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.

William Strang: the portrait of a period

                                                                                    

                                                                                   
On the face of it, the graphic work of William Strang may not have alot in common with many of the artists already featured on Modern Printmakers, but intuition led me to him all the same, simply perhaps because he is more a part of the period than the early colour woodcut artists are. And apart from that, as graphic artists go, when not too glum, he is pretty good.

                                                                               
He came down from Dumbarton in Scotland to train at the Slade School of Art as John Dickson Batten and Mabel Royds were to do after him. Unlike them, he had the good fortune to find a fine graphic artist as his professor. This was Alphonse Legros, one time friend of Henri Fantin Latour, Edouard Manet and Charles Baudelaire but now washed up in London (and, in fact, a British subject). He was a man with a history, who would tell his students through his assistants who acted as interpreters, 'If you are going to rob anyone, rob the rich, not the poor.'
                                                           

  
I think Strang took him at his word. If Laurence Binyon's collar and tie (in the etching second from the top) are by Ingres, then it was Degas did the hands for Strang. Possibly not what Legros was thinking about, but never mind. The simple point I want to make is that Strang trained at a time when what you learned had to be filtered through tradition and graphic art, whether print or drawing, was uniformly monochrome, and no doubt he found himself breaking with tradition when he added colour in much the same way the colour woodcut artists did. His use of colour moves in paralell with their own. All the same, the portrait of his cataloguer, Binyon, is just as 1890s in its subtle blend of the casual and the fine as anything by Aubrey Beardsley.
                                                                                      

But these portraits owe more to the realism of Hans Holbein than they do to the realism of the French. And beyond that, Holbein also offered him the precedent of adding colour to his drawings. In fact, with Strang it wasn't only a matter of adding colour, he began with tinted paper and applied chalks so finely, I was once able to pick up his portrait of William Cunningham for £10 simply because the auctioneer couldn't see any obvious drawn marks and took it for a reproduction, it is so smoothly done. Somewhere he crossed a line between his early realism and style and turned modern, so much so the portrait of the girl at the top could be Viennese if it were only that more abstract. I wonder what Legros made of it all, these suave, sombre, unsettling beings who needed colour - well, apart from this one.
                                                                  

Eric Hesketh Hubbard: art & graft

                                                                                       

Eric Hesketh Hubbard was a man of many parts, as the prints you see may suggest. Not only was he a remarkably suave painter, his railway poster designs had the requisite sweep and panache, he published both books and prints, and was good at promoting all of these efforts. The gulf between the way of life he shows in these deceptively simple prints and his own was a big one. While his Romanies and cider-press men travelled the back-roads and heaths of the New Forest, he was sailing across the Atlantic to New York. It sometimes surprises me that he made such workaday woodcuts at all. They were all put out by his Forest Press at Breamore in Hampshire, and in such large numbers, it also surprises me that more haven't come my way.

                                                                           
They have no more in common with the lush woodcuts of the Colour Woodcut Society than they do with the Grosvenor School linocuts in progressive mode. What he did was take the bravura manner and emphatic keyblock of Frank Brangwyn and apply it to the 1920s. Like Brangwyn, he is third force, fertile and with much the same facility, though not so stagey. He avoided fashion like the plague. And perhaps in the end that is part of the appeal. How many artists would set about making a portfolio of old gates in a cathedral close? It isn't chic, but it sure is canny. The other old rogue behind  him was Turner. Hesketh Hubbard was nothing if not educated about art and what people wanted.
                                                                                   

These are essentially works of translation. Exactly the same thing was said about Yoshijiro Urushibara after he had been working with Frank Brangwyn for a number of years. Unlikely as it sounds, Urushibara took Brangwyn and gave him nuances he could never have found for himself. These prints do something similar. They tone Brangwyn down, and are as likeable as they are blokish. And unlike Brangwyn, they are also deeply English, images of people getting on with things and minding their own business, determindly out of fashion.
                                                                           

Von Bresslern Roth on ebay

                                                                            

Out of interest a couple of linocuts by Norbertine von Bresslern Roth have come up on US ebay. I've not seen either of these before. Both are apparently illustrations for Oscar Wilde's The young fisherman and his soul. I was specially taken with the paper she used, possibly because the images are small. It makes the whole production look precious.

                                                                          
I also include a close-up so that you see just how good her technique was.Starting at $800 each.

                                                                         

Leo Frank

                                                                              
When all around them, everyone had gone woodcut-crazy, from Emil Orlik with his raw Ruthenian peasants to Carl Thiemann and his dandified cockeral and on to LH Jungnickel and a zoo-full of hyperactive maccaws, Leo Frank went down the road of refined and understated landscape. Now, this should suit a British collector such as myself, and I admit I would like to own the first woodcut you see here (in fact, another version, in awful condition, as you can see below, came up recently on British ebay), but at the end of the day, with quite alot of his prints, I just think there's something missing, and it's not just a keyblock.

                                                                                    
I think one thing that appeals is the woodcut feel it has. As so often with British colour woodcuts, you can see the way the medium has been applied in the foreground, and there is a tactful use of the keyblock, and a subtle massing of colour that wouldn't be out of place in an English watercolour. I was surprised to see Herbstnachmittag, below, was dated as early as 1908. It was the year of the great Kunstschau in Vienna, when Jungnickel had only just begun to exhibit woodcuts. But Jungnickel wasn't Viennese. He wasn't even Austrian by birth. Nor were Orlik, Thiemann or Klemm. Frank, though, was a local. What we have in the woodcuts is somewhere. And if isn't Austria, then it's Italy. And when not there, we move on to Egypt. But one place we never visit is Japan. Too modish by far.

                                                                                   
Along with his twin brother, Hans, he studied first at the Kunstgewerbeschule, or School of Applied Arts, before moving on to the Academy of Fine Art where they presumably studied painting, pure and simple. It was the standard thing to do, if you proved you had the talent. (Even Egon Schiele took that course to fine art martyrdom). Leo's woodcuts owe less to the emphatic rather abstract style of the Secession than his brother's do. He's also less varied in his approach. He takes a course that blends various styles and trends to come up with work that is sensitive to the effects of light and yet decorative, as other people eventually did, many of them, as it happens, in Britain.
                                                                                  

How far either of the brothers had an effect on British printmaking is hard to say. Hans exhibited six prints with his British colleagues in 1913, and both brothers exhibited  their work in Britian throughout the twenties and thirties. (They were so respected, their work was on show in Birmingham after the outbreak of the second war). It was also available from print-dealers here soon after the first war. The elegant trees that come up time again in Leo Frank, became a standy-by for many British printmakers from the twenties onwards.

                                                                               
You can see how easy it would be to switch alot of this to Sussex or the Isle of Wight. Frank had an interchangeable manner. He re-uses elements - the soft skies, the floating birds, the floating trees - to bring off his aerial enchantment. He suggests, it isn't too exact, nor too demanding. It might have offered a way out. In England we were cowed by French art, above all by the drawing of Ingres. But Frank wasn't Royal College or the Slade, and that's for sure.

                                                                                 
But you could also convert Berkshire to Capri. If  Frank didn't know William Giles' September Moon (see the post) before he made this last delicate print, I'd be surprised. It was a two-way thing, I suspect, for many of them. Both brothers' prints often look like aquatints, and the way Leo abandonned the keyblock so early on in his career could well be a lesson he had learned from Giles who was articulate enough not too need one.

 

Robert Gibbings: the Fenian and the Orangeman

                                                                                  
The allusion to his Irish background in this colour woodcut by Robert Gibbings is both troublesome and fascinating. Is this also the errant medical student who left the bogs of Munster with only enough money for one term, was it, at the Slade? It's just as good to see it together with its companion piece called Play, which was bought by the V&A in 1922, the year the Irish Civil War broke out.

                                                                                          
The top print comes up for a auction at a three-day sale at Bamford's of Derby beginning Wednesday 13th March. It's a quite wonderful piece and I wonder which of the national collections will be bidding.

From the shadows: the prints of Sydney Lee at the Royal Academy

                                                                                    
My own view of the prints of Sidney Lee may well be equivocal, but there is no getting round the comments left in the visitors book during the opening days of this new exhibition at the Royal Academy in London. 'Inspiring' certainly suggested that a number of people there made prints themselves. 'A revelation' would have been less of a revelation if such comments had not been so prevelant about many printmakers featured on the pages of this blog. And there was no gainsaying the blunt appeal of  'More prints like this'. It is a long time since any public gallery in London has shown prints from this period and the academy may look a mite out-of-touch and self-regarding when it comes to choice of artist. Lee, after all, was one of their own members. But to some extent it seems the road was chosen by a small group of dedicated Lee followers. There are other contemporaries of Lee who I would consider more deserving of a show in Piccadilly before him, Ethel Kirkpatrick and William Giles amongst them, but the die is cast. Sydney Lee it is.

                                                                               
I have to say the show looks good. The size of the rooms suits the large scale of Lee's prints and the gilded architecture brings out an old masterly touch to Lee I hadn't noticed before. Being a pedant, I could have done with another glass-fronted case, and it was frustrating to read about Lee's watercolour sketches he used to make his colour prints and not to see any. But it is apparent now that alot of Lee material has simply not survived, and it is a credit to all those involved, Robert Meyrick and Harry Heuser above all, that the show has taken place at all.

                                                                                  
Malcolm Salaman came up with one of his phrases when he talked about 'the verity of textures' in Lee's prints. Certainly, the range of his printmaking is impressive. Etching and aquatint, woodcut and wood-engraving, and mezzotint, all worked to a point where the prints begin at times to look like photographs. But Lee, it has to be said, is transitional. Some of the work hovers between the reproductive finesse of C19th engravers and the decorative flair and expressiveness of C20th work. The effect may be mysterious, but the marks Lee actually makes lack interest. What  Samuel Palmer did with pen and ink or Claughton Pellew achieved with his tools, was as individual as it is entrancing, so it certainly isn't a matter of fashion or changing styles.

                                                                                
Lee started out at Manchester School of Art learning sculpture and relief modelling. Unsurprisingly, the stones and buildings he choses as subjects are often sculptural, he harries his prints the way a sculptor might, the light and shadow shifts and glimmers the way it does on a Rodin bronze. At times I found myself wondering whether Lee could actually draw or not, but you only need to take a close-up look at the head of the woman crossing the Ponte Paradiso to undertsnad how much Lee's imagination worked in three dimensions. All the same, the flatness of some of the work is disconcerting.

                                                                                 
Ironically, this is especially true for some of the colour woodcuts, not so much Boatbuilding, St Ives as in Drying sails, St Ives.  There is as much interest in structure as there is in surface, and in Boatbuilding he begins to make marks that have a touch of individuality about them. Unfortunately, I strongly suspect he may have learned this from the lithographs of Henri Riviere. What the early history of Lee's prints is, though, is hard to say. Nothing is dated and everything tends towards the circumstantial. It won't matter very much to people if the odd date is wrong. I would have also thought Lee was making colour woodcut prior to the first date given, which is 1904, but again my own take on Lee is just as circumstantial.

                                                                             
But, all told, this is a fascinating and enjoyable show. The colour woodcuts in particular come up really well. But what comes up most, for all his travels to glorious Italy and sunny Spain, is Lee's northern Englishness, as dour as it is evocative, and he is clearly well inside the main interests of the British printmaking tradition if one considers John Sell Cotman or Valerie Thornton or Norman Ackroyd even. He needs more context. I am dubious about the claim that he was 'experimental'. Original artists prints, especially in colour, were relatively new when Lee began. They were all of them finding their way and, as I've said before, when I talked about the 1910 show in Paris, all of those artists, British and French, were trying out different ways of working. Lee was only one of them. He presented himself in the summer of 1897 as the nineties aesthete. It was an experiment in living that was not to last that long.