Portrait of Miss Jessie Garrow

I cannot be sure that the colour woodcut above is a self-portrait by the Glasgow artist, Jessie Garrow, but I tend to think that it is. Even if it is not, colour woodcut portraiture of this distinction was very unusual in 1920s Britain. A number of people including Arthur Rigden Read, Urushibara, Frank Morley Fletcher and Phillip Needell tried and only Urushibara and Read were in any way satisfactory - and, in Read's case, not always. Garrow's portrait pulls it off, mainly because she was a figurative artist and knew what she was doing.

But I think there might have been another reason for her success and it is Ito Shinsui's masterly colour woodcut 'Portrait of Miss Elizabeth Keith'. Again, I have no idea whether Garrow knew Ito's portrait or not, but you only need to compare the two to come to same conclusion that I did. Ito had been working with the publisher Shozaburo Wantanabe since 1916 and in 1922 he asked Keith (who was another of his artists) to sit for Ito. The result was the witty, sensitive and knowing portrait of the thirty-four year old Keith, delectable with her befeathered hat, silken gown and large pink cushion. I also tend to think that Garrow was not alone when she identified the wry splendour of Ito's portrait. Below, I have added Read's portrait of his wife, Kathleen Rigden Read. It had not occurred to me until I began to write that Read might have used the Ito as a source, but as it was made one year afterwards in 1923 and because Read used other people's portraits as a model (notably Edouard Manet's 'Lola de Valence'),, my guess is that he did. Again you decide but this is what blogs are for.

Going back to Garrow's portrait, there are two or three things that stand out. One is the mouth in the pale face, which is so similar to Keith; there is also the hat. To me, this looks like the same  academic cap won by John Swinnerton Phillimore in the portrait painted by Maurice Greiffenhagen in 1924. Greiffenhagen taught at Glasgow School of Art all the time that Garrow was a student there. His work covered a broad range of portraiture, style and other figurative work and the stylised figures and use of white with blue in his painting 'The message' (1923) are pretty close to Garrow's use of them in her colour woodcut 'The wave' which appeared in The Studio one year later. I am not suggesting that Garrow was unoriginal but only like many printmakers she picked up ideas from various sources. Garrow had been making woodcuts by 1919, although they may not have been in colour. Generally I think she and her husband, Ian Cheyne, didn't begin making colour woodcuts until about 1923 or so. He sold his first colour woodcut in 1925. Cheyne was another student of Greiffenhagen, but as a landscape artist, Cheyne had little in common with him. His wife's bold stylisation and wit were more sympathetic to Greiffenhagen than they were to her husband's work, even his celebrated colour woodcuts.

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A tale of two bridges

 

In 1915, the writer Walter Sparrow Shaw published 'A book of bridges' with illustrations in black-and-white and colour by Frank Brangwyn. Shaw was a great admirer of the work of Brangwyn in a world where the critical reaction to his work was more sceptical at home than it often was abroad. He and Brangwyn also had a fair amount in common. Shaw had been brought up in the Welsh town of Wrecsam but had been educated in England and at the Academie des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, a background that must have appealed to Brangwyn whose mother was born in Brecon and whose father was born in England of Welsh parents. Brangwyn himself had been born in Bruges where he had lived until the age of nine when the family had gone to live in Shepherd's Bush in London.

So far, so similar. Brangwyn spent more time in his father's workshop and at the South Kensington Museum than he did at school and wangled an apprenticeship with William Morris. Shaw, on the other hand, was very well educated. Apart from the seven years he spent in Brussels, he had attended Chester College followed by  a stint at Newton Abbot College in south Devon. In the late 1870s he then studied for 15 months at the Slade School of Art under the exacting but multi-talented French artist, Alphonse Legros, before moving on to Brussels. This was exactly the kind of a person to recommend themselves to Brangwyn whose bravura style was always in need of sympathetic adjustment. What is astonishing is how many bridges Brangwyn was capable of and wherever he went there was a succession of dramatic arches and theatrical weather.

At face value, the black-and-white illustrations were woodcuts, but in reality were no more than the approximations of a man who could apparently turn his hand to anything but depended on others to do the work, a man who could criticise the art schools for doing nothing but turning out clever imitators but had no scruples about working with artists who had studied there. Enter Yoshijiro Urushibara, a man who followed the longest apprenticeship of anyone I can think of. At the time Shaw and Brangwyn were collaborating on 'A book of bridges', Urushibara was printing a large number of blocks mainly prepared by Sugasiki Hideaki for a reproduction of a copy of an ancient Chinese scroll painting Admonitions of the instructress by the C3/C4th artist,  Gu Kaizhi (below) . He then moved on to a short series of colour woodcuts of Stonehenge roughly based on a print by William Giles remarkable for all being so alike.

Brangwyn knew a good thing when he saw one and there followed a unique collaboration with Urushibara and the curator and writer, Laurence Binyon, on a superb portfolio of colour woodcuts simply called Bruges which Brangwyn designed and Urushibara cut and printed (below). Binyon had an intererest in Chinese and Japanese art for a long time and it was Binyon and the head of prints, Howard Colvin, who had recognised the significance of the Admonitions when it had been brought in to the British Museum a few years previously. Bruges was published in 1919 and Urushibara must have set to worked on Ruins of a Roman bridge soon after the portfolio was finished. The image had appeared in Shaw's but the success of the later image depended almost entirely on Urushibara's interpretation. His work, The Studio Magazine said, were translations of Brangwyn, though interpretation is more like it  and I would find it hard to believe that Urushibara hadn't chosen the image or the time of day. In the original,  there was no obvious time of day and the left hand side of the sky is filled with a shower of rain. In the Urushibara colour woodcut, it is a lucid twilight with a crescent moon hanging above the bridge.

This was the kind of imagery and symbolism that attracted western artists to the work of Japanese printmakers in the first place. On a simple level, the two bridges are images of collaboration, but the ruin in the foreground and the complete bridge seen beneath the single arch suggests the life Urushibara was leading in a way that would be natural for a Japanes artist Within you/without you is crude but it is something like that. Today Urushibara has a reputation for skillfulness but within that over-arching reputation there was more. He was also ambitious and would not have taken the job at the British Museum if it had not suited him and aside from the work with Hideaki and Binyon on the Gu Kaizhi he was asked to supervise a long-term project which involved the unrolling and conservation of scrolls excavated at Mogao in China by Sir Aurel Stein (until the Chinese government put a stop to his activities). Urushibara was not only a professional conservator, he had a professional interest in archaeology and the choice of subjects like the ruins of Stonehenge and the Roman bridge across the river Loire at Brives make sense.

In the original Brangwyn image, the new bridge seen through the one great arch of the old bridge is a neat visual trick. By casting moonlight on the far bridge and making it more prominent by emphasising the small islands in the river, Urushibara made the series of arches the focus of the image. All this came about only because Urushibara handled the colour and printing with such subtlety and care. Niot many artists could use only blues and greys to express the last light of the day and keep a print so varied and of such interest. It is not simply evocative, it suggests the sympathetic relations of one thing and another which no one looking through Shaw's book would have been concerned with.  I am not suggesting Brangwyn didn't understand all of this only that he was too restless a man to be so thoughtful. All too often western artists have concentrated on the means rather than the end of Japanese printmaking. Urushibara's real achievement was to put new energy and poetry into British colour print. As Giles said, all of us owe him a debt, a debt that was not only to do with technical things.

You only have to compare S.G, Boxsius' Houghton Bridge, Sussex (the smaller bridge above) to see the effect Urushibara's image-within-an-image had other artists during the 1920s. Phillip Needell's colour woodcut of the old bridge at Avignon was less subtle and had none of the understatement typical of Boxsius but bears in mind the grandeur (and overstatement) of Brangwyn's original idea. The interesting thing is that we would not have associated Boxsius or Needell with the Japanese school of printmaking but obviously neither of them were immune. Urushibara's version was not about the past because we search for more bridges in the print than we can find, no, the little bridges of Needell and Boxius only go to prove that Ruins of a Roman bridge looked forward to the future,

Romney Marsh Weavers

 

About 1920, Kathleen Rigden Read moved from Twickenham in London to a house called in North St, Winchelsea, in East Sussex. Once there, she set her the hand-looms her husband Arthur had designed and made and began spinning and weaving wool from the sheep grazed on Romney Marsh (below) as well as weaving and dyeing silk from thread she bought in for the purpose. (The photo shows Chris Finn Kelcey and his dog Pete with a flock of Romneys behind them and a flock of Suffolks in the other pasture.)

I believe she can be seen wearing garments made from both types of material in The Venetian shawl, one of the first colour woodcuts made by her husband Arthur in 1923. Kathleen was a member of Romney Marsh Weavers, a co-operative with a weaving shed in a disused chapel on Peasmarsh Road where they used wool from sheep at Oxenbridge Farm at Iden. Oxenbridge was owned by Catherine Buchanan (below) a friend and fellow member of the Weavers, and her husband Bertram, who was a retired professional soldier and an artist.

The members of the co-operative did all the work themselves from shearing to spinning and dyeing, often using vegetable dyes, including a beautiful fawn made from lichen gathered at Dungeness on the southern edge of the marsh. One reason I think the dress Kathleen is wearing is made from wool is because a tanned Catherine Buchanan can be seen wearing it in a photograph taken at Oxenbridge by Paul Nash.

At the time Nash and his wife Margaret were renting the tied cottage across the road from the farm after they had moved from Dymchurch and where Nash did some of his very best work before surrealism got the better of him. It was an odd mix of the old Arts and Crafts dispensation and modernists like Nash but it seemed to work even if the fastidious Nash was dismayed by his wife's enthusiasm for the folk-dancing that went off at the farm. Whether Margaret ever owned any of the garments made by Kathleen is another thing. Kitty has a rug-loom at the farmhouse where the floors were covered in her rugs.

Other visitors to Winchelsea were S.G. Boxsius and his wife Daisy. Possibly one of the lambing-sheds that are such an important feature of the marsh can be seen in his linocut Afterglow (above) (and once you know the marsh, it couldn't be anywhere else) though many of the current sheds are made from corrugated iron and steel. It is hard t know what happened to any of the products made by the co-operative. They were sold at local exhibitions and praised at larger exhibitions in London. Kathleen silks were sold alongside Arthur's colour woodcuts and some of them certainly were bought by the Carnegie Foundation in the U.S. about 1927.

One of Kathleen's own aims at least had been to teach people how to weave in order to provide them with local employment.  Flax had been grown by the river Brede below Winchesea and there was a linen mill there in C18th.  But it all came to a pretty disastrous end during the war. While she was away in London weaving braid for naval uniforms, the studio was hit by a bomb and both looms were destroyed. I think that knocked the heart out of the project for them because at the end of the war, the couple moved to Slad near Stroud in the Cotswolds. Hopefully this isn't the end of the story, though, and someone will know something more about Romney Marsh Weavers and the things they made. I can hardly believe that a few of the them at least have not survived somewhere and if anyone does know of any, please let me know.

Edna Boies Hopkins: the Derbyshire connection

Back in 1908, the educationalist Samuel Clegg published a monograph about the American colour woodcut artist, Edna Boies Hopkins. This included an odd passage where he said he  regretted that her prints had not been made available 'for art school purposes'. In those days it was common practice for art students to study and copy the work of other people. Alphonse Legros taught his students at the Slade to distinguish between the hand of Raphael and the work of his two assistants. But this didn't make the remark any less odd, at least not till he wrote a second monograph about Allen Seaby who did make imperfect (and unsigned) proofs of his own prints available to schools at a reduced rate.

Boies Hopkins was a student of Arthur Wesley Dow, himself a well-known art educationalist by the time Clegg was publishing his monographs. Whether she made her own proofs available is another thing but British students did nevertheless make use of her work in a very direct way as you can see from the nicotianas below.

Clegg was headmaster of the new Long Eaton School and one of his school governors acquired four  recent prints by Boies Hopkins for the very purpose. I can't remember offhand whether Nicotianas (below, 1909) was one of them but judging by the children's work made only four years afterwards in 1913, it was. So, here were thirteen and fourteen-year old Derbyshire school children cutting and printing their own colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner with Boies Hopkins examples supplied for them to study by the school. 

But why use Boies Hopkins and not Seaby? I think there are two reasons. Firstly, Boies Hopkins concentrated on one image rather than make a complex picture and, secondly, although Boies Hopkins had gone to Japan in order to learn how to make a keyblock, by the time Clegg wrote his article, the keyblock was no more than a vestige in her work and often wasn't there at all. This all made the process of cutting and printing much easier for the children.

On of these lucky children was Edward Loxton Knight who went on to train at Nottingham School of Art where he specialised in commercial art. When I first wrote about Loxton Knight, I had no idea about the survival of this remarkable series of school prints but, as you can see The primrose-seller (1929) his first professional print, the Boies Hopkins lesson sunk in. It is not so much the flower subject that was like her as the overall tone, particularly the way the print was wiped in the same downward manner Boies Hopkins was using before the first war.

As you can see, Loxton Knight had learned to use a keyblock to define smaller shapes and to provide moulding for larger figures like his primrose-seller. Ironically, he didn't use the Japanese manner at all but printed all his blocks with poster colour, adapting the flat Japanese style to give the contemporary feel of commercial art of the period. But he certainly got away with it and, so far as I am concerned, this first print of his was the most satisfying he made along with The Nottingham Canal.

It is in the nature of commercial artists to make use of approximation to gain their effect. But there was another sleight of hand involved in The primrose-seller and one you could only be aware of if you know this location well. The primrose seller is standing on the north side of the market square in Nottingham where people were still selling flowers and newspapers when I grew up. The problem is from where the man is standing, it is impossible to see the spire of St Peter's church at the bottom of Wheeler Gate. It just looked better that way, that's all.

Haydn Mackey's 'Jacke of Newberie'

Every once in a while an artist who isn't all that talented manages to excel himself. Exactly how they do this isn't always obvious but with Haydn Reynolds Mackey's linocut Jacke of Newberie my first impression is the print  was by Arthur Rigden Read, albeit Read out on the booze. The colours are right (more or less) and the limited use of colour is right and the print takes Read's gold medal La cite de Carcassonne, with its heraldic shield and lettering as its starting-point. I have to say if it had been by Read, I would have bid without hesitation. As it is,  I decided against, simply because there is something both spurious and irritating about the work of Mackey.
                                                                 

Mackey trained at the Slade School of Art and had the benefit of attending the life-class under Henry Tonks but by and large, Mackey liked to represent heavy horses as much as human beings. With Jacke of Newberie he was successful because he simply bought together horses and with a sense of character and theatricality and I have to say it worked. I would mind less if  Mackey's prints weren't so manufactured. He didn't use the demanding Japanese manner but added colours in an odd way. Only the keyblock was printed, so you miss the real interest that an original print can have and they end up having more in common with the kind of hand-coloured work made by William Nicholson or the Cuala Press. You have to see it in context and I know very little about Mackey or what relations he had with other printmakers (if there were any). I just thought Jacke of Newberie was well worth a look but whether it was worth spending good money on is another thing.

The woodcut technique of James Alphege Brewer

                                                                     

In the last post I wondered about the technique that James Alphege Brewer used when he came to make his colour woodcuts. Since then, Ben Dunham has sent me other images I hadn't seen plus a label that says Brewer's print Lake Thirlmere and Helvellyn was printed by hand by the artist. Fortunately, there are other details of the print on the website where it was sold. You can judge for  yourself, but the conclusion I have come to was one I didn't really expect to make.

                                                                     

Another thing I suggested in the post was that Brewer knew the work of John Platt and possibly used his 1938 book to learn the technique. I also wonder whether Brewer may even have studied with him. Platt was working at Blackheath School of Art not that far from the subject of Brewer's impressive woodcut Pool of London (top). I don't want to detract from Brewer's achievement, but compare his print with Platt's Sails from 1933. Brewer's style and high colouring is more old-fashioned and similar to the kind of images of Newlyn and London Ethel Kirkpatrick was making in the 1890s. It still remains an accomplished piece of work and if you look at the two details below, from Lake Thirlmere and Helvellyn, you will begin to get an idea of how original Brewer could be when it came to making prints. It is very much like Allen Seaby's and also reminds me of  SG Boxsius' extemporised foliage in Autumn (the word Boxsius used himself).
                                                             

                                                         
Not only that, you will notice that Brewer used Japanese technique in areas of  Lake Thirlmere - there is obvious application of the medium by hand, which is similar to bokashi. The details are expressive even if the overall effect of the print is conventional. But then compare the details of Lake Como (The pergola) (second from bottom) and you see him taking a different, more impressionist approach. You will notice obvious signs in both of application of the ink by hand. That strongly suggests Brewer was using a watercolour medium in common with the majority of British colour woodcut artists at the time rather than the printer's ink used by most of the colour linocut artists. I also think you can see the way the ink has run to the edge of the block. I like the camouflage effect he achieved here very much, something that suggests wartime as well Platt's brown and green on Sails. Even more original is the use of shape in Mont Blanc (bottom).  No other colour woodcut artist was working in this way but it is similar to does Platt's way of building up images from pieces of tissue  laid over each other- one that he taught to his students.
                                                                                 

                                                                 

     

                                                                                   

The colour woodcuts of James Alphege Brewer

No-one could blame James Alphege Brewer for the war. It was bad luck that he began to make these colour woodcuts only a year or so before it began. Then, when it was over, this kind of art was not only out-of-fashion in Britain, it was derided, and soon forgotten, lost under a great surge of  abstraction no-one understood, least of all the artists. Some were able to adapt. Edward Bawden had used linocut before the war to produce designs for wallpaper, but after the war followed the modern trend and made big-scale colour linocuts. Others could not.
                                                               

Brewer was one of the very last British artists to make colour woodcuts. They first appeared at the Society of Graphic Art exhibition in 1939 and presumably he had begun to make them some time before. Colour woodcuts are by no mean easy to produce but there is no sense of the beginner in the earliest ones like Mont Blanc or On the Dochart, Perthshire. This presents a problem in itself. Brewer was self-evidently a professional printmaker. For most of his career, Brewer's stock-in-trade had been colour etchings of architectural subjects and most of  his recorded prints were made after his marriage to Florence Lucas. Her great uncle, David, had been a mezzotint engraver who had worked with John Constable on English landscape untill Constable's death in 1832 and after that with Constable's family to 1840. Lucas himself died in Fulham Poorhouse in 1881, but as an apprentice under S.W. Reynolds he had joined a distinguished line of  English engravers that went back to the great mezzotint tradition of the C18th. Continuing that tradtion in the family may be one reason why Brewer entered into a collaboration with his wife's brothers, George and Edwin Lucas.

At the the time Brewer began to work on his colour etchings, many British colour etchers exhibited with the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour. They accepted a degree of collaboration on original prints, but the kind of work Brewer was doing with the Lucas brothers was too close to the old school of reproductive etching and engraving. (John Hall Thorpe who had trained as a reproductive wood-engraver in Sydney and who could not print his own work, found himself in a similar position). Yet Brewer was adaptable. Few artists use both intalgio and relief methods of printing. More to the point, the only other British artists I can think who changed from intalgio to relief (and not the other way around) were John Dickson Batten and Leslie Moffat Ward. But Ward made his colour woodcuts in the twenties when things were going well and exhibited with the Graver-Printers. My own view is that a woodcut like Mont Blanc (top) and Lake Como (The pergola) (second from top) represented Brewer's way of moving away from the etching tradition towards work that appeared to be modern. John Platt wrote the introduction to his book Colour woodcuts in December, 1937. Platt was headmaster at Blackheath School of Art at the time and had stopped using the keyblock about 1934. The changes of tone he introduced were also similar to the ones that appeared in Brewer's work three or four years later and I would suggest Brewer knew Platt and his work and his book. He was by then the leading British colour woodcut artist, after all.
                                                                       

At Westminster School of Art (where he had studied before the first war) Brewer found himself surrounded by the leftovers of the Architectural Museum that had been housed in the building. Draughtsmanship is certainly to the fore, but it would be a mistake to underestimate Brewer. His sense of colour was acute and when it comes to his woodcuts, the reminders of artists as diverse as Oscar Droege, Francis Towne and John Sell Cotman are all to the good. For a change, there is an undoubted touch of Jean Harlow's Hollywood in Lake Como (The pergola). It is not just elegant froth, it's consummate froth. Most British colour woodcut artists would have avoided such pale tones to avoid any comparison with  watercolour. In this sense, Brewer was something of a one-off although his work does bear comparison with James Priddey. For me, the problem is Brewer could not get away from the generic lonely pine and lonely sail so beloved of Edwardian British art.
                                                                             

So far as the technique  he used goes, the general opinion is that Brewer used a water-based medium to print with, but did not print on japan. There was very little use of a keyblock. Too much black would have detracted from the gentle mood. This made the printing of a woodcut like Lake Como (The pergola) complicated. Generally, this only comes out when the prints are seen close to.  How he printed them is another matter. Personally, I would assume he used some kind of press.  It really is up to readers who own them to say what they think. I don't own one and have never seem one either.

The general impression given by The garden of the villa Carlotta (below) belies the subtlety of the arrangement, especially of the almond orchards in the foreground. Collectors of Brewer's etchings may well be bemused by his change of manner, but the fact that he could change and beat other British colour woodcut artists at their own game says a good deal about his standards of workmanship.  It may not always appeal, but Brewer's professionalism is just as impressive as the distant grandeur of his mountains. In 1938, John Platt advised would-be colour woodcut artists to study the work of great masters like Hokusai and Utamaro. It was to Brewer's credit that he didn't.

Finally, I  would not have written this post without Ben Dunham's research and encouragement and you will see the link to his excellent Brewer website on my blog list.