what you could do with £200. Better spent on Nice weather for ducks if you ask me.
                                                                 

                                                                                       
                                                              

 

 

Sylvan Boxsius 'Afterglow'

                                                                        

For all fans of the British artist, SG Boxsius, an image of his 1933 linocut Afterglow has turned up. It's a fine image, seeing him depicting elm trees with considerable verve. He was getting into his 'less is more' phase by that time, and I like the way he has piled up various shapes behind the farm building. We are used to his single figure masterstrokes by now. The image would be less interesting without the attentive cow. It's remarkable what he achieves with his careful build-up of shapes and tones, and this print shows him very much in William Giles mode, with its depiction of an exact time of day and its mood as a metaphor. It' s always interesting to wonder about the other artists an artist had been looking at. Irresistibly, the miniature scale suggests John Sell Cotman. It's outwardly simple enough, but the complex feelings of a man in his mid-fifties do come through as a result. (He died only eight years after he had made this print).
                                                                               

Unfortunately, I like the condition less. It is quite badly faded all over and I suspect the colours you have here are less vivid than they should be. But this is the first time I've seen this print, so I can't be sure about that. Even so, £175 is quite a hefty price to ask for something in a lot less than perfect condition. As we all know by now, Boxsius isn't a rare artist. His work turns up even more frequently than, say, Seaby, Royds or Platt, simply because he was rated at the time and his work obviously sold. You will find this on British ebay and will see what happens.

Slater's Sussex, the colour woodcuts of Eric Slater: a review

                                                                                
                                                                                       

 

A very unusual event this week, the publication of Slater's Sussex, the colour woodcuts of Eric Slater by James Trollope, the first study of a British colour woodcut artist since Malcolm Salaman's William Giles as far back as 1928. I think the Towner gallery at Eastbourne, who are the publishers, would have been wiser to make more of that than to claim rediscovery of Slater's work, which will strike most readers of this blog as dubious. But more of that later.
                                                                 

Anyone who has chosen to write about a colour woodcut artist soon discovers why so little has appeared untill this week. There are probably only two or three artists where there is enough material for a writer to go on. It was even trickier for James Trollope, because in many ways the subject chose him. He happens to live in the small town of Seaford in Sussex where Slater made most of his colour woodcuts between about 1926 and 1938. Coming across Seaford Head at auction was where it all began for him, and despite a determined effort to discover as much about Slater as he could, including a house-to-house search, his subject remains doggedly elusive. No fault of the author. Despite a valiant effort to place him amongst the other colour woodcut artists of the day, Slater comes over as less intriguing than his prints.
                                                       

I decided to take a sea-faring approach when it came to illustrating my review. In May, 1940, the work you see here by three artists associated with Winchelsea in Sussex - Eric Slater, SG Boxsius and Arthur Rigden Read - was hung together at exhibition. Prints such as Read's Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum and Boxsius' Looe, Cornwall are yet to come my way, but the emphasis on sea-going and the southern British coast is there for all to see. Far from being localist, the exhibition recognised the importance of the sea to national defence. (Uncannily, the Dunkirk evacuation of Allied forces was ordered the day after it closed). James Trollope writes about the very local nature of Slater's subjects, but it is the history and the look of that coastline, with its cliffs and coastguard stations (see top) that has the greater meaning for me.
                                                                   

I happen to be a fan of Slater country myself. I lived at Frog Firle near Seaford for a while and even at the Beachy Head clubhouse above Eastbourne for a month. The landscape is one of the most different and affecting in all Britain. It was Slater who saw this, more so than Eric Ravilious, who was brought up in Eastbourne. James Trollope rightly brings out Slater's oddness, but he is no more odd than the coastline he describes, certainly not if you are used to the Lincolnshire coast as I am. So, the book includes a walk in Slater country, an explanation of the technique he used, it is generously illustrated in colour. So far as the early history of colour woodcut goes, Batten and Fletcher had made a successful print before they read Tokuno; his pamphlet only helped them to sort some of the problems out, but not all. It was published in 1894, not 1892, which was the date of the report it comes from. Nor was Tokuno a printmaker; he was an official. But none of this will be of great concern to most readers.

There is the low-down on more famous contemporaries like Frank Morley Fletcher, John Platt and Read, but no photographs of the artist, or any of the houses he lived in, London or Sussex. Generally, I think it's accepted that the neighbour he had at Winchelsea and who gave him private tuition in colour woodcut is Read (Campbell Dodgson does not name the artist).
                                                                              

The book contains a thorough and useful list of 45 colour woodcuts made over a period of about 12 years. Even though Slater's prints are often smallish, though not as small as Boxsius, bear in mind that Allen Seaby, the most prolific of them, made 100 in a career of 35 years or more. So, Slater showed commitment, and it is all the more surprising that he appeared to give up after the success of having The Stackyard published exclusively in the United States in 1938. James Trollope associates that year with the death of the artist's mother who he had lived with as an only child since the death of his father in 1904. There are no wife and children in the story either, and it's the case that many of these artists have been best served by their grandchildren. Slater has been fortunate to have caught the eye of James Trollope. But who receives fair play is hit-and-miss. The boy in Read's Little fishes (above) is presumably his adoptive son, Clifford, and the woman Kathleen Rigden Read. Slater's work is less obviously personal than Read's, but if Read looks farther, as the book says, in his own way, Slater looks deeper.

You can see a short BBC Sussex film about the artist and the book at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-sussex-22312620  Slater's Sussex is available from Towner at £15. Ring general enquires on +44 (0)1323 434670 to order by post and include a further £2.50 to cover costs. There is also e mail contact on their website.  I suspect Towner have not reckoned with the enquiries from outside the UK that I think they are going to get. Ah, well.

3 new woodcuts by Eric Slater

                                                                            

I say new not so much because they are new to me but simply because untill recently the subtlety of Eric Slater's colour woodcuts have not been done much justice by the kind of reproductions we have seen online. No one who reads this blog, or who goes out and buys a print on ebay, should complain. Almost everyone who does will know that ebay photos hardly ever do a colour woodcut justice. (An exception was the recent Mabel Royds, which came up very well).
                                                            

For Eric Slater all that has changed markedly through the photos published by James Trollope. A review of Slater's work in 1929 talks about 'his sensitive treatment of colour' and these new photos finally do bring that out. This of course is all by way of mea culpa to some extent. I've known Slater's work for many years but what you see here are subtle prints in good condition. No one really could deny that Slater's prints can be samey but I have come to the conclusion that isn't the point. By 1929 Slater had probably been making woodcuts for about two years and the same article starts out by saying, 'It has only taken Mr Eric Slater a short time to establish himself amongst those artists whose work one involuntarily looks for at an exhibition'. These images show why but they don't say how he got there.
                                                                      

 

By the late thirties, Campbell Dodgson, who had been Keeper of Prints at the British Museum and owned four of Slater's woodcuts, said the artist had learned the technique from a neighbour at Winchelsea. This must of course be Arthur Rigden Read, not just because he lived at Winchlesea for many years, but because Read's sense of light and colour was so good. That grey-greenish-blue in A misty day is almost straight out of Read. Even if some of Slater's prints can look rather drab at times, what I think he learned from Read was purity of colour and the way pure colours can be played off one against the other as he does so effectively in Japanese bush lanterns at the top.
                                                                                   

 

Finally, if, what I think is called Eventide Eastbourne does not recall the Sussex seaside town we know, I've included a jolly railway poster that puts the little headland you can see in the Slater into context. It does show just how true to the shapes of the landscape Slater was but the poster also brings out what I often feel about Slater; he's oblique, and more low-tide than cheerful. Now you couldn't say that about Read.

Slater's Sussex: the colour woodcuts of Eric Slater

                                                            

Here is a must for the bookshelves of anyone with more than a passing interest in British colour woodcut: Slater's Sussex, a book by James Trollope, just published by the Towner Gallery at Eastbourne. It has eighty pages, seventeen of them in full colour, and another fifty illustrations. I don't have a copy as yet but James is a journalist who lives at Seaford in Slater country and I know he has used his skills to uncover as much as he can about this popular artist.

It costs £15 and at present is only available from the Towner. You can order over the phone 01323 434670. Both James Trollope and the Towner deserve support on this one.

Alphonse Legros and the 1890s

                                                                                         

If there was one thing the British artist William Rothenstein liked better than drawing ageing or elderly men, it was reviving elderly reputations. When he knocked on Alphonse Legros' door, Legros had been retired some years from his position as professor at the Slade School of Art. Legros was given to favouritism, and Rothenstein had not been amongt his favourites (the real favourites had left before Rothenstein even arrived) but undeterred as ever, Rothenstein persuaded various artists to chip in and buy a picture that he discovered had been lying unsold in Legros' studio for years. The painting was then handed over to the Tate and a small revival in Legros' fortunes began, based largely on the kind of prints and drawings you see here. Looking at the silverpoint portrait above of an unknown man, which dates from 1898, you can see why it happened.
                                                                              

   
It is academic in the good sense of the word. It owes alot to the Italian old masters, who he venerated, but more importantly it also suited the classical revival of the times very well. Many years ago, I picked up some plans and drawings by the Sheffield architect, Frank Wilson, including a fine copy of the Gate of the Agora at Athens, taken from James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's The Antiquities of Athens of 1767. (This portrait of him by Legros is from the same year as my drawing). Legros may not have endeared himself to his students with his offhand behaviour ('not bad' was a fairly standard comment on their work) but he had a background that reached back to the great French classicist, Ingres, and I think he wisely put his old realism to one side to some extent for something more stylish when he set about the work you see here.

                                                                                        
But what strikes me most about this work, is how varied it is. He is not as good an etcher as he is a draughtsman, but the new fashion for lithographic drawings started off by Charles Ricketts actually suited both Legros and the time very well. He had been making self-portraits for many years, but the sheer ghostliness of the one below shows just how far he could adapt a fashionable medium to his own artistic ends. Unlike Rothenstein and William Strang (the real favourite of his) Legros had something wider and more profound to say. In some ways, he came out of retirement like a seer.
                                                                                 

In other respects, it is exactly the kind of Rembrandtism his Slade students were taught to do; to work on the point of the pencil and to introduce a flurry of east-to-west shading. But the haunted look is not the work of a student; Legros could transcend his own method. He builds up from the background with a convincing discrimination.
                                                                                 

 

Different again is the portrait of the Slade student, Alice Knewstubb, who went on to marry Rothenstein. It certainly does not have the intensity of the previous self-portrait. Legros has made his own interests quite clear. But the ghosts of the past are there, all the same. Yet what he achieves is someone recognisably modern. Unlike his knowing and nineties satyr, below, Alice is one of us. But as satyrs go (and I like them) it's not bad, at all.