Arthur Rigden Read: an education in himself

 

It was 1923 and Arthur Rigden Read was on a roll. He had only begun making colour woodcuts the year previously at the age of forty-four but already had already followed up John Platt's re-launch of British colour print with some distinctive and original portraits of his own. The sweep may well be an acquired taste today and admittedly it took me some time to come round to it but once you have the key, it has all sorts of interesting aspects.

For instance, you only have to take a look at one of Utagawa Kunisada's portraits of the kabuki actor, Ichikawa Danjuro  to see what I mean. Not only had Read appropriated the mop of hair (and wag that he was translated it into a brush) both the dark colours and exaggerated expression have some of their source in the work of the masterly Kunisada. This is all a roundabout way of giving an example of what I meant when I mentioned Read's interest in 'shape' in one of the comment boxes. Not that shape was all there was to it; throughout his work, Read had a surprising gift for expressing texture.

                                                                        
The lady in black has it all: rough old coat, silky feather, weather-beaten face. No-one except Allen Seaby had ever made such an effort with description. Nor had anyone moved obviously beyond the usual Japanese models of Hiroshige and Hokusai. Read had no real training as an artist. He was a mediocre water-colourist at best with all the amateur's talent for pernickety detail but no one took the dictum that colour woodcut provided excellent training for the student more to heart than Read and no one benefitted more from it. It made him selective and showed him how to emphasise the telling detail. He learned how to liven up a silhouette against unprinted paper from Kunisada but his application was both unique and entertaining. Imagine the reaction of his contemporaries at the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour and the curators at the British Museum seeing the outlandishness of Kunisada transformed without the least hint of looking Japanese. This was where his originality lay - he didn't show off his knowledge or misapply Japanese aesthetics. No, at forty-four he was wise enough to absorb their lessons as William Nicholson (below) had done before him.
                                                                                 

OK, Nicolson's Die Alte Frau (1897) has dramatic genius and the kind of detachment that all good art has. Read was much less sure and when it came to a serious attempt to come out on top, it all could go disastrously wrong. Trying to use Leonardo's The last supper as a model for a French country market scene he called Market in Languedoc was, as ideas go, pretty inappropriate. The mismatch is just too great and add to that awfulness of genre and - well, I will say no more but only show the wonderful details at the feet of tradesmen and their customers. Fascinated by both basketry and poultry, I have no doubt the birds for sale in France would have been quite irresistible to Read. Imagine him sketching the turkeys, guinea fowl, pigeons and ducks and the array of baskets. It's a little encyclopedia of wickerwork and yet not naïve.

There was a lyrical talent at work in Read, a talent no more obvious than in his blithe May morning (1924). The bird-cage almost certainly made by the Romany people he so much admired suggests how essentially modest Read was, able to include not only his own fixations but the work of others, including the embroidery basket of his wife, Kathleen. In the end, I am not writing here about a set of influences, its a list of compliments that Read was paying. It was said at the time that his success was almost inspite of himself, malgre lui in fact the phrase was. He has the elegance and objectivity of the French temperament and French art. Ingres he may not be but very likeable and independent-minded he is.

 

Away for the weekend with S.G. Boxsius

                                                                         

Even though I have been writing about him for a number of years now, it was not until I bought my house in Wales this summer that I began to realise what an individual take S.G. Boxsius had on the British landscape. I will be the first to admit that A Devon village (below) could easily fit into the generic view of the countryside made famous by the flat but fetching dust-jacket designs of Brian Cook. But then Cook's work is more likely to be a simplified version of the more subtle work you see here.

 Boxsius was a Londoner who infrequently depicted the city he grew up in. London from the roof  and Kew Bridge are exceptions. But even with Kew Bridge the sense of an outing to Kew isn't far away and what he sometimes did (especially when he visited the West Country) was present postcard views. Nothing exactly wrong with that but the places he visited were shown exactly as an informed visitor would see them. Every time I pass through Criccieth on Cardigan Bay on the train and see the ruined castle above the town, I am reminded of Corfe Castle. It's the neat build-up of buildings that does it, medieval overlaid with Georgian and Victorian and all put together with a stylish, intimate and crisp sense of perspective. They are so well-behaved and good-natured, we hardly notice the way Boxsius carefully takes us in and out of the shadows of a place or by how much these weekend-away views have the art master's visits to the National Gallery behind them.
                                                                                 

 

I have pointed out before that his exquisite Seaside used Georges Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres (acquired by the Gallery in 1926) as a model. I suppose what I am saying is that London isn't as far away as you might think. Many of his prints are architectural compositions and even when he depicted trees, as in the dashing linocut, Twilight, Winchelsea. At the time, Winchelsea was the home of Arthur and Kathleen Rigden Read and I assume that Sylvan and Daisy Boxsius were sometimes visitors because the town appears at least three times in his work but I think Boxsius must also have known the white fencing and orange rooftops from William Giles view of Rothenburg am Tauber made twenty years earlier. Even when he is at his most lyrical, bookishness is not so very far away and modern girls occupy their time with reading. If his holiday prints can look occasional as much as the pure colours, their literary feel makes them something more telling. You just have to try and work out or guess what he had been looking at but look he certainly did.

                                                                                     

Time and again as the trains runs from Machynlleth through Barmouth and Harlech and on to Criccieth and Pwllheli, you see not only the neat towns but the same delicate views that Boxsius uncovered for himself. I don't think anyone, not even much better artists, were capable of the meticulous sense of distance that he had, the way the light picks out a skein of fields and woods and brings them closer. Ironically it appears composed and artificial. What my frequent journey along Cardigan Bay has shown me is how far Boxsius chose his subjects and revealed himself. Unfortunately, it's where he is at his palest and most subtle and generally beyond what a monitor screen can reproduce all that well. The view across the estuary in Autumn is one classic example that I know but the distant view of the town in Old Whitby gives a good idea of what I mean. In Boxsius the foreground is often nothing more than a prelude to what is a long way off and less obtainable, it's the classic view of the batsman to the boundary.

On ebay: Kenneth Broad 'A Sussex Farm'

                                                                   

Also on e-bay but this time in the United States, a very fine but imperfect impression of Kenneth Broad's quite lovely 1925 colour woodcut, A Sussex Farm. Straightforward as it is, it was also one of the most direct and atmospheric of all British colour woodcut landscapes. As the only image of this print available online was a rather poor one, I thought it was well worth posting this image simply so that people could see what Broad could achieve when he was doing his best work in colour woodcut. Unusually for e-bay, the photograph does do this woodcut justice. The colours are a touch higher than the one I own so this may be a very fresh impression. Unfortunately there is some loss of ink top left and paper is missing on the reverse where the print was glued down.
                                                                             

None of this has deterred the seller and it goes up at $750, a price I don't think I would pay even if it were perfect. Even so, I include a close-up of the title to show just how expressive Broad's printing had become at this stage when he was at his most prolific and original. Like Ethel Kirkpatrick before him, the unique expressiveness of the tone was in part achieved by underprinting. Exhibited at the California Printmaker's International Exhibition at Los Angeles in 1926, the year Arthur Rigden Read took the gold medal with his tour-de-force Carcassonne, presumably this was one of the impressions Broad sold in the US at the time. Unlike Read, though, Broad's career failed to take off and many of his later prints are rare.

'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.
                                                                                       

  

 

 

Three Scottish artists: Jessie Garrow's 'The wave'

 

 

I am starting to think that 'The wave' was the only colour woodcut that Jessie Garrow ever made. Like most people, I only know it from the illustration published by The Studio in 1924 but just on that evidence I would say here is the most professional and stylish colour woodcut made by any young Scottish artist at the time.

Born in Bearsden, East Dunbarton in 1899, she studied at Glasgow School of Art where she met a fellow stylist who she married in about 1920. This was Ian Cheyne. Garrow claimed that they had taught themselves to make colour woodcut. Certainly she had made The wave before Chica MacNab's woodcut classes began at the School of Art. Whether or not she had recourse to Frank Morley Fletcher's Woodblock Printing is another matter but she has little in common with Fletcher and keyblock outline, which he used freely, only appears along two of the women's arms. It was highly unusual to depend on so much white and on contrasting colours to create an image at the time. My first impression was how peculiar the figures looked with their white stockings and shoes but she was bowing to no conventions here, especially in the way she made figures central to a colour woodcut.
                                                                                         

It will not surprise you to hear that Garrow made her living as a fashion illustrator and writer and also illustrated books with the same spare line. But how could it be that such an original artist could leave so little work behind her? In her interests she is closest to Arthur Rigden Read who began making his own stylish woodcuts in 1922. But Read was a generation older. Like her, he didn't make a fetish of the keyblock, was mainly interested in figure subjects, and often used black, white and grey around this time (and just so you know what I mean I've included on of his own 1924-ish prints) but Garrow's sense of style was more acute than Read's. Just look at those overlapping feet on the pier - nothing if not ambitious for a one and only woodcut (and I would like someone to prove me wrong about that).

 

Three Scottish artists: Helen Stevenson's postcard from Arran

 

 

I know this is a rather duff image of Helen Stevenson's woodcut 'Goatfell' but it is the best I can do right now. It is also a bit larger than actual size which makes it remarkable for a British colour woodcut and shows exactly how well Stevenson could handle scale. The only other contemporary artist I can think of who made successful small colour prints was Sylvan Boxsius. More typical of Stevenson is the fine handling of colour and the consummate way she prints on japan. Perhaps less well known is how closely Stevenson followed the contours of the landscape she described. She took liberties, sometimes by foreshortening, but that only went to show what an informed eye she had in the first place. She knew a good view when she saw one but almost always organised the image in a superior way to photographers who show the same view.

Stevenson is less hard to come by than many of her contemporaries, especially the Scottish ones and I suppose I was lucky with this one. This is why two more women artists will be following on in this short series. Their work is almost impossible to find even in reproduction.

Steven Hutchins update

                                                             

                  

Quite a long time ago there was a post about the British woodcut artist, Steven Hutchins.  I believe he made only three colour woodcuts, all of them in the early 1980s. I think the Venetian scene must be the third one. Also included is his masterly Eggleston Abbey. Both different in style, you see that Hutchins wasn't a hard-and-fast traditionalist but was capable of accomplished work with and without the keyblock. In fact, the Venice image may even be a linocut.

                                                                       

I still find it odd that there seems to be no trace of Hutchins nowadays. But even stranger is the fact that someone with such printmaking ability could have disappeared leaving no more than three fine prints to his name.