Jessie Garrow at McTears

 

Edward Burne Jones was appalled when he realised that his young friend and follower, Aubrey Beardsley, wanted to be a graphic artist and not a painter like himself. It was so outside Burne Jones take on things, he was unable to comprehend the profound change that was taking place in modern art and the friendship between the young Beardsley and himself proved to be short-lived. Beardsley on the other hand set a standard no serious British illustrator could ignore and some of the most telling work done by young artists like Isabel de B. Lockyer and Jessie Garrow in the twenties was not in colour but in black and white and owed Beardsley a considerable debt.

This means that whatever I say about the watercolour that comes up for sale at McTears on 11th August in Garrow's home town of Glasgow is qualified. Garrow was an able colourist but she had an elegant and descriptive sense of line, which is just as apparent in her illustrations for Wee Willie Winkie as it is in her semi-monochrome colour woodcut, The wave. You will note how far Garrow pared her colours down to cream, dark brown and touches of mauve in this watercolour. The subject may be winsome but the overall control is not. Whether any readers are dedicated enough to buy this work remains to be seen. It is rare, it is interesting, it is Jessie Garrow and, as you all know, Modern Printmakers approves.

Katharine Jowett for sale by auction at Dominic Winter

 

A reader tipped me me off today about a group of seven colour linocuts by the British artist, Katherine Jowett, coming up for sale at Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Gloucestershire  this coming Friday. It includes Lanterns in the wind (above) the most original of all her prints and the complementary Street scene (below). Unfortunately, in order to buy these two striking prints, you will need to buy all seven. They come with a estimate of £400 - £600, considerably less than they will go for. In common with much of her printed work they are all either tipped onto light card and laid down on it.

Not a great deal is known about Jowett and, in particular, how she came to make colour linocuts. This has meant there has been some conjecture about her reasons for going to China. The facts as I know them go like this. She left Britain in 1904 to become a teacher at a Methodist school in China. Six years later she married Hardy Jowett who was himself a missionary and the couple subsequently had two children.

By 1931, she had made  a sufficient number of colour linocuts to exhibit alongside Bertha Lum. Not only was Lum resident in Pekin at the time, the Scottish colour print artist and writer, Anna Hotchkis, was also there. It is always possible that this was how Jowett was introduced to lino. She used an oil based ink and heavy card and had little in common with her linocut contemporaries in Britain.

Hardy died in 1936, leaving her alone with the two children and a deteriorating political situation. The following year, Pekin fell to the invading Japanese Army. This did nor deter the young American dealer and collector, Robert Muller, from visiting her in 1940 and buying work. He made it only just in time. Following the United Kingdom's declaration of war on Japan in December, 1941, she was interned and remained in camps until September, 1945, when she returned to Britain.

The hammer price of the prints was £800.

To my friends Lucy & Ted: the woodcuts of Elsie Garrett Rice

 

The woodcut (above) belongs to a reader who was fortunate enough to acquire the proof inscribed to the artist Marion Gill and her brother, Edwin. It is called Boston from the river or Boston Stump. Either way, readers will recognise the clarity of the style of S.G. Boxsius. It shows the tower of the church of St. Botolph and the harbour on the tidal reach of the river Witham.  Straightforward enough but you will know from the previous post that Edith Hope included the same tower in her view of Boston market-place. It is a famous landmark. When children were getting restless on the train on their way to Skeggie, they were urged to look out for Boston Stump - and here it is, a monument to a moment, as D.G. Rosetti put it.

Much as I like Hope's image, I prefer this one. It is Rice at her best - colourful, intelligent, observant. Beyond that, this particular proof is a record of the importance of friendship in her life. We can probably safely assume Hope had visited Boston alongside Rice but by the time it was inscribed in 1931, the Gills were both in Cape Town where Edwin Gill had been appointed director of the South Africa Museum in 1924 and the following year Rice's daughter Rosemary and son-in-law, Charles Hawthorne, moved to Cape Town too. (Their son was the British character actor, Nigel Hawthorne, who was three at the time of the move). She had begun exhibiting with the Colour Woodcut Society after the war and with the Graver Printers from 1929 onwards. Nevertheless Festival, above, (as well as some of her other prints) suggests the kind of colour woodcuts made before the war. Like Allen Seaby and Frank Morley Fletcher, her sister Amy, her husband,  and herself were all involved in education where art played an important role.

In 1893, Amy and her husband, J.H. Badley, were two of the four joint-founders of the co-educational and non-denominational school, Bedales. There was a strong emphasis on the arts - the singer Lily Allen, the artists Ivon Hitchens and Stephen Bone, and Sir John Rothenstein, director of the Tate, were all ex-pupils. Unfortunately, the biographies I have read are contradictory. Rice herself married Charles Rice who I believe was headmaster of King Alfred School in north London. This was founded in 1898 and was again run along secular and co-ed. lines. Likewise, there was a strong bias to the arts. (The influential British blues musician, Alexis Korner, and Paul Kossoff, sublime guitarist with the band Free, were former pupils.) Like Gill and Hope, Rice trained at the Slade School of Art and according to one account she and her husband eventually left London and became teachers at Bedales. You will not be surprised when I tell you that Rice was also a feminist and when she organised an exhibtion of the work of members of the Colour Woodcut Society at Bedales in 1928,  many of the artists, including Ethel Kirkpatrick, Frances Blair, E.C.A. Brown and Mary MacDowall, went on to feature in Modern Printmakers, although Dorothy Langlay, is yet to have her turn.

The other story says that Charles Rice trained to be a doctor during the war and bought a practice in Coventry. Garrett Rice was already in Petersfield (where Hope also lived) by 1928 and in 1931, Charles Rice retired, sold the practice and the couple separated. Their daughter moved to Cape Town the following year and by 1934 Rice was exhibiting South African subjects with the Graver Printers. She lived in S.A. for the rest of he life. Aside from making prints, she became a botanical illustrator and books containing her work like Wild flowers of the Cape of Good Hope are still available. I wish this was the case with her colour woodcuts.  I have a record of only thirteen and I have decided to post what I think are the strongest. The image I have of Misty morning (1933) is too pale to put up and others like Old sheep bridge, Norfolk, The snow storm (both 1929) and The bonfire (1928) remain untraced but must be somewhere. Fortunately, there is enough variety here for readers to gain an idea of what Rice could do. I would not say 'No' to any of them. If the style of The bather is self-conscious, the bathing cap and robe are nicely-chosen. It is also a rare female nude by a colour woodcut artist. Who the subject was we all naturally would like to to know. I have given a list of possible names and I leave you to make up your mind.

Land of Hope & Glory: the colour woodcuts of E.A. Hope

 

The only reason the colour woodcuts of E.A. Hope have not been featured on Modern Printmakers before is because so few can be seen anywhere - until now, that is. I have a record of eleven colour woodcuts and six of them are here, enough to give readers a good idea of what she could do.

She was born in the Sydney suburb of Ryde in 1870 but the family's true home was Hopetoun House, an extensive Palladian mansion at South Queensferry on the Firth of Forth. Her father was  the Hon. Louis Hope, son of the Earl of Hopetoun who was serving as Governor of Australia. Hope moved to London where her mother lived in Chelsea. Hope herself lived in Fulham is an area that remains full of artists' studios. (Robert Gibbings was in the next street and John Hall Thorpe not far away either). She studied at the Slade but this doesn't make her  Stanley Spencer or Gwen John. She may only have been there for a term or two. She could have afforded more but that isn't the point. At the Slade she must have got to know Elsie Garrett Rice and Lucy Gill who went on to make colour woodcuts after the first war. Hope and Garrett Rice both made colour woodcuts at Boston in Lincolnshire (below) and one reader is not only lucky enough to own both  prints, Boston church by the river (1929) by Garrett Rice is inscribed to Gill and her brother, Edwin. (To be included in a second post).

This group of friends and her contact with Australia help to make Hope worth looking at. Like so many. she switched from etching to colour woodcut and, as with so many, the reason can be found in the work that Frank Brangwyn and Yoshijiro Urushibara did together. (Hope had Brangwyn design a bookplate for her as Edith Hope.) In 1915, Walter Sparrow-Shaw brought out A book of bridges illustrated with what appeared to be woodcuts by Brangwyn. Urushibara took the least exclamatory of these and with an inwardness and skill that was beyond his collaborator, transformed the small image into the magnificent Ruins of a Roman bridge of 1919. Along with Brangwyn's series of grandiloquent windmills, this bridge set a trend like no other. It meant that no colour woodcut artist seeing a nice old bridge could resist having a go and Hope was more successful than most. Trotton Bridge (1925) easily outperforms Phillip Needell's Pont d'Avignon (1925) and Eric Hesketh Hubbard's canal bridge.

I am  pretty certain this print gave S.G. Boxsius the idea for his early colour woodcut, Houghton Bridge, Sussex. I say this partly because around this time the Austrailian artist, Ethel Spowers, came over from Paris and made two colour woodcuts of bridges, including her 1926 print The Green Bridge showing the Kissing Bridge at Walberswick, quite obviously the basis for Boxsius' masterly At Walberswick from five years later. The people who try to write about the colour linocuts that Spowers made after studying with Claude Flight three years later, have missed all this and consequently the relationships between the artists making colour woodcut and colour linocut (and some times it was the dame people) have not been properly researched. (You read that here first.) Only look at the differences between The red tower (top) and the two prints below. First the history. The town is Albenga on the Italian Riviera (the print is sometimes simply called Albenga). Isabel de  B Lockyer often worked on the same coast and towers by the sea are often found in her work. By the time Hope made The red tower, the supporting outlines of the keyblock in the other two prints has been lost in the blue atmosphere. Its is not the conventional view of the town either. Hope instead looks inland from the sea to the light of dawn on the range of mountains beyond - and to anyone who knows the coastal towns of Italy, nothing could be more true of them. Here is a print that is linocut in all but name, a subtle blend of de B. Lockyer, Hokusai and perhaps memories of Australia that is unusual.

What holds all this work together isn't the motifs of towers and bridges so much as her sense of tone. This changes very much and is partly related to the different techniques she used. Albi (above) has a firm woodcut feel about it and emphasises the texture of the stone and rooftops. You can see immediately how far she had moved away from drawing and etching in The red tower and by how much Hope went on learning as other printmakers began making new images. She was also typical of the artists who began making colour woodcut after the wat in the way she never appeared to use brushes. Like Gill and Garrett Rice, the surface is mottled. She also makes patterns in the way a colour woodcut artist wouldn't. Th string of lights in her Italian town is prominent but the way the crowd in Boston Market or the team on Trotton Bridge introduce a similar rogue line is deftly done.

Significantly, Durham (above) was exhibited at a joint show of woodcuts and linocuts only thirteen miles away at Sunderland. This was December, 1931 when the first and second exhibitions of British linocut were blazing a trail through provincial municipal galleries. Her print York was also there, though this remains untraced (though I depend on readers to find one and let me know). I considered including work by all the others I mention here to put Hope in some kind of context, but as this is the only article to have appeared about Hope since Clive Christie wrote about her well over ten years ago on Art and the aesthete, I decided to avoid confusion.

The final  image is Market, Espalion.  The rickety style of drawing suggests she knew the work of French graphic artists like J.-E. Laboureur.  Hope had left Fulham for Kensington by the end of the war then eventually moved to a house called Byways at Steep near Petersfield in Hampshire and only a mile from Bedales where Garrett Rice had been a teacher. Work by Rice is even harder to come by but going by Boston Stump, she could pull it off. But that is for another post, another day.

John Hall Thorpe & Bemrose and Sons

As some of you will know, John Hall Thorpe training was in commercial work in Sydney where he was on the staff of two newspapers before he moved to Britain in  He had already made a few etching whilst in Australia and did not exhibit any colour woodcuts until the end of the first war. But when he did, these prints were important in the revival of colour woodcut in the 1920s. As you may also know, Hall Thorpe never printed his own work and acknowledged the printing was done under his supervision.  This meant he was unable to exhibit with the Graver Printers though he gained by having much larger editions to sell. If he went to a commercial printer (and I think be did) he was also limited by the numbers and subtlety of the colours he used. But if you look carefully at his prints, what stands out is how successful his economy of means was.

William Bemrose (or Bemrose and Sons as it became) certainly worked with Hall Thorpe on prints like Summer (top) which was published in 1929. Bemrose set up in Derby as a maker of railway timetables in 1826 and naturally worked with the Midland Railway whose main base was at Derby Station (destroyed by British Rail). The fine engraving below of the station was made by them in 1840 and you will be pleased to know the memorable clock tower to the left remains unmolested 180 years later. Features like the tower were typical of the Midland's serious attitude to public architecture. John Ruskin was appalled by their plans to drive the main line through from Matlock to Chinley but no one seeing the grandeur of the remote viaduct over the Derwent at Monsall Dale could fail to be impressed.

The firm did everything. This poster for the Midland's excursion to Newcastle races from Sheffield is typical though not the most amusing. Readers who are also railway buffs will notice that by the seventies, the Midland were a market leader and had done away with 2nd class, much to the consternation of other operators. The Midland took a modern, integrated approach to rail travel and whether it was commercial vigour, engineering expertise or style, for a time they were in the vanguard. George Stephenson did work for them, but they also understood the appeal of stylishness and how far everything from stations and publicity to refreshments could promote the railways as a pleasurable and sophisticated form of travel. From Leicester London Road to Nottingham Midland, surviving stations are confident and original and some small stations like Matlock Bath in Derbyshire and Collingham, Nottinghamshire, were remarkable if not sublime. Everyone played their part, including businesses with expertise like Bemrose.

Bemrose's son, William, became interested in applied art and wrote a book on wood-carving but the firm evidently had the ability to produce fine prints by 1840.  As you see from the 1902 advertisement  (second from top) colour block had become prominent in the specialist work they undertook. You will also note by then they had premises at Snow Hill in east central London. By the 1930s, they were printing off everything from colour railway posters to brochures for L.M.S. With classic overkill, Matlock was promoted not only as our own Switzerland but as a metropolis of hydropathy. (Matlock Bath station was designed to look like a chalet - wood was another feature of Midland designs). 

Readers will know from the previous post that Bemrose worked with Arthur Rigden Read on Valencia. But notice the similarity between the block capitals used in Hall Thorpe's Summer and S.G. Boxsius' Evening afterglow (below). I suspect this masterly woodcut from about 1936 was printed by Bemrose. Certainly if Boxsius had printed it himself, he would have signed it in pencil. (I know it isn't signed because I own it). What Boxsius, Read and Hall Thorpe all had in common is knowledge of the print trade. I cannot be sure that Bemrose printed any of Hall Thorpe's other woodcuts, but someone had to and, as you see from the standard of all the prints and posters here, Bemrose knew what they were about.

But I need to add a footnote about letterpress of the kind used by Bemrose in the C19th. In 1916, Robert Gibbings made the initial proofs for his first colour woodcut, Retreat from Serbia, on the letterpress kept at his father's rectory in County Cork. (See the post about Gibbings). Both Hall Thorpe and Gibbings had studios in Fulham in London towards the end of the war. Gibbings installed an Albion press at his and I believe Hall Thorpe's attitude to making prints owes something at least to Gibbing's resourcefulness. Gibbings showed it was possible make colour woodcuts good enough for the V&A to buy them without using the laborious Japanese method. The V&A may never have paid for any of Hall Thorpe's prints but he made sure they had some all the same.

Arthur Rigden Read's 'Valencia'

 

As there is a copy of this print for sale which people may have seen, I wanted to explain exactly what it is. The print suggests like nothing else he made how much broader Read's approach to making colour woodcuts than any of his contemporaries. I remember seeing it first many years ago in a shop in Camden Passage in Islington and being bewildered. I certainly didn't buy it because I had a very limited idea at the time what a British colour woodcut was partly because I had seen so few of them and partly because I had only even seen Read's Venetian shawl and which I owned by then. But this print was different and I now know why. 

So far as I am aware, Read never had any formal training apart from the instruction he received at the School of Photo-Engraving and Lithography at Bolt Court just off Fleet Street in London. The locality says everything. Most of the boys intended to enter the London print-trade and while he lived in London Read worked as a writer and publisher's illustrator. Beyond that Bolt Court (as it was always called) had a considerable effect on Read's attitude to making prints and, as I said, it is nowhere more evident than in Valencia.

Amongst other things, the boys at Bolt Court were trained in reproductive techniques. The idea was to reproduce the feel of the original work and Read was proficient enough as water-colourist by then for other boys to use his watercolours as a basis for their own lithographic reproductions. Once Read began making colour woodcuts about 1920, he not only gave his attention in particular to pattern and texture, he went out of his way to depict effects like the sheen of silk or the dirt on a chimney sweep's face. It was this approach that helped make him so original. Unfortunately, when he came to to make Valencia in 1933, the way the blocks were printed off defeated him.

Read took the idea for Valencia from Edouard Manet's Lola de Valence. Manet had painted this in 1862 while Lola was performing in Paris as a member of a troupe  of dancers.  It may be a coincidence but Lola de Valence went into the collection of the Louvre in 1912 at the time that Read was training at Bolt Court. He probably also saw it at the Louvre, where it stayed until it was moved to the Jeu de Paume in 1947. Admittedly, it is only the title that makes it plain that Read decided on Manet as his victim this time round though the flowered skirt and the edging of Lola's own shawl obviously provided Read with his main leads. But you have to start somewhere and Read may or may not have known that Manet adapted the pose from Francisco Goya's full length portrait of the Duchess of Alba. Read decided against against that appraoch and instead we have a portrait that emphasises the shawl covered with camellias. Alphonse Legros used to tell his students at the Slade that if they were going to rob anyone, they should rob the rich and not the poor. Artists certainly do not get any richer than Manet. Nothing if not ambitious, Read's image itself falls flat mainly because it was printed on the press at the art printer Bemrose in Derby (this is why none of the images are signed in pencil). Read's flair for texture, which relieved the flat designs he often made, was impossible to reproduce and no amount of busy detail could save the image from looking unappealing. Basically, it is the face that let's it down because the fringes and the flowers are all well executed. And having said this much, I  must add that once I got a second opportunity to buy it at a reasonable price, I did so. But you would need to be a serious collector of Read (or writing a book about colour woodcut) to lay out even fairly serious money ie £250, on Valencia. 

A Christmas card by Laurence Bell

 

This is all starting to look like an end-of-term report. I have finally dug out my Christmas card designed by Laurence Bell for his publisher, Burlington Fine Arts. The most important aspect to all this is not so much the brightly-coloured print as the spelling of his Christian name and what it says on the inside page (below). Firstly, in my opinion, this is the way the signature reads: a, u, r, e. It is easy enough to read 'w' but here we have contemporary printed evidence that all of us appear to have been spelling the name wrongly. 

Secondly, this does not mean that all Bell's prints were coloured by hand but it does suggest why so many are so bright. It is up to readers to decide for themselves because the card is the only work I have seen by Bell. But if you look closely, it should be obvious whether or not he has used pigment and where the colour overlaps the keyblock.

The card provides one further clue in the way linocut was spelt. In 1923, Allen Seaby always wrote linoleum cut and never used the short form 'lino'. Claude Flight did and in 1927 went out of his way to spell it Lino-Cut in the title of his book - not sure why but then I could say that about so many things Flight wrote. I will have to check earlier spellings!

There are at east three readers who own work by Bell and they may be able to detect signs of hand-colouring on some of their own prints. Either leave your comment below or send it on to me. The advantage to leaving comments in the box is that they stay with the relevant post. Either way, between us we have made some progress.