Four new linocuts by Laurence Bell

I know there is more than one reader who collects the colour linocuts made by Laurence Bell. These images may not be new to them but they are new to me so I decided to put them up to augment the examples that have already been posted on the blog.  The windmill above reminds me of the work of E.C.A, Brown and the clogs worn by the woman in the print below means the subject is French. (For readers who are not British, clogs were only worn in England in the 1920s by northern mill workers and I don't believe they were all wood like those in the picture).

The photos are not all square but the colours look right and the one above has a title The shepherdess. Sometimes it is not easy to work out what Bell was intending but the more we see of his work, the more it all starts to make sense. The titles do not always give very much away and the tones he uses are deceiving and make everywhere look like the veldt (though admittedly some prints are of South African subjects)

Russet and blue (above) is better known but is included here because for the first time we have a title for it. The one below I have never seen before and despite the high colour, I assume the subject is Sussex (in common with the one at the top) as the trees are English elm. His use of strong colour has the effect of making the places he depicts look generic but I have come to the conclusion Bell usually worked from the subject as he did with 'The Mermaid' tavern at Rye.

There are a number of tree prints that have a samey feel, including the one below sent to me only today by another contributing reader from Chicago and who did not hang around. If you only have one or two things by Belll, it hardly makes any difference how many elegant trees there are, though note the difference between the elms and the French poplars. This is a particularly good one and a good photograph as well. It presumably shows Chateau Gaillard and may have been online before but these things come and go, so it always a good idea to replace them when they do.

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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.

The curious rise of S.G. Boxsius

Clive Christie recently suggested to me that S. G. Boxsius was 'an artist for uncertain times'. Readers who have been round long enough will know that Clive can be relied on for such perceptive remarks. What he said certainly made me stop and think.  A part of the appeal of Boxsius is his sense of place and small scale sensibility. It doesn't matter where he goes, from St Paul's Cathedral to the quay at Looe, he tends to make it his own. It is always England and it is often momentary but whether it is a sudden shower or the heat of midday, there is always an ongoing conversation, sometimes literally.

This does not explain why Boxsius prints have been turning up first in Britain and now in the U.S. I heard only today from a relieved reader, telling me the proof of The black bull he had purchased had arrived at his home and turned out to be a loose sheet in good condition ( aside from a poorly attached hinge). But there is more. The same person tells me Ruins at Walberswick is coming up for sale at J. Garrett Auctioneers in Dallas on 10th September.  I have known about this print for quite a few years but until this year, I had never seen it. Now good images have turned up twice. As for The black bull, until this year, I don't believe any of us had even heard it. Suddenly there are two. As for the one in South Africa, how did that get to be there?

 

This doesn't look like a blip. If it means there is growing interest and that prices have risen, well, it has not been an overall disaster as both myself and readers have discovered in the past month or so. What all this means is there is an opportunity to buy and build a small collection and frankly it hardly matters what you buy. On the whole, what you pay will average out and although there is the odd dud, Boxsius was not only a proficient artist, he had a vision of England and its coast and buildings, holidays and days out that is coherent. This means everything you buy will fall into place and the more you have the more will be revealed.

As it happens, I was in Pershore in Worcestershire today and Ian Pugh the second-hand bookseller there mentioned Tenbury Wells which lies on the other side of the county. This was where Boxsius died and frankly nowhere could have been better. Like Winchelsea and Devon or Spitalfields and Kew, Tenbury Wells is Boxsius country. But then, every now and again, I look out from the train and there it is once more, Boxsius country, that curious land of uncertain light and certainty of purpose.

The colour woodcuts of Winifred McKenzie

I heard last week from a reader in Scotland about a proof of Winifred McKenzie's colour woodcut Waterfall (third from top) from 1935 coming up for sale in Edinburgh. Like the rest of McKenzie's colour prints, Waterfall  is rare and shows what kind of work from the 1920s and 1930s is still appearing at auction houses in Scotland. No-one expected it to be cheap but at about £500 it was not expensive either. 

One of the big gains in recent years has been the appearance online of good quality photographs on auction house websites. Online auctions also mean that many images that were sold by means of printed catalogues are also coming up online nowadays. This means it is time for a second look at McKenzie mainly because there is more to show you on this post than the one I put up some years ago.

As with Hans Frank, it will be the earlier woodcuts that will figure in the post. To be honest, I just prefer them. I suspect the early ones show the effect of linocut on her woodcuts while the later woodcuts may be more in line with the wood-engravings she began to make a little later. McKenzie enrolled on the teacher's diploma course at Glasgow School of Art in 1923. Chica MacNab graduated from the same course two years later and was offered a job teaching a relief printmaking class in conjunction with the intalgio class taken by Charles Murray. I am never sure exactly when MacNab resigned. I think it was in 1927, so there must have been a number of students who took her class but McKenzie and Ian Fleming are the only artists I know of for sure.

What is interesting is that Fleming was more influenced by Murray and McKenzie by MacNab. She did not take to Murray (who drank) and I have not seen any monochrome prints from her Glasgow years. A shame because Murray was a good printmaker and Fleming did some exceptional work after studying with him. McKenzie herself made her black-and-white prints after taking MacNab's advice and studying wood-engraving with her brother, Iain, at the Grosvenor School.

So far as I know, there are no colour linocuts surviving by either McKenzie or Fleming but I assume they made use of the medium simply because they adopted a pared-down style for their colour woodcuts. Notably, neither made much use of the keyblock while their work at the time had a lot in common with MacNab's faux naif style. I may of course be wrong about lino. McKenzie complained about the expense of materials for making colour woodcuts and said when her costs were taken into account, she hardly made any money. This may help to explain why there are so few colour prints by her; it doesn't explain why she didn't turn to lino instead.

From the top, the prints are Evening in France, Ben Lui (1933) Waterfall, unknown, Valley of the Dee (1928) Devon valley (1937). Valley of the Dee is the only one I can be sure she made while still a student. It is the most Japanese of the lot but could not be anyone else. Evening in France is reminiscent of MacNab and I assume was also made while McKenzie was at the school of art. Whether the early prints are a bit too samey, may be down to taste. Ben Lui is the one I would go for myself. It has also been remarked that her work has a lot in common with Ian Cheyne's but that may only be because both were influenced by the same range of Japanese prints. It has to be said McKenzie never achieved the same imaginative mastery as Cheyne in work such as Beeches at Glen Lyon.

What she also lacked was Cheyne's sense of place. This is what gives artists like Eric Ravilious and S.G. Boxsius their coherence. What they saw around them remains recognisable to this day. Like McKenzie, neither ever trained on fine art courses but had the kind of unique vision we associate with all good artists. I tend to think she took a wrong turn with wood-engraving. In the end, colour prints of the period (whether on wood or lino) have proved to have greater staying-power and kudos. Ironically, I tend to think the same thing about the engravings of Murray, Fleming and Robert Austin. What McKenzie might have achieved if she had stayed the course, no one now can say.

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Print & prejudice: Ethel Kirkpatrick at the V&A

 

The V&A South Kensington cannot have heard about the Ethel Kirkpatrick Society (and perhaps you haven't either). To curators at large institutions like the V&A, artists like Kirkpatrick have been mislaid. But we can let that pass. She was included in a small exhibition of women printmakers at the V&A which closed on 11th May this year. If you missed it (as I did) you can see some of the highlights on the website under  'Print and prejudice: women printmakers 1730 to 1930' where you will find the best reproductions of her work I have yet seen, including Bowl of marigolds from 1922 and Mount's Bay (1914). 

The V&A have done her some justice but the scholarship is poor. Kirkpatrick is all over Modern Printmakers and they only had to get in touch to find out the dates.  The research Alan Guest did in the 1980s on Kirkpatrick (when she really was being rediscovered) was as meticulous as the museum's photography. Getting dates and titles right are basic to appreciation of an artist's achievement. Trying to suggest Kirkpatrick was in some way hard done by is not.

Alan was fortunate enough to own a proof of Bowl of marigolds and believed it was a linocut. He could be right. The V&A themselves have a series of proofs of Brixham trawlers (1924) pulled by Kirkpatrick and donated by her in 1924. (They are now available online but seeing is believing). The way she achieved her subtle depth of colour by canny under-printing is an education in itself. There are also progressive proofs donated by William Giles and John Hall Thorpe at the same time and for the same reason. Giles had been both a student and a teacher at the Royal College (next door to the museum) and knew how useful such examples could be.

The week-end on ebay

 

A round-up of the prints to be found for sale on ebay this week-end has to begin with Helen Hyde's Butterflies made in 1908. To start with I need to say the image above is not the one for sale. At under £200 you will get a print that has almost certainly been laid and down and is also cockled. On the plus side you will get the original frame complete with the label of the fashionable Glasgow dealer Andrew Duthie on the back. This is the only time Hyde has appeared on Modern Printmakers. It is a very well-made print and by the time she had made it, she had studied with block-makers in Tokyo. But it isn't all that cheap considering the condition and you should be able to find a good proof for not a lot more.

Nor will you get a bargain on Ethel Kirkpagtrick's Brixham trawlers. What you will get is an unframed proof in good condition, with the colours looking bright and fresh. Here we have Kirkpatrick at her insouciant best and from her classic period before the first war. As she has recently been featured in a small exhibition at the V&A, you will need to be just as insouciant when you pay. Kirkpatrick has a sense of movement and magic rare in British colour woodcut artists. Only Allen Seaby is her equal but unlike Seaby, she never made a duff print.

Robert Howey has never been cheap either but I thought the U.S. dealer was pushing it on this one. The impression Howey makes is usually good. After the storm is also well-designed. But so far as I am concerned, Howey doesn't follow through. He was really a commercial artist, with a small business in Hartlepool, and used  to use printer's ink so his images tend to look flat on his thin buff paper. Howey was one of the first English artists to make use of lino in the 1920s and provided a bridgehead in the north-east for the 'Exhibition of British Linocuts' tours in the late twenties. All in all, though, if you want sea and boats, stay with the expert.

I am a fan of the Swiss artist Alfred Peter and own a few of his bookplates and would have considered this one myself if it had not been for the condition of the paper. Peter remains good value if you like small prints. He was a fine craftsman and here you have his own New Year print made in 1911. I suspect the photo does not do the meticulous printing and compact design much justice.

Last but not least we have this fine etching of a faun by Hans Frank. At about £25 this looks like a bargain compared to the late colour woodcuts currently for sale in Germany and Austria at almost £500. I know many readers like to have the prints they buy framed on the wall. I keep most of mine loose in portfolios. This means I have am happy to have small prints at negligible prices wrapped in tissue and invariably looking great! Good artists understand the preciousness and intimacy found in small works. It is what gives so many British colour woodcuts their special value though when it comes to very small prints, the Swiss, the Germans and the Austrians are even more appealing than British wood-engravings and a fraction of the price.

Hans Frank revisited

One way or another I always find Hans Frank hard to avoid and here I am again looking at his early prints. Frank had a long and varied career which began while still a student at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna where he gained a reputation for colour woodcuts of remarkable skill and maturity. He was also fortunate to be studying at the school in the heyday of the Vienna Secession and was able to produce prints like Silver pheasant (above) as eloquent and impressive as any print made during those seminal few years.

This is a big claim and I make it because if Frank is the art equivalent of a conviction politician. What he did in those years was never half-hearted. Even when he represented young animals like fauns, they come vivid and fully rounded. At the same stage in his own career, Allen Seaby was struggling to get it right. Why? Because the British allowed technique to get in the way while the Austrians placed the emphasis on design. It was not about animals, it was not about birds, it was not about snow, it was about the ability of the artist to put a memorable image on the page.

By about 1908, Seaby was doing his best work but try and imagine him then making an etching as good as as Frank's Eagle (above) made by Frank in 1909 about the time Frank moved to the School of Fine Art. Ironically, the Austrians were interested in British printmakers but did not see the ones who were making artists' prints. Frank Brangwyn had three rooms dedicated to his etchings at the Vienna Secession exhibition of 1909 but he did not print his own work. William Nicholson's woodcuts were also widely admired in Austrian and Germany. Like Brangwyn he was invited to exhibit with the Secession (in his case in 1899) and although his portrait H.M. The Queen was responsible for all the  square images subsequently made in Vienna from then on, what the Austrians actually saw were wood-engravings made to look like woodcuts. Nicholson only once applied inks by hand and always used printer's ink (and probably did not print the work himself either). As with the Austrians, this all placed the emphasis on the image rather than the impression.

Frank did not always used a key-block but used pattern to build up the image instead. This made feathers useful and helps explain why exotic birds like peacocks and silver pheasants became subjects. Something similar can be said for butterflies or plants like clover. The butterfly above has a black pattern which means there is no need for an overall key-block while the petals of clover are pink and cream. With snow, there is no detail at all. This is not to say he was making it easy for himself only that he did not necessarily want to create a naturalistic effect.

It was all carefully considered and it would be a mistake to downplay or miss his achievement as I heard one distinguished British wood-engraver do when shown one of Frank's fauns. He called it 'sweet' and that was all. I wonder how he would have described Frank's woodcut of an eagle (above) if I had found that at Oxford Antiques Centre instead of the faun. I suppose Richard Shirley Smith wasn't very interested even though both the School of Applied Arts and then the School of Fine Art in Vienna were training artists like Frank during a time of great innovation for C20th design.

Prints made by Frank before the first war remain affordable. (What set me off was seeing a peacock of his up for sale on U.S. ebay. I have probably said this before but what you get with early Frank is a small piece of great period of modern design.  What you also get is the work of artist with considerable powers of observation as you will see from the detail (above) and of objectivity (below).  He is not as obviously Japanese in manner as, say, his contemporary Carl Thiemann, but when it comes to a stylish but objective interest in the world, he is far more Japanese than Thiemann. It all depends what you mean by Japanese!