Tom Purvis ( British, 1888 - 1959) It's quicker by rail

Tom Purvis came from Bristol to study at Camberwell School or Art in south London. David Jones had also been a student there but their careers cannot have been more dissimilar. Whether or not he was taught by AS Hartrick (1864 - 1950) while he was there, I don't know. Hartrick was a painter and lithographer who had known Toulouse Lautrec and worked at the school from around 1908. After art school Purvis worked for the Mather & Crowther agency for 6 years before going freelance. Where he picked up his knowledge of the Beggarstaff Brothers advertising work of the mid nineties, I don't know (see below) but there's no doubt they were the starting point for his famous spare and simple style - and his signature. (And that's quite enough of the cliches).


His big break came when the British railways were re-organised in 1923 and he was taken on as a graphic designer by the London and North Eastern Railway who had a fair number of holiday resorts on their network along the eastern coast of England and Scotland. Their first advertising manager, William Teasdale, took his lead from the work of Frank Pick at the new London Underground where the designer Edward Johnston had been commissioned to produce a distinctive style for the whole operation in 1915.

The brief given to Purvis wasn't as comprehensive as Johnston's but he worked on everything from booklets to his celebrated posters, producing more than 100 by the time he left LNER in 1945. Facts and figures apart, Purvis' work is highly recognisable as was intended but the levels of intimacy and boldness vary. The East Coast Joys series are the most flagrant. Flat, colourful shapes pick out the human figure, often female and dressed in very little. The details are kept to minimum - sea-water, light. The message is equally straightforward: uncomplicated bliss is just a return ticket away. 'Harrogate' above is a good deal more sociable and subtle. The town is a well-heeled but old-fashioned Yorkshire spa but the appeal is to the young and active. The erotic range of pinks and the splash of orange are really quite something, Pimm's in poster form.

He could also do wholesome, as here. It's sometimes said he avoided trains and towns but the main idea here is to get across the fun of the journey. Everyone is framed and rather free of us. They are lucky. The boy's hand pressed against the window a true imaginative touch. The company's claim that it was quicker by rail was certainly true in their case. They ran the famous Flying Scotsman express to Edinburgh and their Mallard remains the fastest steam train on record. Below we have their class A4 locomotive designed in 1935. They even introduced two observation cars with a bar and deco trim. The stylishness follows through.

And, in case you didn't know, this is Purvis' superb version. LNER achievement is the modern message + all for your further comfort. A vanished age.

It did also surprise me to discover than you could hire a camping carriage (I think they should had Dorothy Burroughes on this one). The funny thing is the message here is contrary to almost all his other posters: cosy, even folksy. The carriage is very reminiscent of the ones people turned into weekend holiday homes. But the appeal of the outdoors runs right through the series as does the sense of sociability but freedom from restraint. (I think you have to turn to British comic postcards for mockery of this ideal).

Now here he is doing simplicity very well. I like the subtle shades of violet, pink and grey. He hits exactly the right note but it's one of the rare examples of him adding words to express the meaning. Like many other modernists, he tends to reject the literary.

Again, I think the poster for Cruden Bay is far better than his better known work. The addition of locals was common in both posters and postcards. It adds local colour for the modern visitor. Not often you get a caddie in a kilt and tam. This one just goes to show how good his figures were. Interesting, too, how many of the people look away from us towards something else. Placing figures both behind and in front of the letters is a typical device. The posters are not always quite as one dimensional as they are said to be.

And if you were wondering by now where all these fashionable people went when not on the beach or the links, I've included a couple of thirties buildings. First the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea in Sussex (1935, Mendelsohn and Chermayeff):

OK, it's not Miami but this villa at Frinton-on-Sea in Essex is no less moderne. Incidentally, quite alot of this architecture has been lost. I know of one example that has been re-vamped beyond recognition. I remember a glorious cafe cum sun lounge with a complete glass front that fell out of use during the war years than succumbed to the inevitable dereliction. It shows there was a market.

And I know some of you at least have only been waiting for the eighteen-year olds, so here they are:

It is certainly true that he very rarely gave men much prominence. This lifeguard looks like he's just escaped from the 1936 Olympics quite honestly. Lithography certainly lent itself to both broad strokes like the light along his arms but also subtle use of colour. I like the contrast of mauve and blue-green.

I assume this young woman is on the ferry from Harwich to Hook of Holland. Notable for its details - the perm, the pink shoes, etc. I don't think he was ever more outrageous than on this one. The shaded face is particularly stunning.

What is interesting is that this sense of individuality which is largely missing from the railway work comes to the fore in his work for the British outfitters, Austin Reed. I think this challenge to define at least a type of person brought about his best work. Nothing for me beats the young man at the head of the post, typically staring away from us, the relaxed hands a nice contrast to intent gaze. The blue coat casual beside him and redundant striped scarf are wonderful. (Tom Wesselman eat your heart out). In the poster below, the concentration around the hands - the tie, the violets - are equally clever, as is the coat suavely over his arm. They even have a narrative: he has bought violets for their scent, just come down Regent St in fact to a flower seller in Piccadilly.

And we have to save cheerio to Tom with this last image of a younger man actually buying a bunch of violets. We are back with William Nicholson's London Types updated for the twentieth century. It's as exactly placed in the centre of town as the stripe of the tie and the cane under his arm. For all the blather about boldness and simplicity in his work, it's this insouciance and understatement that makes his work such a joy.

Dorothy Burroughes at the zoo

I am grateful to Mike and Alison for exposing both my ignorance and poor memory (see the October post on Burroughes). As a result of a hint from them via Robin Garton, I can now offer all these delightful images by Dorothy Burroughes (c 1895 - 1963) - not to mention the scandalous titles. 'Queer birds at the zoo' dates from the early twenties. The lemur poster for Regent's Park is 1922.

No doubt the books were a success as I see Gladys Davidson wrote two. Here we have an ant-eater in profile. And below him or her, a splendid portrait of the artist herself in 1923.

She trained at the Slade and Heatherley's in London and also in Germany, not only doing fab linocuts but also making illustrations for The Bystander and the Illustrated London News. There are plenty of books illustrated by her out there as well.

Last but least this coolly fashionable creature, staring right back at us, poised, pristine, chic, perceptive. I am merely shameless.

Ian Cheyne: six more woodcuts

Gerrie Caspers has been on the look-out for Ian Cheyne woodcuts for us all to enjoy so I am combining the last short post on Cheyne with his latest finds. The first print here is the glorious 'Beeches at Glen Lyon' from 1937. It finds Cheyne in art deco mood, celebrating Scotland's longest glen. (It's in Perth and Kinross). A bold, masterly, wonderfully disciplined piece, it would convert almost anyone from Englebert Lap. Although I have never seen this next print before, I know it is called 'The wave' (rather than Tsunami as the auction house unfortunately described it). It's exactly the kind of dramatic scene that colour woodcut does so well. Virtuoso is the other term that comes to mind. 'Helmsdale' from 1933 below finds him back in more conventional, Hokusai mode. The fishing village is on the eastern coast of Sutherland and I've included Hokusai's 'The moon above Yodo River and Osaka Castle' by way of comparison. Very interesting the way Cheyne takes aspects of the Japanese print - the great bend of the river, the rusty-roofed houses, the fringing greenery to help define his own work.

Remarkable, too, the way he adapts another artist to depict the Scottish landscape he obviously loves so much. His own aerial viewpoint shifts the perspective to enhance the drama of the scene. The range of greens here are particularly wonderful.

I believe the print below is called 'St Monans'. The size was the best Gerrie could do but the subtlety is distinctively Cheyne. The bold cutting of the mountainside avoids the rather featureless effect you get in some later prints by John Platt. Also notice the way he picks up on the apricot colour in Hokusai and re-uses the little tent shape. This really is one artist responding to another.

A rather Mediterranean version of Scotland comes next. I mean I could swear those were olive trees. About as close as he gets to expressionism as well. And this one an almost entirely green woodcut. Always interesting, wonderfully planned, with the little road leading you into the picture. It's a typically Cheyne touch. He sweeps you up in his pattern-making but never loses sight of the real landscape he wants to describe. When will we see such flair again?

And lastly we have the narrow road to the far north transposed to Spain in 'Spanish hill road'. An effortless, elegant mis-match of blues and greens, detail and plain shapes. I think this is where the emotion rises in Ian Cheyne's work, he understand the fact that we see or notice some things less well than we do others. And his combining of cool and warm colours engages the viewer in a way no other British printmaker does. This is diversification at its print-best. I also want to add that no reproduction does a Cheyne colour woodcut justice. They are very memorable and utterly compelling. Thank you Gerbrand. You are now an honorary Scot.

Mary Wrinch (Canadian, 1878 - 1969)

Here is another artist born in the 1870s who began her career as a painter then turned to relief printmaking. Mary Wrinch was born in Essex, England, presumably emigrating to Canada before training at the Central School in Toronto. (She also put in time at the Grosvenor Life School in London and the Art Students League, New York). The painting below dates to this early part of her career. By the late-ish twenties, she had taken up linocut.

She clearly took care to master the technique. Her first compositions were all monochrome and like the one below either landscapes or flower studies, some rather symbolist and undemanding for the date. Not that I would turn this one down. It's a finely balance little piece and more focussed than the hollyhocks from the garden of the governor's house in Quebec.

Not that it was long before the painter in her began to reassert itself. It was at this point she began to make her most individual work. As she said later, 'Colour was all I cared about... I loved contrast'. You can of course see this love of contrast in both prints here. Not for her straightforward blocks of colour. It would have been impossible for her to reproduce the same gradations of colour print by print and this was obviously her intention. It's very reminiscent of the ceramic flower vases of the period with their subtle glazes and shifts of colour. At the same time it is quite flat and finally unconvincing as landscape. In this she is quite similar to her British contemporary Eric Hesketh Hubbard (1892 - 1957). The night piece at the head of the blog is more subtle and painterly than anything he would have attempted. It also notably dispenses with the keyblock. Here is an artist who was not content to stick with a formula.

The moonlit lake is a beautifully judged, simple image and very evocative from my own perspective, on a damp November afternoon in the English Midlands. It's miles way from Essex as well. It's too translucent and forward-looking to be old world. In part it's the fine and careful use of keyblock in her later flower studies that make them look so contemporary. That and the bold and unsentimental use of colour. What she loses in evocativenes, she gains in clarity. I suppose that was where she was heading. Most date from the later thirties and forties. Compare the approach taken to the same flowers taken by her British contemporary Mabel Royds (1874 - 1941) in the early thirties.

Perhaps I'm not being entirely fair to Wrinch here because I think Royds is the better artist. Her tulips are mortal; for all Royd's artistry, we are in the living, dying world with her. Wrinch is coherent but doesn't move that far beyond design.

She did no paintings after the twenties and produced 44 colour linocuts between 1930 and 1944. Unlike her British contemporaries her market clearly held up. No wonder those tulips are so confident! And I can tell you it makes a refreshing change to be able to finally write about a woman artist who is documented and had a long career. Hooray for Canada!

Helene Mass (German)

Helene Mass was born in the eastern province of Posen in 1871, the year of German unification. Like her contemporary, Ethel Kirkpatrick, she first became a painter. She had trained at the Academy of Arts in Berlin before taking up colour woodcut. How she learned and why is hard to say but her early style is well in keeping with the late Impressionism used by artists associated with the Berlin Secession. Her delicate colour woodcut 'The garden gate under blue lilacs' pins her down both as colourist and plein air. Max Uth (1863 - 1914) painted 'The beer garden' below in 1905. As we have no dates for any of her work, it is impossible to say when she began to make woodcuts but it cannot have been earlier than about 1905. She has shifted in this second woodcut towards art nouveau stylisation but in both prints the subject and not the design has primacy. Even so these were exactly the kind of blue trees the Kaiser himself took exception to. (Being a hunter, he said, he was quite sure he knew that trees were green).

This deliberate use of colour is typified by the superb poster for the third exhibition designed by Thomas Heine (1867 - 1948).

Nor could I resist adding this evocative photograph of an early hang. The man on the far right is Leopold von Kalckreuth - see more of his impressive profile under 'O was for Orlik'; also there, Lovis Corinth, third from the left, (see Wim Zwier's portrait of him) and Max Liebermann, the president, turning, as always, towards the camera.

I've tried to include only strong work by Mass. The print below, 'Children in the park' is weaker but continues her parks and gardens theme. Instead of the Luxembourg or the Grande Jatte, she perhaps gives us the Tiergarten and the lakes and wooded countryside around the city. This is what I think. It is a recognisable world, anyway, that she creates, often heavily canopied. (Unfortunately, I've been unable to include an image of a house being overpowered by Virginia creeper in the autumn).

I think these final prints see her moving to a later style, the first probably pre-war. It strikes me there is something more in keeping with Carl Thiemann. But without any documentation, it's all conjecture, really.

There has also been conjecture about her so-called disappearance. Her work certainly isn't common but the reasons for this aren't hard to see. The National Socialist Society for German Culture was formed in 1927, the original Seccession folded in 1933 - and as I've tried to get across, that was about making artists accessible to the public. Then in 1937 all modernist work was cleared from German galleries and museums. If she was still living in Charlottenberg, as I assume she was, the allied occupation of west Berlin after the second war saw her isolated in another way. One source has her resident in the city as late as 1953.

When I bought this last print, I couldn't even read her signature. At least I can see now that she was never really a ruralist. She gives us a familiar world of trees, sky and water, both elemental and suburban, ie the one we know.

O was for Orlik: the search for a master

First Emil Orlik (1870 - 1932) failed to get into the Munich Academy of Fine Art then in 1893 he left without completing his course. Three years later he was back in the city, making woodcuts with fellow student Bernhard Pankok (1872 - 1943 - that's Orlik's 1903 portrait of him below the anarchist). The revolutionary was his first published woodcut, the ostler standing in, I would say, as Orlik's model.

As uncompromising as he was stylish, this ostler came from An Alphabet by the British artist William Nicholson (1872 - 1949). This was published in 1898, the same year that Orlik made his woodcut and also the year that he visited Nicholson in London. Nicholson was two years his junior, in fact, already married and with a failed project behind him. In 1894, he had set up the Beggarstaff Brothers with his brother-in-law James Pride (1866 - 1941), aiming to produce commercial posters in the way Toulouse Lautrec had done. Flop it was, but it was the first recognisably modern work in British printed art. The stark simple images were the result of necessary technical restraints because they needed to be produced cheaply but the effect on Orlik was just as graphic. (Despite eventual success with his book of woodcuts, Nicholson just put them behind him. You wonder what he made of his visitor from Prague.)

I'm not certain when he made his greyhound below but here he out-Nicholsons his mentor. He dispenses with colour altogether and concentrates on line, the vocabulary is more Nicholson's than the obvious loan in the anarchist print. Now Orlik is fluent.

He also had a model for the co-operation between artists that had come about in the 1890s. Co-operation and craftsmanship had as much a part to play in his father's tailoring business in Prague as it did amongst bohemian artists knocking together periodicals in Munich. The men below all look as though they are stitching shadows; one man reads, the others sew and listen; quietly this really is a wonderful piece. (Compare the use of areas of black with the Nicholson woodcut).

The tailors stand in absolute contrast to the bench of unemployed in a London park. The London types might be Nicholson but the ad hoc descriptiveness is not. Orlik is attempting the naturalism of the times. Social comment is more Nicholson; Orlik is strong on milieu but we still note the smoking chimney in the background. His observation is also acute. You still find Londoners in snazzy trousers striding down The Strand today.

Orlik had been far from idle. He was gaining some succes. His work was going into print rooms and being collected but he saw the kind of mastery he was after half-way around the world and March, 1901, saw him in Genoa, setting sail for Japan, and not just any old woodcut pilgrim but the very first. Once there he achieved a kind of self-translation that very few artists would attempt: he learned the conventions of woodcut production in a printmaker's workshop where three people were involved in the process. The people, heads down, occupied in their work, the words on the wall, are familar. Even the madder he might have seen in a Beggarstaff poster. What is new is this: subtlety, refinement.

Gone is the sparing use of colour and the awkward line. These Mount Fuji pilgrims in the straw capes and hats surge forward across planes of oriental red.

In the same way, he breaks with one convention to work on another. His Temple Garden of 1901 is as littered with symbolism as a Gaugin glimpse of Tahiti. You understand that his stay in Japan was not only about learning a craft from a master because this print is quite unlike the previous two in feel.

Even more enigmatic is the gravel garden below, the break with realistic colour complete. He has moved from Hiroshige to Erte, articulate in everything. So, somehow it shouldn't be

surprising that two years after his return he could turn out this quite masterly etching of the painter Leopold, graf von Kalckreuth (1855 - 1928). Calm, distinguished, the subtle modulation hardly monochrome at all. It is almost photographic in its confidence and a million miles away from the humble preoccupations of his Prague tailors.

Hardly surprising as well that the year after he made this print, he was offered the position of head of graphic art at the Museum of Applied Art in Berlin. His portarit of Kolo Moser (1868 - 1918) also dates from 1903, telling in the way he chooses woodcut for the stylish designer and possibly about the nearest he gets to Lautrec. One minute he speaks German, the next it's Japanese.

And finally in 1904, in this portrait of the broad-backed, bull-necked Ferdinand Hodler (1853 - 1918), we also see him gradually turning away from it all. Creased neck, receding temple, tangled ear, this is the artist no longer young, turning leftwards and away from us, to all the images that lie behind him - masterful images indeed.

Ralph Mott (British)

I recently had an email from Gerbrand Caspers asking about a couple of prints that were up for sale marked RAM (you can see them on his latest post on The Linosaurus). Quite independantly, I came across the print of Sarajevo below signed by the artist Ralph Mott. Or not by the artist Ralph Mott would be nearer the truth.

The name is a pseudonym for the British graphics agency Ralph & Mott who employed various artists - hence the wide variety of styles. The cheeky people even got someone to sign it! Some dealers and price-sites even give him dates! Not that it's a bad image; and the poster above for the English Peak District is even more desirable (it looks like Wilkinson). As I was considering a post on the subject and I had the day off, I thought there was no time like the present. Once I saw Gerrie's post this morning, I was convinced his prints were from the same operators. The question is: who were the artists they employed? Now that would be interesting to find out. Back to you GC.