Results of the sale at Banbury (and what you did not see there)

                                                                         

I would like to say that any one of the colour prints you see here came up for sale at Banbury rather than the ones that did, but all of them are as rare as anything is going to be and would attract any serious collector. But I have brought them up from my records and thought it was a good idea to let readers see some of the work that does not come up for sale at all often. This is not to disparage the prints that were sold. I would have bought any of them but I needed to a bookcase and fridge instead.

I have been warned to let you know that online buyers needed to pay 40% more than the hammer price. The buyers premium of 31.2% includes VAT and on top of that online sales are subject to a further fee of  8.2%, also including VAT. The effect was to depress prices and meant that once the vendor had paid their own fee, they would not be getting very much. Overall it probably means you would be better off selling on ebay if you did not have to pack up all the stuff you have sold.

I was surprised Allen Seaby's woodcut Pewits was the most expensive at £500 (and altogether you would almost pay £700 which is not all that cheap for a piece of work that I personally think falls flat). The barn owl print was much better value at £240 and more attractive than a fridge. It would end up costing you about £330 and as I could have got to Banbury on the train I could have picked it up.

The Phillips went cheap at £420 although the auctioneers did themselves and their vendors no favours by putting up poor photographs. Considering the photos have to be paid for by the vendor, it makes the whole situation even worse. It's all a bit of a stunt but there you are, and going by what you can pay for a Phillips from a dealer, someone will be pleased.

As predicted, John Hall Thorpe's prices are going nowhere and are well below what they were in their heyday ten years ago. We all knew he was overpriced then and scoffed but I would have gladly paid £130 for this pair of prints. The fuss over Hall Thorpe tended to obscure the fact that his work is well-made indeed. He had been a professional block-cutter in Australian before he came to Britain and had a good eye for colour. What he did not do was print the work himself, something the labels make clear. This never seemed to put buyers off in the past and for that type of decorative work it hardly matters.

The Urushibara was another reasonable buy at £250. Read's Venetian shawl was even better at £270 given the poor condition of so many of the proofs I have seen and the place the woodcut has in British colour woodcut history. Read was the only British colour woodcut artists to pull portraiture off. Not only that, he singlehandedly reinvented the medium for a post-war audience who no longer wanted the earnest work of the pre-war arts and crafts movement.

I have no doubt you will also want to know what the prints are that did not come up for sale at Banbury (and which will probably not come up for sale anywhere soon). First of all comes S. G. Boxsius' diminutive masterpiece Bowsprits. Despite the poor quality of the reproduction, the work stands out as Boxsius at his most Boxsius, with all that that means. Far more rare is Phyllis Platt's stylish portrait of her daughter, Una, lying reading on a sofa. This has never appeared online until today and very few people  have ever seen it. I found the illustration in a catalogue that was sent to me. I probably don't need to say she was the wife of John Platt but typically we know very little about her. The third print is Seaby's Karnack from 1925, followed by a more interesting early colour woodcut of a St Ives shop window by the Scottish artist, Frances Blair. Below that is Edward Ashendens's Old Icelander. He is best known as a designer of dioramas but here is making a creditable colour woodcut. Continuing the theme of ships and the sea, there is Hugo Henneberg's important colour linocut Dalmatia and then Kenneth Broad with all his originality and sense of style to the fore in a subtle and sensitive colour woodcut he simply called Hastings.

A catalogue of the colour woodcuts of Allen Seaby

I once tried to get hold of the exhibition catalogues owned by the writer on colour woodcut, Alan Guest, but was unsuccessful. I was told they were 'only lists' even though such catalogues are invaluable to anyone putting together a detailed catalogue of an artist's work. They form the basis for any scholarship and are no less important for the collectors who preserve the work itself. A number of catalogues for both American and British colour print artists have been published over the past ten years or so. Robert Meyrick's work on Sydney Lee was a model of its kind and of the books published in the U.S., Dominique Vasseur's Edna Boise Hopkins from 2008 is the most attractive and useable. A catalogue was beyond the scope of Martin Andrews and Robert Gillmor's 2014 book Allen W Seaby, art and nature but it was a missed opportunity nevertheless. To my knowledge there are at least eighty colour woodcuts made between 1900 and circa 1940. Mabel Royds was the only other artist making colour prints over that same period. She started out only about a year before Seaby and continued to work up until long before her death in 1941. Unlike Seaby we know what all of Royds' prints look like (though one or two may not have appeared online).

The main resource I have for Seaby is Alan's list of prints exhibited with the Society of Graver Printers in Colour between 1910 and 1938. Alan could be circumspect and how he came to see the exhibition catalogues he based the list on, I do not know. What the National Art Library in London have, I don't remember offhand. All I possess are photocopies of the six or seven catalogues owned by Seaby himself but from what I see on the internet, about eight exist which cannot be found on the main list by Alan Guest. None have titles and some of them would only appeal to a serious collector of Seaby's work. But they are all interesting. What is more you only need to look at Old English pheasants at the top to see what has been missed. If the image above can be identified as Porta Pinciana, at least we have a date. The pheasants find Seaby in the unfamiliar territory of the Scottish wildlife artist Archibald Thorburn who was old seven years older. As a general rule, Seaby appealed to the naturalist rather than the sportsman but here we have him giving the sporting print a go. It is a good print and one i would like to own but it may have been too genre for Seaby to exhibit. Without a catalogue with the relevant details, we can only make guesses about what his intentions were.

It was not until I began to try and sort out sundry lapwing woodcuts this week that I realised how much work still remained unaccounted for. It is not enough to say that Seaby was prolific; he was obsessively hard-working. Even so, it surprised me how little we knew. But judge for yourself. How many of you have seen these cows before? And does anyone know the title? I am sure this must be a very early work made before Seaby was competent with the keyblock. So far as I can make out, he has used silhouette and black-and-white instead and though few of us would rush out and buy it, it is very informative about the progress the artist was making with the medium But where exactly does it fit in? 1900, 1901?Without the catalogue, we just have no real idea. It has to be said, Seaby never made it easy for us. Few prints have titles and so far as I know none have dates. Nor was he beyond selling unsigned prints if he believed the standard of printing was inferior. This is why he took care to sign them in the block and again a catalogue would contain all the relevant information and it would be possible to say when the habit of signing in the block began.

Now you may be saying to yourself, why is he going on about Seaby when he could be telling us more about Helen Stevenson or Sylvan Boxsius? Good question. And I have an answer. If Seaby had made exceptional colour woodcuts for ten or fifteen years, it still would not have mattered so very much. The truth is Seaby is everyone's idea of a colour woodcut artist and is archetypal in a way no other artist could be. He was already forming his ideas about design by the late 1890s, a process that only came to an end when war broke out in 1939. This means his output lies at the dead centre of the story of British colour woodcut and that a full catalogue of his prints would be of much greater use than any of the ones we have including for John Platt, Yoshijiro Urushibara and Arthur Rigden Read. It does not matter how good those catalogues are, Seaby should have come first and the prints you see here tell us why. 

If this is the kind of work he did on an off-day or for some reason decided not to exhibit, how much does it say about the colour woodcuts he did put on show? What is important about Seaby is not only the standard of his work; the influence he had has not been assessed at all properly. It is easy enough to detect the influence of Hokusai or Koson on his own work. What is harder to ascertain is how far he set an example. I have to convince myself the beach scene actually is by Seaby at all, but for my money, it is where John Platt's famous The giant stride begins but again, without details, how can we say? The kingfisher was first exhibited in 1910 but by then Seaby had found his own way with the intractable keyblock. The kingfisher finds him struggling to make the bird stand clear of the confusing marks behind it. By the time he made the pheasants he had perfected the technique of experimental cutting where he kept taking trial proofs as he removed more wood from the background. By anyone's standards, The kingfisher is an expressive print but the background remains unresolved.

Many artists have been praised by Modern Printmakers but how many of them produced a body work you could follow through as I have just tried to do with Seaby? Seaby is all about identification. He was less concerned to encourage us to look at animals from the outside as Thorburn did; he wanted them to live in front of us. This exceptional gift is not found everywhere in his work. This does not make prints like Bay of Salamis from 1929 unimportant only less crucial. It has come up online recently but if you want to find Assisi (1928) The Parthenon (1928) Acropolis, Athens (1932) or Crossing the Nile at Luxor (1932) you will search in vain. I know surmise is often foolish but all I can say is he sold so few of them, none has have as yet come up for sale again. Bay of Salamis was itself bought up from the vaults by an academic from the University of Reading but has not as yet stood the money test like an unattractive print of The Adoration I remember going fairly cheap on ebay. Kings of Orient is much better but you will need to ignore the hackneyed figures if you buy it. Whether we like these prints or not, they help to suggest what his real strengths were.

No one could fault Seaby for not trying even if Lake Lucerne from the end of his woodcut career in 1937 is more of a watercolour than it should be. Taking a broader view, two remarks made about Seaby by his contemporaries come to mind. A reviewer of one of his books noted signs of deterioration in his drawing and wondered whether Seaby 'had drawn too much'. Another critic who went to see his second one-man show may have been the first person to say what we tend to take for granted, namely Seaby was at his best with birds. I have tried to suggest what it was about birds and their habits that meant so much. All the same we are still in need of perspective about his work and in the end a catalogue will be the only way we can find it.

Four new linocuts by Laurence Bell

I know there is more than one reader who collects the colour linocuts made by Laurence Bell. These images may not be new to them but they are new to me so I decided to put them up to augment the examples that have already been posted on the blog.  The windmill above reminds me of the work of E.C.A, Brown and the clogs worn by the woman in the print below means the subject is French. (For readers who are not British, clogs were only worn in England in the 1920s by northern mill workers and I don't believe they were all wood like those in the picture).

The photos are not all square but the colours look right and the one above has a title The shepherdess. Sometimes it is not easy to work out what Bell was intending but the more we see of his work, the more it all starts to make sense. The titles do not always give very much away and the tones he uses are deceiving and make everywhere look like the veldt (though admittedly some prints are of South African subjects)

Russet and blue (above) is better known but is included here because for the first time we have a title for it. The one below I have never seen before and despite the high colour, I assume the subject is Sussex (in common with the one at the top) as the trees are English elm. His use of strong colour has the effect of making the places he depicts look generic but I have come to the conclusion Bell usually worked from the subject as he did with 'The Mermaid' tavern at Rye.

There are a number of tree prints that have a samey feel, including the one below sent to me only today by another contributing reader from Chicago and who did not hang around. If you only have one or two things by Belll, it hardly makes any difference how many elegant trees there are, though note the difference between the elms and the French poplars. This is a particularly good one and a good photograph as well. It presumably shows Chateau Gaillard and may have been online before but these things come and go, so it always a good idea to replace them when they do.

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Classic British colour woodcuts for sale at Banbury

 

It is not often we are presented with a good choice of colour woodcuts in a single sale but the forthcoming auction at Banbury has an old collection of prints put together with care and good judgement. All seven come in their period frames and some have well-known dealers from the 1920s like Redfern, Bromhead and Abbey Galleries on the back.  I say this partly because the labels suggest the prints were bought framed but mainly because I prefer the way prints were placed in good-sized mounts at that time. Apart from the Arthur Rigden Read, the frames themselves are not up to much (and one has bowed outwards).

                                                                           

Heading the post is Rigden Read's bravura early masterpiece from 1923. Here is one of the most irresistible of all British colour prints with Kathleen Rigden Read in a sumptuous golden shawl worn over a plain linen shift, presumably of her own making. Read has dated the proof 1924 but that was the year it was pulled. It first appeared the year before. It has a large area of unprinted paper and this may have led to many proofs being discoloured. The one you see at the top is not the one in the sale. You can see that above. So far as I can see this one is in good condition and has been housed in a sympathetic frame.

The downside to many prints by Read is firstly they are small and secondly he often used drab colours in order to team up with the vegetable dyes his wife was using for her fabrics. The Venetian shawl was made before they held joint exhibitions and stands out, even though it is remains quite small. My mother had my own proof on loan for many years and everyone who came into the room for the first time commented on it. Read was a showman and that characteristic is to the fore here. This is not to say that Allen Seaby's owl does not have the necessary sense of drama but his theatricality was different. Read was just as observant as Seaby the naturalist. What Seaby has on offer in this print is poetry. Half-owl, half-ghost, what you have here is Seaby's presiding spirit, the constant search for what is always absent. 

The auctioneers give the title as 'The owl'. This must be wrong. To begin with, Seaby was a dedicated ornithologist and would have said it was a barn owl. Secondly, he made two similar but different prints of barn owls. One was more the work of the naturalist, the other more expressive. Regretfully, these are two of the only prints of Seaby's I have no record for. His output of about 100 colour woodcuts is too large to catalogue easily and the only records I have are the exhibition dates for the Graver Printers.

In 1910, Seaby exhibited fourteen colour woodcuts alone at the Graver Printers. This was the society's first exhibition and Seaby already had many prints in hand, including one entitled Lapwings. As with his barn owl, Seaby had two tries at the same subject and also made a print of young birds, which the National Gallery of Scotland call 'Lapwings' too. With no proper catalogue being available, the confusion is understandable. Seaby rarely put titles on a print. What you can see bottom left is the edition number. My guess is the one you see here is the first one and the better known one with the birds facing the opposite direction is Lapwings prepared for the Graver Printers exhibition of 1910.

For all the effort Walter Phillips put into making colour woodcuts, I remain unenthusiastic. Even so, his strong links with north America make him sought after over there and I have no doubt Norman Bay no 2 will be pricey. Phillips liked to present himself as a backwoodsman who taught himself how to the make colour woodcut by dint of his own ingenuity and hard work. This is tosh but Phillips was an able journalist with a regular column who could present himself as he wished. He was as earnest as Seaby (who was also a friend) but lacked Seaby's broader interests and his sense of humour. His prices are commensurably high without being an out-and-out joke. 

John Hall Thorpe on the other hand has had his day, partly because people are better informed about colour woodcut than they were ten years ago and partly because the fashion for art deco has died the death. All this will should make Cowslips and Forget-me-nots affordable and, I will admit, I was tempted recently by Marigolds mainly because it was still housed in its original frame. It is a glorious decorative print and was the first colour woodcut I owned but I decided against. If I found these two in a junk shop for £1.50 (as I did Marigolds) I would buy them. But that will not bring the 1970s with all its fads and bargains back. They are gone for good. And so is John Hall Thorpe.

While Seaby's Lapwings was hanging on the wall at the Goupil Gallery on Regent St., a twenty-two year old called Yoshijiro Urushibara was giving demonstrations of colour woodblock printing beyond even Seaby's capability in Shepherd's Bush. Only eighteen years later he became one of only four colour woodcut artists to ever have a solo exhibition of prints in London. (It says a good deal about what we have here that the other three were Hall Thorpe, Phillips and Seaby). Grasshoppers was among the exhibits at the Abbey Gallery in 1928 and provides firm evidence of the breadth of his work by the age of forty. One of the most thoroughly Japanese of all his many woodcuts, the series of images and his prominent signature are played off one against the other in a virtuoso display of nuance. Nowhere in the annals of British art has the relationship between image and calligraphy been so well made (unless we take his Crayfish into account as well). But where the detachment of Crayfish  is unnerving and creepy, Grasshoppers introduced collectors to the muted colours of the 1930s a good two years before the decade began. And if that doesn't sell it to you, nothing will.

The sale will be held at Holloways Auctioneers, Banbury, on 2nd September, 2023. There should be a follow-up post regarding prices once the sale is over.

The curious rise of S.G. Boxsius

Clive Christie recently suggested to me that S. G. Boxsius was 'an artist for uncertain times'. Readers who have been round long enough will know that Clive can be relied on for such perceptive remarks. What he said certainly made me stop and think.  A part of the appeal of Boxsius is his sense of place and small scale sensibility. It doesn't matter where he goes, from St Paul's Cathedral to the quay at Looe, he tends to make it his own. It is always England and it is often momentary but whether it is a sudden shower or the heat of midday, there is always an ongoing conversation, sometimes literally.

This does not explain why Boxsius prints have been turning up first in Britain and now in the U.S. I heard only today from a relieved reader, telling me the proof of The black bull he had purchased had arrived at his home and turned out to be a loose sheet in good condition ( aside from a poorly attached hinge). But there is more. The same person tells me Ruins at Walberswick is coming up for sale at J. Garrett Auctioneers in Dallas on 10th September.  I have known about this print for quite a few years but until this year, I had never seen it. Now good images have turned up twice. As for The black bull, until this year, I don't believe any of us had even heard it. Suddenly there are two. As for the one in South Africa, how did that get to be there?

 

This doesn't look like a blip. If it means there is growing interest and that prices have risen, well, it has not been an overall disaster as both myself and readers have discovered in the past month or so. What all this means is there is an opportunity to buy and build a small collection and frankly it hardly matters what you buy. On the whole, what you pay will average out and although there is the odd dud, Boxsius was not only a proficient artist, he had a vision of England and its coast and buildings, holidays and days out that is coherent. This means everything you buy will fall into place and the more you have the more will be revealed.

As it happens, I was in Pershore in Worcestershire today and Ian Pugh the second-hand bookseller there mentioned Tenbury Wells which lies on the other side of the county. This was where Boxsius died and frankly nowhere could have been better. Like Winchelsea and Devon or Spitalfields and Kew, Tenbury Wells is Boxsius country. But then, every now and again, I look out from the train and there it is once more, Boxsius country, that curious land of uncertain light and certainty of purpose.

The colour woodcuts of Winifred McKenzie

I heard last week from a reader in Scotland about a proof of Winifred McKenzie's colour woodcut Waterfall (third from top) from 1935 coming up for sale in Edinburgh. Like the rest of McKenzie's colour prints, Waterfall  is rare and shows what kind of work from the 1920s and 1930s is still appearing at auction houses in Scotland. No-one expected it to be cheap but at about £500 it was not expensive either. 

One of the big gains in recent years has been the appearance online of good quality photographs on auction house websites. Online auctions also mean that many images that were sold by means of printed catalogues are also coming up online nowadays. This means it is time for a second look at McKenzie mainly because there is more to show you on this post than the one I put up some years ago.

As with Hans Frank, it will be the earlier woodcuts that will figure in the post. To be honest, I just prefer them. I suspect the early ones show the effect of linocut on her woodcuts while the later woodcuts may be more in line with the wood-engravings she began to make a little later. McKenzie enrolled on the teacher's diploma course at Glasgow School of Art in 1923. Chica MacNab graduated from the same course two years later and was offered a job teaching a relief printmaking class in conjunction with the intalgio class taken by Charles Murray. I am never sure exactly when MacNab resigned. I think it was in 1927, so there must have been a number of students who took her class but McKenzie and Ian Fleming are the only artists I know of for sure.

What is interesting is that Fleming was more influenced by Murray and McKenzie by MacNab. She did not take to Murray (who drank) and I have not seen any monochrome prints from her Glasgow years. A shame because Murray was a good printmaker and Fleming did some exceptional work after studying with him. McKenzie herself made her black-and-white prints after taking MacNab's advice and studying wood-engraving with her brother, Iain, at the Grosvenor School.

So far as I know, there are no colour linocuts surviving by either McKenzie or Fleming but I assume they made use of the medium simply because they adopted a pared-down style for their colour woodcuts. Notably, neither made much use of the keyblock while their work at the time had a lot in common with MacNab's faux naif style. I may of course be wrong about lino. McKenzie complained about the expense of materials for making colour woodcuts and said when her costs were taken into account, she hardly made any money. This may help to explain why there are so few colour prints by her; it doesn't explain why she didn't turn to lino instead.

From the top, the prints are Evening in France, Ben Lui (1933) Waterfall, unknown, Valley of the Dee (1928) Devon valley (1937). Valley of the Dee is the only one I can be sure she made while still a student. It is the most Japanese of the lot but could not be anyone else. Evening in France is reminiscent of MacNab and I assume was also made while McKenzie was at the school of art. Whether the early prints are a bit too samey, may be down to taste. Ben Lui is the one I would go for myself. It has also been remarked that her work has a lot in common with Ian Cheyne's but that may only be because both were influenced by the same range of Japanese prints. It has to be said McKenzie never achieved the same imaginative mastery as Cheyne in work such as Beeches at Glen Lyon.

What she also lacked was Cheyne's sense of place. This is what gives artists like Eric Ravilious and S.G. Boxsius their coherence. What they saw around them remains recognisable to this day. Like McKenzie, neither ever trained on fine art courses but had the kind of unique vision we associate with all good artists. I tend to think she took a wrong turn with wood-engraving. In the end, colour prints of the period (whether on wood or lino) have proved to have greater staying-power and kudos. Ironically, I tend to think the same thing about the engravings of Murray, Fleming and Robert Austin. What McKenzie might have achieved if she had stayed the course, no one now can say.

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Print & prejudice: Ethel Kirkpatrick at the V&A

 

The V&A South Kensington cannot have heard about the Ethel Kirkpatrick Society (and perhaps you haven't either). To curators at large institutions like the V&A, artists like Kirkpatrick have been mislaid. But we can let that pass. She was included in a small exhibition of women printmakers at the V&A which closed on 11th May this year. If you missed it (as I did) you can see some of the highlights on the website under  'Print and prejudice: women printmakers 1730 to 1930' where you will find the best reproductions of her work I have yet seen, including Bowl of marigolds from 1922 and Mount's Bay (1914). 

The V&A have done her some justice but the scholarship is poor. Kirkpatrick is all over Modern Printmakers and they only had to get in touch to find out the dates.  The research Alan Guest did in the 1980s on Kirkpatrick (when she really was being rediscovered) was as meticulous as the museum's photography. Getting dates and titles right are basic to appreciation of an artist's achievement. Trying to suggest Kirkpatrick was in some way hard done by is not.

Alan was fortunate enough to own a proof of Bowl of marigolds and believed it was a linocut. He could be right. The V&A themselves have a series of proofs of Brixham trawlers (1924) pulled by Kirkpatrick and donated by her in 1924. (They are now available online but seeing is believing). The way she achieved her subtle depth of colour by canny under-printing is an education in itself. There are also progressive proofs donated by William Giles and John Hall Thorpe at the same time and for the same reason. Giles had been both a student and a teacher at the Royal College (next door to the museum) and knew how useful such examples could be.