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!

Scottish Bridge, 1921, by Ian Cheyne

As discoveries go, this early colour woodcut by the Scottish artist, Ian Cheyne, must be one of the most unexpected and surprising I have made. Unfortunately, the size entailed only reproducing the middle of the image (not my doing) but it must have been identified as by him. It is also dated 1921. This means he was making colour woodcuts around five years before the earliest record we have. Now, that does not surprise me. Jessie Garrow (who became his wife) said they had taught themselves how to make colour woodcuts and this image of a bridge shows Cheyne at an early stage in his career as one of the most distinguished of all British colour woodcuts artists.

Scottish bridge is in the collection of Minneapolis Museum of Art but this is not where I found the image.

Boxsius 'Unloading gravel'

 

For anyone who has already looked at the post about the change of email address, I have been sent a much better image of Unloading gravel.

Isabel de B Lockyer & the Islington Hoard

I came across Leigh Underwood in a guide where the gallery was described as specialists in colour woodcut and before not too long I was making my way to Camden Passage to see what they had. In the early eighties, Islington was having its moment in the sun and I soon discovered that 'specialist in colour woodcut' was hype. The truth was Leigh Underwood had come across a pile of colour woodcuts and colour linocuts they liked and framed them up to sell to the fashionable people thronging the High Street.

By the time I got there, they only had two left, namely what I think was a green version of Arthur Rigden Read's Valencia (and the red one is no better) and de B. Lockyer's The striped sail. Even by then, Sylvan Boxsius and Isabel de Bohun Lockyer were a cult waiting to happen. We were as beguiled by their improbable names as much as anything and, looking back, I now understand we were already followers of the little god of colour linocut, with all his glamour, chic and frivolity. I remember seeing Spring morning, Arundel on Alan's wall like an icon from another age.

Day nursery (top) comes from the Islington Hoard. It was last sold a couple of years ago in Eastbourne. A far cry from Islington but if you own it, at least you now know its history because de B. Lockyer signed and fully inscribed each print and in so doing created a precious object.

For a while, I saw her figure studies as mystifying. In fact, she is often interested in the human figure and the landscape prints she made between about 1923 and 1930 are more of a phase between her early book illustration (edited, second from top) and later prints like Day nursery (from 1935). Very unusually for one or our artists, we more or less have her own words to clarify what interested her. Following a six-month visit to Provence in 1921, she remarked on 'peasant women... of an almost Moorish type' in the country near St. Tropez. She had travelled there in a boat with her sea-going mother and father and returned to London for an exhibition at the fashionable Dorien Leigh Gallery. Here she exhibited her distinctive pen-and-ink drawing (below) of a remarkable figure, a professional mourner with a large candle walking through the streets of Toulon like an unexpected visitor from the past. She gave the impression of a countryside half gone wild again, full of boar and houses lacking sanitation. Ironically, her figure draws on an illustration from The yellow book with its unmistakeable sense of city life.

                                                     

  

                                                   

Email for Modern Printmakers

I have failed to inform readers that my old email to be found on the blog and in the comments section was discontinued a month or two ago. I know at least one reader has tried to contact me since then, so apologies to them. Anyone who does need to contact me directly, please use cgc505@outlook.com. Otherwise, continue to leave comments in the box.

To make amends, I am posting a fresh image of SG Boxsius' Unloading gravel. This linocut has only appeared recently and the image above was supplied only today by a reader from the United States. If any of you come upon this print for sale again, please let me know using the email provided and my reader may have better luck the next time.

A trove of linocuts by SG Boxsius

 

It beats me where all the Boxsius woodcuts and linocuts that have have come up for sale in the past few weeks and months actually come from. One reader believes the prints recently for sale on British ebay were part of a collection. This may be true but I wonder how a collector has found unsigned proofs and why they should be a damaged print in a collection. It is always possible they have come down through the family of Daisy Boxsius or were sold in a sale following her death. But that was a long time ago.

Spring morning, Arundel (top) has never appeared online until the past few weeks and then to my surprise not one but two unframed proofs turn up. This is very unusual even for Boxsius. I happened to already know the print well because my old friend Alan Guest owned a proof which he thought highly of (and I coveted), so making  a purchase was the obvious thing to do. It was under-priced and in good condition. There is no sign of framing, no scuffing or deterioration caused by exposure to light so it looks like both proofs have been lying undisturbed somewhere for a long time. 

                                     

Having bought that, I was then encouraged to get A Devon village as well (second from the top) and did not regret the purchase either. Also available was an unsigned proof of Seaside (above). This is a great little print but I was suspicious about the lack of a signature and resisted the temptation even though figure subjects by Boxsius are rare. I have copies of a number of watercolours of Shakespeare characters that show another side to someone who we all tend to see as a landscape artist.

His use of figures was carefully considered. As you will see from the design above, the two young women on the left were an addition. Others may disagree but I believe they refer back to figures in both Georges Seurat's Bathers, Asnieres and Giorgione's The tempest (below) which had been exhibited in London in 1929. (Boxsius exhibited Seaside in 1931).

Boxsius had always had an interest in the history art and he and Daisy had books about the old masters at home. What is impressive is the way he used very different sources to put together his prints. On the face of it, Twilight, Winchelsea (below) (which also came up for sale on ebay but was damaged) draws on the modern stylishness of Grosvenor School artists who Boxsius exhibited alongside in the early 1930s. But both William Giles and the Giorgione are also in the mix. Here was an artist of wide sympathies who took a great interest in the work of others.

The white railings and orange roof-tops are direct borrowings from Giles' bizarrely wonderful At eventide, Rothenburg am Tauber (below) for about 1906. What is missing in the Boxsius is the eccentricity of Giles' railings. Also compare the buildings in the Giorgione with the array of chimney pots in A Devon village. A trained artist's visual memory should work in that way but you have to be sympathetic in the first place to retain the information.

I have come to the conclusion that Boxsius was a holiday and weekend artist. He had a responsible job as art supervisor at the London School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, which sometimes involved taking evening classes. But the palces he visited mattered to him and what is worth remarking on is the strong sense of place he achieved. As a person, he was always north London and never strayed far from Highgate Cricket Club all his life. Even when he and Daisy moved from rented rooms into a proper flat in Fortis Green, he made sure the club wasn't far way. Look how closely he places the figures between the rocks and the way the half-timbered building at Arundel is made to fit into the image.

The black bull (above) has turned up twice, once in Britain and once in the US (where it was wisely bought by a reader). With its reading of the weather, it is a classic Boxsius image. The others appearing recently include Noon-day and the early woodcuts Houghton Bridge, Sussex, The broken plough and The old mill, most of which appear elsewhere on Modern Printmakers. The only reason I say 'early' is because I have never found a record of any of them being exhibited which means they all probably belong to the period prior to 1928.

I also want to say there is an article in preparation (and almost finished) 'Yoshijiro Urushibara, Arthur Rigden Read and S.G. Boxsius' which I hope to place in a journal or magazine. I am aware this has all been a long time coming but the issues with reproduction rights and copyright are most trying.