Modern Printmakers

Yes, I know it's only Wednesday but Clive (who will be well-known to many readers for The Blog That Vanished - I mean, of course, Art and the Aesthete,) tipped me off about a number of colour prints up for sale on US ebay and here are some of them. I post them now just in case anyone has some spare cash and wants a Walter Phillips, because Sunday coming would almost certainly be too late.

Now, Phillips was without doubt an excellent printmaker and Above Lake Louise even appeals to me. It comes in its original folder with a foreward by the artist, as sold by the Woodcut Society in 1945. This society was nothing of the sort. It was set up by a mid-western businessman in the thirties to sell unique prints mainly by US artists and, as I say, this one comes with an introduction by the man himself written in the way that only he knew how. He manages to position himself somewhere between aesthete and backwoodsman but behind the imaginative persona is someone who knew what he was talking about and what he has to say about the nature of a colour woodcut as a print rings true.

Four more days to go and it currently stands at $255. It won't stay there much longer. I should also add that the image I show here is not the one for sale. Here Phillips has tried (so far as a pc monitor will let me tell) to express the conditons he worked in as he sketched. There is a sense of spontaneity here, not something you would normally associate with colour woodcut. Unless, of course, it is the work of Phillips' old friend, Allen Seaby.

This image of The lady in black by Arthur Rigden Read is also not the one for sale. The one that is up for auction has toning as the trade like to say. It's an anodyne term for a nasty phenomenon, an overall browning that has affected at least one other Read I know of - my own. Because toning is usually even, I suppose it's not so bad. Even so, condition is everything for works on paper and personally I don't think anyone should consider bidding a $300 for this, certainly not if they have read Phillips' introduction to his own print where he compares colour woodcut to fresco.

Bringing up the rear is the hapless Ernest Watson with one of those linocuts that display considerable energy to no great purpose. The cove could be one of those prints showing Cornish scenes. I posted his image of Mousehole on the colour woodcut tour of Cornwall. Probably readers will realise that whatever I say, I wouldn't bother posting any of these prints if I didn't have some kind of regard for the artist. Watson's boldness I can't help but like and admire. Whether it's $100 + worth of boldness, I wouldn't like to say. It currently comes with those infamous red letters reserve not met. I wonder what that reserve could be.

Many thanks to Clive. For all those who miss his blog, he is still out there, informative and inquisitive as ever.

What we know so far about the early training of Ethel Kirkpatrick is sketchy and but she had begun to paint in watercolours early in her career when studying either at the West Kensington Schools (which soon became the Royal College) or the RA Schools in London and then at the Academie Julian in Paris. Watercolours by Kirkpatrick are not so easy to come by and so I was very fortunate to have this earlyish watercolour Boats at rest sent to to me by Clive Christy.

It provides a number of clues, not least that her interest in maritime subjects began early on. Funnily enough, the patterns and dark colours also suggests to me the way her interest in enamalling and jewellery might have developped. The watercolour dates from 1894 three years before she took a course in jewellery at the Central School in London. It shows part of the pilchard fishing fleet at Newlyn in Cornwall. (You can see the lighthouse at the end of the pier to the left of the larger vessel).

The date is interesting. 1894 was the year Lily Kirkpatrick moved to St Ives. It's generally assumed that Lily was a member of the larger clan Kirkpatrick. They were landed people from Coolmine on Dublin Bay but Ethel had been born in London. Her father had joined the British Army, was wounded during the Indian Mutiny and eventually joined the prison service. Over the years Ethel did time at Coldbath, Exeter, Wormwood Scrubs and most notoriously at Newgate. By 1894 Captain Kirkpatrick had had a house built at Harrow-on-the-Hill near London. Curiously, a studio for his two artist daughters had not been included in the plans. Ethel and Ida soon put this right. One was built after his death in 1896. It's been suggested that the sisters moved back to Harrow after the death of Lily in 1902. I somehow doubt this. Ethel was studying weekly at the Central School during the autumn and winter of 1897/1898 and the watercolour itself was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1895.

Another maritime piece follows on (made presentable by one of the members of the Ethel Kirkpatrick Society) but I don't want readers to assume Kirkpatrick was a maritime artist, straight and simple. She may have relied heavily on boats and water for her later colour woodcuts but she also painted figure subjects. Her Cornish Floral Dance finds her working in the style of Thomas Gotch. I think she was a more flexible artist than she might appear at first glance. Basically, we still know very little about the range of her work - even the colour woodcuts, which she is best known for today. I came across a new one to me called Thames Barges only on Friday. This is why it was so good of Clive to send his image on. It extends what we know about her work. And that was what was important to her.

Nor is there a simple jump between her watercolours of boats and the colour woodcuts. The earliest woodcuts depicting sailing boats that I know of appear to date from about 1912. This date is also significant. Generally, there had been no real opportunity for British artists to exhibit their colour woodcuts until the formation of the Society of Graver Printers in Colour in 1909. Nor was Kirkpatrick a founder member. (In fact, none of the leading colour woodcut artists were in at the beginning). But the opportunity to exhibit may well have led her to interpret some of her watercolours.

But there are subtle differences between the paintings and the prints. She continues to group boats together but there are fewer of them and, by and large, they often occupy a restricted space within the picture. She didn't believe in making it difficult for herself. Virtuoso printmaking of the kind practiced by William Giles (and he was very good at it) and John Platt was not for Kirkpatrick. The outgoing fleet is fairly complicated so far as her seascapes go. But what she loses in impressiveness, she gains by way of expression. Look at the way the boats and their sails turn with the wind and the water. This is what she was about. (One of her titles was With wind and tide). She is no formalist; she describes. Her watercolour training, the way she observed and sketched what she saw, led to the later colour woodcuts that she was proud of, the ones like Early morning Venice, Mount's Bay and a blue version of The outgoing fleet, that she gave to the nation. All of the six depict boats but all the scenes are different. The poet in her was at work, from London to Cornwall to Venice. She didn't let colour woodcut become too laborious for her, she let it set her free.

[I include Hiroshi Yoshida's Morning at Abuto as Klaus refers to it in his comment below].

Claude Flight had a nice line in pithy sayings. 'I am a lone figure, belonging to no school' was one of his most self-conscious. Ironically, the modern print industry has nevertheless attached his name to one very famous school. I mean the Grosvenor. He worked there weekly, for no more than four years, between 1926 and 1930, but his life and career have largely been subordinated to it by people who have one of two things in mind: their own careers or their bank accounts. Fortunately, his linocuts, like the one above, are as radical as those things are conventional.

I very much like the way you can read almost everything that has happened on the sheet of paper. He even put the price on them although the photographs don't show the £2 - 2s - 0d. This was alot more more than the average man's daily beer Flight claimed his prints might cost (unless he knew alot of average with way-above-average alcohol habits, that is) but then he certainly wouldn't be a lone figure when it came to fatuous remarks. The top sheet, as you can see, isn't even square. Nor is the print. The overprinting is smudged way beyond the image - if you can actually say where the image ends. Interconnection, though, is the name of the game. The figures become part of some unseen field of force that appears to include their environment. There is an even more remarkable attempt to define the second image by ruling lines with a pencil, the whole approach as outlandish as it was deliberate. Why?

Again, ironically, it was the whole commercial printmaking set-up that he had in his sights. His prints are quite simply the exact opposite of the fine etchings of the period that cost so much and meant so little. I won't name names, but the whole thing basically was a racket.

It's hard to say whether Flight was conscious of that other lone prophet, crying in the wildnerness. He had joined the Seven and Five Society alongside other artists with a modern outlook in 1923 but was subsequently eased out when the advanced Ben Nicholson began to insist on abstraction for all. Flight must have found it galling to discover that prints like the one above were not modern enough.

Clearly, it was easy enough, even at the time, to pick holes in Flight. The Studio never published one of his prints, denigrating them as design. (They showed rugs by Flight and Gertrude Lawrence instead). His aesthetics were in tatters before he had even put pen to paper. He took exception to Frank Morley Fletcher saying lino could not produce 'a beautiful surface' but viewed prints from a press as 'deplorably mechanical' and 'works of art of a very low order'. But, in the end, it was the example that he set that was perhaps as important as the prints that he made. By all accounts, he was a charismatic teacher who obviously brought out the best in many students. Sybil Andrews said that making the prints were by no means as straightforward as Flight liked to make out, and the work of some of his students at least ended up looking alot like him. Yet I wonder how many of them actually stuck their tissue images to an olive-green backing mount so the green might show through as he did with Trawler down the wave, above. It's a real shame you can't see this in the photo. It looks much better without its mount, than it does enclosed. And as soon as you see it in front of you, all the clap-trap is forgotten (if not entirely forgiven).

The British artist, John Austen (1886 - 1948) is best known as a prolific illustrator of books throughout the 1920s and 1930s, but he also made a small number of wood-engravings and some striking decorative linocuts like Cythera (above), which provides the necessary contrast to the prints I had a look at in the last post. If Flight's early linocuts are twenties bohemia through and through, then Austen's, which date from about 1930 on, are thirties to the core.

He was the son of a carpenter at Buckland near Dover, but decided against following in dad's footsteps and took the road to London instead, to train as an artist. Where, I do not know, but by the time he was twenty-five he was living in Eltham in south-west London working as a designer and illustrator for a correspondence course. (Interestingly enough, EA Verpilleux was doing something similar at the time in west London). He married Ruby Thompson when he was thirty-three, and I am told that Thommy provided the model for this beautifully polished pen-and-wash, as she did for many other figure-subjects. Years before, Henry Tonks at the Slade School had asked his students to spend less time looking at The Yellow Book and more time in the National Gallery. Looking at the way he had both Italian quattrocento and 1890s draughtsmanship off to a T, I think Austen must have done both.

Everywhere he went, he seemed to absorb the styles of others like the proverbial sponge. He is the classic imitator who originates. Quite alot has been said about the influence of Aubrey Beardsley in his early work. This may partly be because the illustrations for Hamlet, and similar work, are what people like and know. But there is more to him than that. The masks he used have a formal rectitude Beardsley wouldn't have been bothered with. What he really learned from Beardsley wasn't so much the decadent manner as it was to make the human figure central to the design.The well-lit skull wouldn't be out of place in a contemporary fantasy comic. It might be dead, but it is modern.

What appeals to him almost everywhere he goes is classical art. Sometimes the approach is direct, sometimes the approach is by way of the C18th. While some contemporaries like Ronald Grierson attached classical odds and sods to their linocuts, Austen tries and explores the world they come from. I specially like this wood-engraving made for Aristophanes The Frogs in 1937. Its roots are in the work of Thomas Sturge Moore, who he would have known as a contemporary of Beardsley but its workmanship and sense of authenticity are modern as well.
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He is always professional, adapting styles and techniques, but always to the back of him is a rigourous training and an an eye for the formal qualities of art. The female figure is also a major theme. Even when he depicts Sir Galahad, the unmistakeable features of his wife appear above the suit of armour. Hamlet's large eyes and little chin must belong to her as well. But the one I couldn't resist posting is the witty interlude below.

His interest in the details go hand in hand with his sense of authenticity. For instance, the perm is quite sensational but are nothing compared with the headlamp eyes. The boundary between observation and imagination is as fine here as it is with many of contemporaries. Like Edward Bawden and Edward Ravilious, he trawled backwards in time, picking up the styles he needed. What surprises me is that he could make such a good linocut as Cythera and still not be known for work like that. Quite simply the editions weren't big enough. (I also want to add that professional photography doesn't always do linocuts like this justice. The camera and the lighting fail to pick up the hand-made feel that makes them exciting and human.)

We don't really know enough about his career to say why he failed to make more prints but he left London after an illness in the late twenties, I think, and the couple went to live at various rural spots in Kent that included an oast-house. These are the kinds of details we have. In the last years of his life he shared poor health with his mentor, Aubrey Beardsley. Unable to work, he was placed on the Civil Pension List and died at 62. I don't have a very good image of the messenger-god, Hermes but I wanted to include another print. It's probably Thommy again in disguise, anyway.

It was certainly hard to know where to stop with John Austen, but I decided on this final colour image of an exhausted artist from 'The gods are athirst' and a small, uncompromising self-portrait made in 1930. Notice the similar downward, inward-looking gaze. But then as someone else said, don't miss the pair of slippers either.

Finally, there are two sites I have to acknowledge as very useful sources: firstly, Jim Vadeboncoeur's 'Illustrators' based at Palo Alto, and then Brian Austen's 'Austen Families' at Hobart.

Thanks also to Keith (aka grumpyangler) for additional biographical info.

One day some time around 1922, a student at Birmingham Central School of Arts and Crafts found a copy of Morley Fletcher's Woodblock Printing in the library and decided to have a go herself. (I am assuming the student was a woman). She found a cherry block (not in itself an easy thing to do so she must have been determined) and set about making a print. Presumably this got to the ears of someone with connections and Yoshijiro Urushibara himself was invited up to Birmingham to show the students how.

The effect was immediate. A colour woodcut mania set in. And Alice Coats, who came from Handsworth and studied at Birmingham between 1922 and 1926, must have been amongst the students who went on to found the Central School of Colour Woodblock Engravers in 1923. Her view of St Phillip's churchyard in the city centre is one of her uncommon early woodcuts. November is also that uncommon thing, an English colour woodcut with a realistic urban subject. It's also the only colour woodcut by her that I've seen. I think printmaking wasn't her main interest at the time. She was there at the school to study illumination and lettering, one of those key arts and crafts courses, that had begun life at Birmingham in 1901 after the success of Edward Johnston's Illumination and Calligraphy course at the Central School in London.

But what is especially interesting about all this are two things: the way the students were encouraged to work with materials (like the cherry block), as Walter Crane had noted years before, and also the initiative shown by them. It was Have-a-Go. And Alice coats did. Woodcut, linocut, etching, wood-engraving - she tried them all. I particularly like the etching of Christmas party mistletoe below. It shows her warming to the subject that was eventually to preoccupy her. Even here, she is studying a plant in its enviroment, even if it is an artificial one. (The trees in central Birmingham are other early precursors of her great interest in botany).

From Birmingham she went to the Slade School and around 1931 put colour woodcut behind her and began making those newly-fashionable linocuts. The last colour woodcut I know of is The new ricks and plants and rural landscape begin to predominate, so far as I can see. There are more of her linocut images available but not enought to come to any great conclusions. But she was taken up by the Redfern Gallery in London, very much a home to the modern linocut movement.

As so many printmakers did at the time, she went into illustration, producing at least one children's book in the thirties and then after the war her classic Garden shrubs of their histories. Not so much is known about her history as yet. This is all that I have. A print like The calf pasture strikes me as much more Iain MacNab than Claude Flight. But Still life with pears shows her capable of a far more modernist take on things than winter in Birmingham. Whatever the medium, though, whatever the style, I get the feeling she never lost sight of her ultimate subject. I will be looking for more.

Edward Bawden once noted, 'One can have too much of Japan,' a sentiment many young (and not so young) printmakers echoed when some key elements of woodblock printmaking went AWOL from their work. The situation was summed up by William Giles himself when he travelled northwards to give a lecture on colour prints at Manchester in March, 1925. He was at pains to acknowledge the surge of talent that had washed across the British print scene and the way artists had simply thrown overboard what others had always seen as a life-line. Yes, it was the keyblock: 'It was a fundamental belief that a black outline was an all-important necessity, a belief based on the fact that it was met with in almost every Japanese colour print'.

His use of almost is important. It also helped considerably that every time students walked into the old Central School building in London they found themselves surrounded by examples of Japanese printmaking in the entrance-hall. They were held up to them as a model and a reference and were therefore hard to avoid. Even so, when Giles came to make his own first print, he made no mention of an outline and because all we have is a newspaper report, it's hard to say how far Giles was being ironic in the lecture. But more importantly, who were the 'many outstanding workers' who had 'appeared with their own individual expression' he was talking about? Giles makes no mention of Arthur Rigden Read, or his Venetian Shawl (above), but he could hardly have missed him. Read took up colour woodcut only in his forties and dispensed with the outline block without even trying. Notice the way he uses both shadow and the grain of the wood to avoid flatness and give a sense of three dimensions.

But Giles made special mention of Yoshijiro Urushibara. 'The finest technician in Europe' he called him. Hard, again, to say how far his words are qualified, but this fine, monochrone version of Moonlight, Bournemouth shows the way a Japanese printmaker might leave off the keyblock to show that one object lies behind another. Urushibara had certainly produced Queen of the Night (below) by the time Giles gave his lecture. No keyblock here, so why use it in the first place?

According to Giles, the keyblock allowed the publishers to make the popular ukiyo-e prints more cheaply. I don't know; but what I do know is he liked and admired the prints of Arabella Rankin (see her post). Her early woodcuts do make use of a fairly blatant outline that enhances the naive quality. Getting rid of the keyblock immediately introduces a tone of sophistication, as it does in The striped rocks, her remarkably advanced print for 1922. All she does is substitute the markings on the rocks and the line of surf to model the objects. In Queen of the night Urushibara had to resort to all kinds of surface markings and fussy outlines (which don't really show up very well here) to avoid flatness. And it ends up looking rather messy and, worse still, a bit pointless.

Another artist he came to know what the Canadian Walter Phillips. The pair had entered into a correspondence as Phillips the perfectionist had struggled to get his prints right. He was so keen to do this that he eventually left Winnepeg and brought his wife and children to Britain where he met both Urushibara and Allen Seaby.

There is plenty of outline even in this Christmas card he sent to Seaby in 1925, soon after his return home, but by the time he made his pom-pom dahlias around 1928, it had vanished. But he was a devotee of the keyblock, being essentially a traditionalist and, in many ways, one very much like Seaby. There were also other younger artists who stuck with the keyblock, notably Ada Collier, herself a student of Giles, Kenneth Broad and Phillip Needell. Anna Findlay made use of the keyblock for her colour woodcuts, then something happened. She took up linocut.

Making a linocut doesn't necessarily mean an artist can do away with outline. It only means they use line in a different way, as does Ronald Grierson in Farm machinery. What we get now are all those racy jagged outlines and heavily defined planes we have come to love so much. But compare Phillips Waterlilies on its side to the Grierson and the differences are not so great. By comparison, Phillip's work is flatter and less dynamic. But what a Grosvenor School linocut gains in a modern sense of structure, it loses in expression. For all Claude Flight's blather about the avoidance of Japanese methods, it was artists like Rankin and Rigden Read who showed the way well before he did. How far they were both influenced by European woodcut example and even by colour linocut is very hard to say.

I'm not a huge fan of Read's The batik scarf but it shows how accomplished he could be with limited means and just how much can be achieved with turquoise and grey. But then he was in his forties by the time he made this in 1924, with alot of experience behind him. As was Mabel Royds. She had experimented as early as Sunspots in 1912, and left out the keyblock altogether, and she certainly made less use of outline from the early thirties on. But what we tend to miss is what we perhaps take for granted. The vitality and eloquence of Royd's cutting was noticed by her contemporaries. Another artist with an individual and expressive use of black outline was Elizabeth Christie Brown but Royds was the only artist at the time to have a keyblock (for Girl and goat) published as exemplary in a book. Here she is still hammering away at her craft in 1927, with that combination of vital cutting, colour and suggestion that makes Read look rather technical, as Giles himself might have said. Malcolm Salaman, who should have given a lecture at Manchester instead of Giles, said the Indian subjects had brought out the best in Royds. I wonder whether these were the kinds of workers Giles himself was thinking about.

At last here is exactly the kind of thing that doesn't come up often enough, namely a good colour woodcut that has started off at next-to-nothing on German ebay simply because the seller has no idea who it is by. In some ways you shouldn't need to read the signature. This print is signed Karl Johne all over. Very few central European printmakers were using such bright colours nor doing trees as well as this, albeit in a conventional way. It's worth having at quite alot more than the derisory bids it has received so far, but then I suspect a small tribe will be waiting on the sidelines to place a bid. It is here on the blog simply so that readers can appreciate a print by an artist who isn't well-known enough and that probably hasn't been seen online before. He has done a tremendous job with a limited number of colours; the varied shapes, the reflections and the perspective all give the print interest. I especially like the way the plants right foreground combine with the precision handwriting. Convincing, well-conceived and very likeable, this view of the Isar nevertheless lacks the atmosphere and panache of Hans Frank's more wintry view across a river.

Just as good (if not better) is Leo Frank's City in the desert, an evocation of the citadel at Cairo at evening time, with the Mohammed Ali Mosque pretending it's on the banks on the Golden Horn. Frank finds himself on British ebay, and I would certainly have had a go at this one, partly because I like Cairo so much, and partly because as Leo goes, I like his use of blue here quite alot. But I'm afraid I like the condition of the print much less. Even by Frank brothers standards, the foxing is spectacular. I assume it was the kind of paper they both used. It seems to be almost endemic, though they would probably have had no idea themselves what would happen to their prints. There is another woodcut by him showing the Pyramids, with the statutory camels, not as nice, but just as badly foxed.

I can see no reason why, but people have already bid on this, and it only went up on British ebay today. Just to show how careful Frank was, I've included one of the many good photographs taken of Cairo long before its citizens took over every available space, including the cemeteries. I think the sand Frank shows may well be poetic licence. I'm not sure the desert ever got that close but I could be wrong. It's interesting the photographer has a better view of the mosque. Frank makes it look cramped but he wisely opts for an open view across the sand. Frank's print says more even though it shows less.

And just so as you know that dealers in Germany do not bother to look and see what other colour woodcuts are for sale on ebay, another woodcut, but this time correctly identified as Johne! This one showing a chapel half-hidden by some lime trees is for sale at 85 €. Again, Johne has got the trees right. Even so, the seller still could only make out half the title. Gratifying to know that even Germans can't read their own writing. You will perhaps also have noticed by now how much both printmakers make use of verticals to break up the sky and divide the image. Frank and Johne also both use paths to connect foreground to background, though Frank is far more subtle about it. (I must bear that in mind).

The to-and-fro of printmakers between New Zealand, Australia and Britain is fairly well-known now but even with an artist as popular as John Hall Thorpe many of the details that make the story worth telling often remain largely absent. Thorpe, of course, was in the self-promotion business and we have to take quite alot of what he has to say about himself with a pinch of salt. The linocut contingent who came to Europe and studied at the Grosvenor School in London now have their reputations dominated by those few months spent working with Claude Flight for a few hours every week. So far as I can make out, Helen Ogilvie didn't relish life in England and the second time she travelled to Europe, notably set up camp in Italy. The even smaller island of Capri suited her better.

How Ogilvie came to make colour woodcuts (see her post) is a blank. And I have only a bit more of an idea of the way Margaret Preston might have begun. Her first formal training was private lessons with William Lister Lister. He had gone off to Glasgow to train to be an engineer but had lately returned to Sydney as a fully-equipped artist. It was a common enough story for men at the time and by the time she was twenty-eight, Preston found herself travelling to study in Munich and Paris in the company of one of her own students, Bessie Davidson. That was between 1903 and 1905, seminal years to be in Paris to study art, and that's for sure.

And in 1912 she was back again in Paris, this time with student Gladys Reynell. The pair only moved on to England after the outbreak of war and even then it took another two years before Preston (and presumably Reynell) became students yet again, this time at Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in south London. I don't know whether it was by chance or by design that this distinguished school was founded where the working-class districts south of the Thames turned almost rural (and had therefore attracted the likes of John Ruskin). But its philanthropical foundation and sense of practicality and outreach to working men and women made it a bastion of the English Arts and Crafts. (Its art gallery opened in the evenings and on a Sunday to allow working people to visit).

I assume that the potter, WB Dalton was still headmaster at the school when Preston studied there but in a way, it doesn't matter. He had been instrumental in getting the ceramics course started, Roger Fry had been a student, and this was one course Preston took, along with basketry. (We are now quite some way from Dufy, Picasso, and Matisse).

The National Gallery of Australia also suggest she took up printmaking here. Like many at the time, she gave etching a try and found it didn't suit her. For her, it was the equipment; for Walter Phillps, it was the mess and, even worse, the smell. She also gave colour woodcut a try. But all of the prints you see here are hand-coloured. Although quite a few of her colour woodcuts exist, I've never seen one anywhere. Significantly, she also had a crack at fabric-printing.

What the tale really is, I don't know, but it intrigues me, I have to admit. But there's something almost retrograde in all this. The facts from Australia are that she began making hand-coloured woodcuts in the early twenties and yet she harks back - to Gaugin, William Nicholson, the Fauves. And her attempts to make use of aboriginal art are irritating. But she went her own way. The earliest print here is Shell Cove, Sydney (third from the top) from 1920. By then, she was back in Australia, making prints and married. She was forty-five.

From then on, she became established. She exhibited with her friend, Thea Procotor, but her joint exhibition with Norbertine von Bresslern Roth and Frances Blair (see her post) at the Grosvenor Gallery in Sydney is one of the shows I imagine walking round. (The catalogue must still exist, surely). I suspect that if she didn't like all the equipment for etching, she would be not much keener on all the tackle she would need to make a colour woodcut. The point is that Australian claims for her as a printmaker are rather far-fetched. She has been roped in for the Japanese method and there is nothing remotely Japanese or method about her work. Not really. Nicholson broke new ground; Royds had the wit to take his example and print everything. Preston, I fear, took the easy way out.

Early on in 1929, Helen Stevenson had four of her colour woodcuts on show at the Bromhead Gallery in Cork Street, London. At the time she was probably many miles to the north, in Scotland, where she was an art mistress. Her subjects were also there, in her much-loved land of Argyll and on the gallery wall beside The coal boat was the work of one of her teachers at Edinburgh College of Art.

Mabel Royd's Boat builders showed by how much the student had gone her own way. Royds' India was the one she remembered from her sketch-books but her boat-builders take up poses as though they were still in the life-class at the Slade where she herself had been a student.

Like Royds, Stevenson worked from watercolour drawings, but her figures are almost always incidents, there to give scale and interest. The wider interest for her was the landscape and we are lucky that one of her watercolours survives to show her sorting her subject out.

The coal boat shows one of the many small vessels that delivered coal to yards and distilleries along the western coast of Scotland. This one is anchored in the stony shallows of Brodick Bay on the Isle of Arran, with the wooded northern shore and the lower slopes of Goatfell shown beyond the boat. (Goatfell was the subject of another woodcut. The conifer planatations that can be seen in the photograph obviously were not there when Stevenson painted the view. It's interesting how much care she took over the skyline.)

I think Stevenson wouldn't have considered the sketch any more than a working drawing, even though she inscribed it to the writer and art historian Georg Brochner a few months after the exhibition had been held. (Ironically, the drawing cost someone four times what the woodcut cost me, even though the print is more satisfying by far). With the print she had made a fairly radical departure and depended largely on shades of brown and the Japanese technique of bokashi (the application by hand of the pigment to the block). I suspect she was already well aware of what the effect would be when she drew the boat. The sketch is what she needed to remind her of the details of boat, clouds and shoreline. She hardly departs from those details, apart from making the stony foreshore more prominent, but what the print gains is an overall control of tone, which the drawing lacks. It is slightly odd, but Stevenson often made colours prominent in this way, most notably with the startling blue in The hen wife. (See her post). By the time she made Gylen Castle, Kerrara the green of the machair, the coastal grassland, is as sumptuous as a late print by Mabel Royds.

This brings us to another type of pasture, the one grazed by William Giles. Where Stevenson makes use of a brush, Giles takes up a pencil. Obviously, I can only make use of any preliminary work that survives so we only see a part of the process, but Giles' main interest first off (notable for a great colour printer) is in form. I like the play-off here between the flock of sheep and the herd of stones and the way he comes to a decision about the scope of the image. It looks as if he only brought in tone after that, with this striking use of a sepia wash.

Even more astonishing was the care taken by his contemporary, Elizabeth Christie Brown, who made many proofs without colour, or with very little. The uncoloured colour woodcut, below, may still be rather genre, but it is genre of the kind that Degas or Seurat just might have made. And it may well be Largs harbour in Ayrshire, but it is seen through a telescope that once belonged to Corot.

Fascinating that both Giles and Brown show how much cross-over there was between early C20th colour woodcutters and artists who only made aquatints and etchings. One way or another, Brown and Giles find the image by building it up in states, the way an etcher would, and colour comes last. In some ways, it wasn't always integral and personally I like the preparatory work by both Brown and Giles very much - alot more than I do the watercolour by Stevenson (and I am a fan of hers). The conception is as different as the final effect.

But as the Bromhead Gallery were showing woodblock prints like Stevenson's the Redfern nearby was showing artists as young as Stevenson but less the teacher training - if, that is, you don't include the Grosvenor School. Very little is know about the formal training Ursula Fookes had apart from atttending Claude Flight's weekly class at the Grosvenor in thetwenties. How far she worked in front of the subject, like the other artists here, is hard to say, but by the time she came to make her design for Washing line in the wind (below) a process of radical selection had taken place.

You only have to take one look at this and know you can ignore most of what Claude Flight had to say about the woodblock method.(And all of it was negative). His style of printmaking required just as much careful planning, as we can see from the intersecting planes and the notations Fookes had to make. It's also fairly obvious from the coloured proof that she had to try out different schemes because the proof is different from the plan, and for all the apparent pzazz, the linocut is no more spontaneous than a woodblock print. William Lethaby years before had made the point that relief printmaking was an excellent form of training because it made the student plan. He avoided any art talk as far as he could. He probably knew the art would take care of itself.

I need to credit Annex Galleries at Santa Rosa, California, for their image of the coal-boat, and also John Shillito for the loan of his Mabel Royds print and preparatory drawings. Many thanks.

Of all the artists who made colour woodcuts, Bror Nordfeldt is the best to play spot-the-influence with. The ironic thing is this: in a period of only about ten years he came up with a style of woodcut that was his own. With his use of fine muted greys and blues and pensive figures, he described a special country - the lost land of memory.

In 1894, at the age of fourteen, he had been taken with his parents from rural southern Sweden to go and live in the great American city of Chicago. The Swedish community there had their own newspaper and he found work as a typesetter. True to the time, he studied art as he worked, in his case at the Art Institute in Chicago, before moving on to the Herter brothers interior decoration business in New York City. This led directly to the the first of his moves back to Europe. In 1900 the firm were to display a mural at the Exposition Universelle in Paris and he was taken as an assistant by Albert Herter, to help with the work of installation.

Herter knew Paris. He had been a student at the Academie Julien where he had made friends with the British artist Frank Morley Fletcher, and there is something almost predestined about the way that Nordfeldt left the Herters and stayed on in Europe. First he enrolled himself at Herter's old academy and next moved on to Britain, to study with Herter's old friend.

Or, so they say. By 1900, Nordfeldt could have studied with Fletcher at a number of places. In a way, it doesn't really matter where. The precision keyblock and flat planes of colour he makes use of in The spinning wheel looks alot more like Sydney Lee than Fletcher. So far as I can see Fletcher taught the selective, expressive cutting that is typical of his best work. You only have to look at the other people he worked with. Mabel Royds, Ethel Kirkpatrick, Elizabeth Christie Brown, Allen Seaby all follow on from Fletcher in their own way. The spinning wheel is an odd mix of Fletcher's print Reading (no, not the place), John Dixon Batten, Lee, Mary Cassat and French realism (and probably lots of other things, as well). The facts are that Batten, Lee, Fletcher, Royds and Brown were already artists and were far from being merely students. Nordfeldt arrived in England when the word was spreading and they were learning from one another.

The word went down as far as Cornwall. I don't want to imply that any of these sea-scapes are Cornish. He is well outside of the British topographical tradition and never identifies the scene, but true to form he seems to have picked up something else in Cornwall: another artist's name (he sandwiched it between the ones he already had).. Julius Olsson may well have sounded Swedish, but he came from Islington and moved down to Cornwall in the 1880s, became an expert yachtsman, and set up a school of painting at St Ives. He had one great subject: waves. I'm assuming Nordfeldt took Lee's example and went down to St Ives, where he studied with Olsson, and was impressed enough to put their names together.

From Cornwall and England, he moved on to the coast of western Sweden, but by 1903, the year he made The long wave, he was back at home in Chicago where colour woodcut would have been a novelty. Arthur Wesley Dow was the only other artist making them in the US at that time, and he was way out on the east coast (see his post). Like Dow, Nordfeldt began to teach the technique. One of his students, Mary Colwell, also appears to have worked in Cornwall. You can see her Cornish coast below. Her early work is quite alot like her teacher's.

And there is more of the Olsson effect on colour woocut with Lee's The bay, St Ives (bottom). If my own mixed feelings about Nordfeldt and his work have come through in this post, I will also say that, if nothing else, the addition of these two last prints do suggest one more thing: Nordfeldt saw more than waves in Olsson, he recognised the surging vision.

Of all the British artists who ever made a colour woodcut, Kenneth Broad is the most informative (and I say this in the face of fairly strong opposition from the likes of Allen Seaby and Ethel Kirkpatrick). I couldn't find a better example to show you what I mean than this photographic study of Broad at work in the fields. It's the architect-artist on default setting: the use of strict perspective, the interest in contemporary dress, the almost anonymous face, the trees - all these things find their way into his small masterpiece The New Fair, Mitcham and I would find it hard to believe that Broad hadn't posed the photo himself, probably for his wife Mary to take, simply because there is a similar photograph taken from the other side - you can just see his painting clobber beyond the stool, including his Army small pack ( a very blokish touch).

Broad's prints are often like Hogarth's. They tell you alot. The photo is equaly calculating: not only is this what he looks like (more or less) it also shows what he is painting, and where the subject stands; it says he sketches outdoors and sits well back from his subject. On many of his crowded scenes there is empty space in the foreground where Broad has set up his collapsible easel and stool and set to work. He isn't avoiding the crowd; he only wants to get it all in. There is the same wide view in A Sussex Farm (see Kenneth Broad Town & country) even though there are only clothes without people in that woodcut.

Both prints date from 1925 and The New Fair, Mitcham almost certainly comes second because he couldn't have made the print before 12th August, 1925. That was the day Mitcham Fair opened at its new site on Three Kings Piece. It was less Broad's job to imagine than to record and he would have been there to see for himself. He had already made a print of Mitcham Fair at its old site in the town in about 1922 and, if nothing else, the move to a new site offered Broad the chance to tackle the subject again. This second print shows exactly what kind of person he was. It is a considerable improvement on the earlier work. Some time in 1922, he hit his stride and by the December of 1925 all of the prints were for sale at his one-man show at the Macrae Gallery on Fulham Road in London. This was something unusual in itself. A Sussex Farm also found its way to the Seventh International Printmakers Exhibition at the Los Angelese Museum the following spring. But the Mitcham Fair print is as typical of Broad as you can get. Even so, the two prints hang together in my mind.

The image on my previous post is probably more faithful, but the one you see here comes from Broad's own collection, and may well be the exhibition copy he used at the Macrae. (It's 5/150). I don't care whether Edward Loxton Knight's print Goose Fair, Nottingham, which came up on ebay recently, is more obviously attractive and displays more flair, I think Broad is better. It is more interesting and more skilled. Broad sits firmly on his stool inside the craft tradition. He spent some of his spare time poking around the tidal gravel banks along the river Thames, collecting worked flint tools. That was the kind of craft he liked - the durable. The same went for his collection of old forged iron. Broad's work is also durable. The New Fair, Mitcham also pre-dates the Loxton Knight by three years and it's certainly interesting that Knight used much the same organisation for his print. With Broad it is: foreground, crowd, striped tents, then sky while Knight has: foreground, fair, suburb, sky. The use of the shapes of trees and smoke to link the areas is striking in Knight's woodcut but what Broad uses to divide up and also connect the picture vertically is original and more difficult. I mean those red and white posts of his.

If Knight loaned Broad's idea, then Broad I would think was in hock to a great master he would have seen in the National Gallery - take a look at Paolo Uccello's Battle of San Romano. Why the striped posts were there in his print, I still have no idea. I mean, I don't know what purpriose they had in reality. He also uses them in Mitcham Fair and he obviously likes them alot. They attract him but he also makes use of them, they are jusrt as much found-objects as the flint axeheads. Knight ends up, as he he so often does, looking like a maker of patterns. Broad's approach is more vigorous and more objective, not perhaps qualities we necessarily associate with colour woodcut. But the striped posts are useful in another way. From very early on, including in the first Mitcham Fair woodcut, Broad had a strong liking for red and bright pinks. Of all his work, though, The New Fair, Mitcham is his most subtle effort with dark red. In the print below, he rather overdoes it.

But for Kenneth Broad, August arrives in two different ways. Completely unlike A Sussex Farm, the colour scheme for the fairground is largely unrealistic. That first print does without a keyblock and so softens everything to gain the effect of an early summer morning. In the second print, only the clothes tell you it is August; the sky says it's November. Taking two such complementary but very different approaches to the same time of year shows just how modern Broad was in his approach. In Sussex, he expresses summer, but at Mitcham it is analysed.

The architect in him is never far away but in the second Mitcham print, it is very close. The intensity of the use of the keyblock for the crowd make all the people interlock like the structures that his own bees made. (He had eight hives at his house in Rotherfield). And he's interested in some of the most temporary structures people make for themselves. He thinks outside the box. The tents and vans are fairly obvious. More thoughtful and waggish is the pram the young nanny has left behind her. The curves carefully echo the roofing to the traction engine.

I couldn't resist adding this photo taken by the colour woodcut artist, Mercie Lack, of the archaeologists at work on the Sutton Hoo burial site in the 1930s. Like Broad, Lack and her partner were also keen amateur archaeologists as well as exprimenters with early colour print photography. But she appproaches her subject here with as much of a surveyor's eye as Broad does in The New Fair, Mitcham. He cheerfully adapts the stripey posts to make giant surveyors poles out of them, no an obvious humourist, but as with many things in Broad, humour is there if you look. The only reason artists like Broad remain under-rated and misunderstood is because no one knows their work. Prints lie in boxes in print rooms. Broad, for better or for worse, also threw in his lot with the colour woodcut crowd. As an artist, he may have seen himself as a watercolourist, first and foremost, but his prints provide his most original contribution and in the end he has found himself keeping company with everyone from William Giles to John Hall Thorpe. It limits the way we look at him and for someone as much an individual as Kenneth Broad, it just means that we miss out in the end.

But there is still more. Overlooking the whole human project at Mitcham, we also find Broad the botanist at work. The feathery tree taking up a quarter of the image is one of the black poplars that grow on the common. I'm not sure whether it is a native or hybrid black poplar, but I assume that Broad knew what it was. He was too well-informed not to. There are also trees on The Forest at Nottingham but they are plane, lime and oak and look nothing at all like the elegant creatures in Knight's work. Broad is more subtle by far. In describing, he also suggests. The poetry, like the axeheads, is half-buried.

I want to add that informativeness runs in the Broad family because I am deeply grateful for all the help and information given me by the artist's grandson, David Broad. Without him and his sister, Nicola, there would be almost nothing.

I have a list of thirty linocuts by the British artist Sylvan Boxsius. I have only ever seen sixteen of them and Spring is so hard to reproduce, I can hardly include that: a small ploughman labours over a vast downland field. That is about the best I can say about Spring. Of the rest, one or two may be the same print given different titles; another one is not much more than heresay. Now I can add one more to my list of elusive linocuts because the minute I saw At Walberswick, it became the stuff of legend.

Unlikely colour schemes are, of course, one of the things that attract us all to colour woodcut (and to colour linocut). And at first view, this print happily joins some of the more improbable efforts by William Giles and Allen Seaby. But it also just goes to show that by 1931, when At Walberswick was first exhibited, a convention that included even and unlikely colours did already exist. Even so, by previous Boxsius standards, I think this linocut is both extraordinary and superb. It was quite unexpected and I should have known better. I have already posted the surprising Rouge et Noir (see the post) that uses the same bold bands of colour. It simply proves that it is a mistake to think you know what an artist can do when you have seen no more than fiften or sixteen pictures by them. Spring should have warned me that Boxsius was extending the medium just as much as Claude Flight had been at the Grosvenor School. It didn't.

I sometimes wonder why a man of fifty should start making linocuts. Or even why it should take so long for someone to find the right thing to do. Part of the answer might lie in this print. I assume the woman in the orange kerchief is the artist and teacher Daisy Tuff who Boxsius married when he was already thirty-nine. Colour linocut and woodcut is so well-known for its decorative effects, we hardly expect that sort of personal content, but a number of printmakers did include their wives in their prints. Phillip Needell depicted Anne Needell twice (see his post), William Giles announced his marriage by showing Ada Shrimpton and himself gazing out to sea, I strongly suspect Frank Morley Fletcher included Dolly in at least three prints by him, that Rigden Read made his wife the subject of a number of his prints, and the droll Allen Seaby had Ada hanging mistletoe at Christmas with an uncompromising billhook in her hand. The figure in At Walberswick isn't there just to give scale; she is central to the whole complex structure of the print. I think this is what might give the game away. But what do I know?

This was not the first time the Kissing Bridge had found its way into a woodcut. Sidney Lee tackled the subject years earlier as you can see here. Lee was a habitue of artists' colonies (along with Ethel Kirkpatrick) produced what I think was his best colour woodcut when he made a print showing Abraham's Bridge at Staithes (unfortunately the image is marooned on my old pc). I used to assume the subject of that print was also at Walberswick, but even given the potential for exxagerations of scale that most artists of the period seemed unable to resist when faced with a bridge, I think Lee's colour print must be at Staithes.

I include a couple of old photographs just to shown the way Boxsius approached the subject himself. By comparison, Lee's work is mundane, even if he makes the bridge look like something out of a Japanese garden. As ideas go, that was pretty duff and irrelevant. There is also self-consciousness in the way the photographer in 1919 poses a woman on the bridge without giving her anything to do. The work of Boxsius may well begin with topography but it is only ever a starting-point. Despite the literal title, At Walberswick is a work of imagination. It doesn't really matter whether the details shown in the admirable photograph below conform to many of the details in the linocut, it is what Boxsius makes of them all that counts. He begins with something believable, but ends up with something rare. The whole image moves towards us, as resolute as it is wonky. It is about as far from a postcard view as you can get. It has the dynamism Flight said a linocut ought to have, but it is dynamism without Flight's distractions.

It is also just as formal as a linocut by Flight can be. Like the second photographer, Boxsius shows the old bridge at low-tide when there is greater scope for dramatic effect and submerged detail. But unlike all of the other images here, including Lee's, Boxsius selects, avoiding both the nearby village and Valley Farm and any anecdotal interest. He works with the kind of discipline that he was well-known for as a teacher. Even though Boxsius had spent the previous thirty years or more in schools and colleges, either as a student or a teacher, there is no sense that you sometimes get with teachers, that he was on a production-line. Allen Seaby's later work falls back on formula and his later history prints are uninspired. Fletcher published only three or four prints in as many decades once be began to teach full-time. Even John Platt, that enthusiast for colour woodcut, developped academic dryness, with or without a keyblock. Somehow Boxsius maintained a freshness of vision we associate with naive artists. His own work is not naive, of course. It just pretends.

I also need to thank the reader who sent me this image of At Walberswick. There have been a number of rewarding surprises fro me recently and that certainly was one of them.

I remember going through a pile of things that had belonged to an friend who had died and his executor (who was standing over me) saying, 'There's nothing much in there.' Nothing much turned out to be a woodcut by Ohara Koson and ... well, I took it away with me. And that probably sums up my attitude towards acquiring prints by Koson. Paying a round ten quid at an antiques centre seems about right.

I know very little about Japanese workshop practice but the image you see here lies on the paper in almost the same way as the one for sale on British ebay, so I assume they were printed at the corner of the sheet. The one coming up also has a brown mark which the seller tells me is from old mounting.

That said, I did ponder whether to post this image or not, but good sense tells me that even if the seller hasn't identified the artist as Koson, potential buyers will. I shall stick to beach-combing.

But ebay does have bargains and as it stands this wood-engraving by the British artist Leslie Benenson could well be one. By and large great enthusiasm for wood-engraving is some way behind me. Nor am I a great enthusiast for Benenson's work but that didn't stop me buying her fine Leaping stag from the same seller last week even if there is light damage round the edges of the mount. (You can see the same effect here). Her skill is beyond doubt and at £14.99 you would have a craftsmanlike and satisfying print. I think as much as anything, I just liked the woodland image. But I also noticed all the last four prints I've bought feature animals. So much for judgement. I have a zoo.

There's nothing of the sauve professional about the colour woodcuts by the Scots artist, Margaret Romanes, nor do they come up the way work by Benenson does. Now this is odd, because she is reckoned to have made about 500 of them. The story goes she first saw 'Japanese prints' (as she called them) in the window of a gallery in her home-town of Edinburgh after the first war, and her own prints generally have bird or flower subjects. How satisfying these are, I wouldn't like to say. As one of my readers says, if he paid £125 (and that's the asking price for the Romanes) he wouldn't enjoy it. In this instance, I don't think I would either.

Moving on from the mundane, we come to the iconic - an over-used term but here I think it is apt. Max Kurzweil made this image of his wife in 1903, which makes it one of the earliest of accomplished European colour woodcuts in the modern decorative manner. The snag of course is the sad condition. The seller on German ebay has been wise enough to start off bidding at one humble euro. All the same, someone has sensibly put in a bid. Whoever it is, they will enjoy it more than they would the Romanes, I will tell you that for free.

Last, but far from least, a John Dory by Meryl Watts. In the early 1930s, Watts made some super prints. She also made some peculiar ones. I think I would place this one in the second category. It's an unhappy amalgam of terracotta and turquoise (never my personal favourite) and the cutting on the seabed is banal. I often think once she left the fatherly influence of John Platt behind her, she went astray. All the same, she has acquired something like the mystique that artists associated with the Grosvenor School now have. The style is instantly recognisable. Is that the reason why?

There must be a process whereby an artist becomes an enigma. How it came about for the Scottish printmaker, Elizabeth York Brunton, I do not know, but certainly an enigma is exactly what she has become. For someone with such an individual gift, we should have more on her, but in three years or so, I have turned up only two images. Belatedly, here is a first post on her.

I deduce that she came to colour woodcut late. This was by no means unusual. In fact, her close contemporary, Marion Gill, began to exhibit her first woodcuts the same year as York Brunton, having also studied at Edinburgh College of Art. Unlike Helen Stevenson, who graduated and began to exhibit the previous year, both Gill and York Brunton were in their early forties. But while Gill went on to become a superlative maker of prints in as far as her technique was just wonderful, York Brunton I suspect stayed closer to her teacher's own approach. The expressive cutting and printing you see here can only really follow the example of one person. Unfortunately, I have no proof that it was Mabel Royds. But you decide.

Like Stevenson, she had made a surprising number of woodcuts by early on in her printmaking career and I have to assume that some of them were student pieces. Certainly by 1926 there were at least eleven, all of them in the Japanese manner, and not bad going for someone whose first exhibition date (so far as we know) was 1924. Owls, with its twiggy blue keyblock, may well be one of them. Fairly simple in its structure, there is nevertheless depth of experience in the way she makes us look up and down the picture and note the alertness of the bird and its intensity of vision. (Like so many good works of art, it describes itself).

This follows straight through into two more of her subjects that sit and wait. Again, I am going to make an assumption that this so far unidentified print, is Summer. It is altogether more sophisticated and it has already been pointed how much it has in common with Frank Morley Fletcher's image of a farm at Trepied near Etaples. This one also looks like France to me and presumably describes a scene in a tourist town where people ride carriages for pleasure. If the way the keyblock is used to catch the shadow in the trees and bark is Fletcher, the array of colours, especially the soft peach and turquoise, is Royds. But Royds never has that sense of heat and indolence, even in her Indian prints. York Brunton's work is much closer to the painter who paints out of doors and catches the moment of time in her claws. Royds is just that touch academic by this point. The patterns that the print sets up - the tree trunks, the wheels, the doors, are more subtly French than either of her teacher's work, even though all three of them studied in Paris at one time or another.

Probably kindred spirits gravitate towards one another. But I think I have made enough suggestions for one short post. Over the next month or two I shall be looking at more woodcuts by York Brunton and reporting back. The subjects sound similar: birds or landscape and sometimes both. Enigmatic, yes, and also intriguing.

Thomas Kirkpatrick died only a very few years after he had had a house called The Grange built at Harrow-on-the-Hill in Essex. I did wonder whether it had been named after Edward Burne Jones' house at Fulham and considering Kirkpatrick had two daughters who were making their way as young artists, there was one important thing missing. It was a studio. The year after their father's death, Ethel and Ida (see her post) put this right.

Although Ethel Kirkpatrick's take on home-life in On top of Harrow Hill (see above) is witty and convivial, just as one would expect from someone whose father had been born at Coolmine in County Dublin, the domestic gets short shrift in her work. The nearest that we ever get is a simple bowl of marigolds. If it was wings that interested her near-contemporary, Allen Seaby, with Kirkpatrick it was sails. She did sails like no one else.

It took a few years before she found what she wanted. Moving from Brittany to Chambery in Switzerland and then on to St Ives in Cornwall, she finally began to work around Newlyn in about 1893 or 1894. I've already talked about her watercolour Boats at rest painted that year, but when she learned how to make colour woodcuts, probably only a few years after that, she found a metier that helped make her sails something not just special, but unique. It doesn't come across on a pc monitor, but occasionally her printed boats move across the picture like ghosts being blown along to a seance. She achieves a sense of something unearthly in those prints that no one else quite gets near. Not to my mind, anyway. Of all the artists I have written about here, you need to have one of those Kirkpatricks in front of you to fully understand what her achievement was.

As I've just suggested, she was in the first wave of British artists to learn to make colour woodcuts in the Japanese manner. She was certainly one of the earliest students at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London and must have studied the craft there with Frank Morley Fletcher. For a craft that required such discipline, there was still an emphasis on experiment at the time and Kirkpatrick was one of a few artists who tested the range of the medium in a way that was similar to the approach taken by the Japanse themselves. Alongside Sidney Lee and Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown, she worked on colour variations of her prints. With Lee, if he changes from night to day, nothing much is gained. Brown, as I've said recently, is more subtle. She builds up the image from pure monochrome to strong colour. It wasn't just a change of the time of day with her. Oddly enough, though, there is an early print by Kirkpatrick called The full moon (bottom) where the time of day is so ambiguous, I have still not convinced myself it isn't sunset. I think she was obviously experimenting, even if we only have one version that has come down to us. But for her print An outgoing fleet, we have three. This second, silvery variation is so close in feel to Brown's colourless version of Largs harbour it is hard to believe they didn't know each others work well.

We have to remember that colour printmaking of this kind was something new to Europe in the late 1890s and for me it has become clear that Brown and Kirkpatrick both became interested in the effect of colour, but of all three artists, Kirkpatrick was the most evocative. She doesn't make herself unnecessary work. The images are kept to the centre of the picture and the cutting is often kept to a minimum. What she does excell in is tone. She achieves this not just by her jaunty use of colour, but by the way she applies the medium to the block, and the way she underprints.

She knew what she was doing. The complete set of build-ups she gave to the V&A in London makes that clear. More's the pity the set was for Brixham Trawlers rather than for An outgoing fleet. All the same, it just goes to show the striking lengths she went to to gain an effect that is far from obvious in the final proof. The underprinting, above, is for two trees, believe it or not, in The canal. There is a kind of planning and calculation in her work that is all the more surprising when you consider the effects she wished to achieve. If Allen Seaby once described colour printing as 'a sort of magic', the magic in Kirkpatrick's prints isn't only one of colour, or tone. It is more contrived than that. It is hard to conceive the way she managed to plot colours and shapes in the way that she did and come up with something, as I said earlier on, that is just so purely strange. It's an over-used phrase, I know, but what we sometimes get in Kirkpatrick is a dream-world. Of all the colour woodcut artists, she grasped what she might be done with the medium, in a way perhaps no one else did. She was not just vigilant, she was uncanny.

For an artist of such sweet simplicity, Janet Fisher (1862 - 1926) uses a helluva lot of black. But then she was in good company. Both Mabel Royds and her woodcut model, William Nicholson, also used black to create graphic images that may have looked almost childlike but were, in fact, throughly sophisticated. Unlike either of them, Fisher stayed the course. Her work is almost impossible to date. She was still exhibiting in the 1920s even though she was studying as early as the 1880s. What marks her out is her sensibility.She has abiding interests that show up throughout her career - whatever that period may have been (and I don't exactly know).

And beneath the sweetness, there is an abiding rigour. Images of donkeys and goats, old men and old women, may be appealing, but she approaches almost everything she does with a wonderful sense of colour and form. She was a classicist, pure and simple. Hers are prints that, for all their attractiveness, appeal to the mind, as much as to the eye. The great stone arches of Italy are inherently interesting to her as much as the surviving Greek temples. She is more a contemporary of Roy Lichtenstein than JM Whistler.

I have started off with prints whose subjects are less genre than some of them are, I suppose, just to make this point. But even when her subjects are purely genre, there is no escaping the fundamental discipline behind her work. Those saturated Prussian blues she uses in the print above may well suggest someone who has looked at Hokusai but it was someone who could resist the japonesque. At her best, she is almost above style. Unlike her paintings, her prints make wider claims. In going to Italy, she became a European. She is also a colourist in the way her printmaking European contemporaries were.

To this end, almost no one else requires excellent reproduction to get a proper sense of what she could do. I was very grateful recently to see the photos posted by peninky aka Bellagraphica on ebay. These did her work justice and if you care to compare the old woman bent forward over the fire and Fisher's drawing of the scientist, Sir Francis Gaulton, you may also come to the conclusion that what illuminates them both is the light of the mind. You only need look at the way she takes a difficult viewpoint so that she can study Gaulton's skull.

I suppose what gives me sufficient confidence to say all this is the little I know about her own background and training. Her father had been educated at Oxford before he went into the Church and eventually was made rector at Walton-on-Trent in Derbyshire. In itself, that isn't very mnuch to go on, but it indicates the climate that she grew up in. She was still studying art in her late twenties and didn't attend Hubert von Herkomer's school at Bushey in Hertfordshire untill she was about thirty.

This was a private school run by a famous artist, not along academic lines, but where study was centred on the student as opposed to technique. Von Herkomer, who came from southern Germany, also made etchings and mezzotints, and there was a print workshop at the school. Nicholson's future wife, Mabel Pryde, was a student there in 1891, along with her brother, James, who was soon working with Nicholson as one of the Beggarstaff Brothers. I don't know whether or not she came to know Nicholson, but her prints have more in common with his than with the Anglo-Japanese, as Claude Flight liked to call them. You can see on my Nicholson post that both he and Royds made use of a girl with black and white goats. Ever alert to formal structure, Fisher introduced a row of verticals into her own goat-girl woodcut. She must have known his books. Even so, Fisher was more interested in printmaking than he was and was making them long after he had stopped. She constantly uses black, blue and green because she understands the requirements of graphic art. No one could ever say of her, as they did of the artists who made woodcuts in the Japanese manner, that they may as well have painted in watercolour. She may have been sweet-natured, but she was serious. If some of her subjects are pre-occupied, she looks directly at us.

Thanks are due to Keith aka grumpyangler for additional information about students at Bushey.

I posted on the Canadian artist Mary Wrinch two years ago, and and although I have nothing much to add, I did come across Green and gold (above) some while back on Bill Carl's site and think it's about time I put this irresistible little linocut up on the blog. If in common with so much Canadian printmaking of the period, style wins out over subject, I can still forgive her. The blues and golds would be enough to win me over, but really the surface textures convince me that she really could come up with the goods. I don't know how much it is, but I think it's still for sale.

Also from Bill Carl, this other one, in similar vein, but a more conventional landscape, just about. For blue trees were a convention by the thirties though I'm not so sure about pink ones. This one may also be from Bill Carl. The final print isn't but is still up for sale on ebay in Canada. Not in a style I admire nearly half as much, for US$650, it might be yours. My thanks as ever to William P Carl Fine Prints.

I had to give this post a general theme, I suppose, but really it isn't much more than excuse to string together some favourite photographs of artists at work. They are all connected with the early radical days at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London. I know I keep going on about that place, but there it is.

The first registration for the school took place on 30th October, 1897. No one knew how many students would turn up, let alone that it would become the most influential art school in Europe. The calligrapher with his quill in the compelling and unworldly image, top, is Edward Johnston, one of the first teachers there. His talent was identified with uncanny precision by the principal, WR Lethaby, when Johnston went to enrol as a student but went away with a commission, which was followed by the offer of a job. The photo was taken in 1902, possibly at his rooms at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Note the plain oak Arts and Crafts writing-table.

William Lethaby was one of a group of architects who had played a key role in the Arts and Crafts movement and the societies it gave rise to. This striking portrait of him, above, is by the wood-emgraver, Noel Rooke, who had played a canny role in the revival of British wood-engraving at the school. It had fallen to Sidney Lee to take over Frank Morley Fletcher's class in colour woodcut when he himself had already stopped making them and was moving forward as one of he early exponents of the new wood-engraving. Rooke eventually took over the class from Lee after pushing a Trojan horse into the bookbinding department. That's my reading anyway. I'm not a great fan of Rooke's work but I think this is pretty good, mainly because you can see all the stylised tics of the wood-engravers but with Rooke remaining focussed on the subject.

Morley Fletcher left the class in 1906 and twenty years afterwards made a disastrous move to a private college of arts and crafts at Santa Barbara. I have always assumed this photo was taken in California, partly because of his age, but more because of the ample cut of his short-sleeved shirt. It looks like he has the block for the tree-trunks and their reflections for Waterway from 1904 in front of him. (It's a surprisingly large print). The woodcut to his right is certainly his own California 3, Ojai Valley from 1935. He and his wife, Dolly, moved to Ojai after some time spent living in LA. The portrait makes a great deal out of him as a maker of colour woodcut when he had made only three new prints in all the time they lived in California, California 3 being his last.

May Morris would have been one of his first colleagues at the Central. I'm never quite sure whether she did any actual teaching. She had taken over the embroidery department of Morris & Co at the age of twenty-three after studying at South Kensington (eventually the Royal College) and directed the embroidery class with one of her own students in charge. The photograph was taken about 1890, presumably either at Hammersmith, the family's London base, or at the Morris country house at Kelmscott. Either way, the incidentals are as interesting as the face (and that is very interesting indeed, like her mother's). The exquisite dress, the frolicking wallpaper, the chased picture frame show Morris counselling the very best to us all.

The very idea of Eric Gill (above) working at the same school as May Morris is almost beyond comprehension. He was an early student of Johnston's who was then laying the way for much of modern lettering. While Gill was still in his class, Johnston, who was a Scot, drily described Gill as 'the monumental mason who is making a tombstone for Mr Batten'. (John Dickson Batten had walked into his class with the commission). Gill's workman's tunic and rope belt seem a world away from Morris' beautiful garb and yet he was just as arts and crafts as she was. Perhaps more so.

The Corkman, Robert Gibbings, was a student of Rooke's before the first war and later on a friend of Gill's. Wayward from the start, he had been in danger of frittering away his energies untill Rooke had suggested wood-engraving to him and he took to that with gusto, eventually buying the Golden Cockerel Press at Waltham St Lawrence in 1923. This photograph was taken ten years down the line, in the year Gibbings was to sell up. (He ended up in the late thirties flat-broke and living in the garden shed with his son). But this photo sums up all his virile charm. The ordinariness of his dress again stands in contrast to May Morris' 1890s refinement. He had asked Gill to work on illustration at the press but Gill, as unworldly as the rest of them, had fussily refused on the grounds that Gibbings wasn't a Catholic. Undeterred, Gibbings decided to publish a book of Gill's sister's poetry as bait. Brighton was no match for County Cork.

If Laura Knight thought Staithes in Yorkshire was 'life in the raw', when she moved to Lamorna, she must have thought that was la dolce vita. She would not have been the first, nor would she be the last. Not that life was so cushy for Stanley Gardiner when he first went to live in the lush Cornish valley. He had to live in an old Army hut beside the Wink public house, making frames for other artists.

He had started out a house-decorator in Reading, but had first taken evening classes then won a scholarship to study fine art at the university with our own Allen Seaby. But by the time this portrait by WC Weatherby was painted in 1945, he and his makeshift easel were both firmly planted by the sea.

Nearer to Land's End, there is another cove at Sennen, but less the sub-tropical feel that has captivated so many at Lamorna. I don't know exactly when John Platt found himself there, but I've always found this bird's-eye view one of his most appealing landscapes. The details of the fisherman preparing to take their boats and out and raising the sails as they leave the small harbour are unobtrusively fitted into the complex rhythms set up by all those large shapes along the beach. The would-be engineer and architect are all there is this print to bring the whole thing together. It's the subtle dynamics of a work like this that makes Claude Flight look like he's trying too hard.

More occasional, I suppose, is Frank Morley Fletcher's similar view of the old derrick at Lamorna. Again, I have no idea when FMF was there, but this print wasn't published untill 1916. He was a habitue of art colonies - Etaples, Walberswick - and this view from the garden of Flagstaff Cottage shows him firmly in Lamorna Birch country because it became his house. He had taken it over from The Times art crtic, Charles Marriott, and I wonder whether it ws Marriot rather than Birch that Morley Fletcher had gone to visit.

Even more tantalising (and for more than one reason) is this view of Sennen by Daisy Boxsius that appears to show the viewpoint that John Platt made use of. Tantalising also because, by the look of this watercolour, she was a better painter than her husband, Sylvan. It's the only work by her I have ever been able to find and it's hard to judge from a reproduction, anyway. She had a better approach to the haphazardness of the boats than John Platt. In his hands, they become technical drawing; what Daisy Boxsius gives us are the rhythms of reality. Her husband was in the photo-lithography business at Bolt Court and presumably arranged to have her work reproduced in this way. She outlived him, and carried on exhibiting after the second war. The only record we have of their trips to the West Country in the 1930s are their pictures: Corfe, Shaldon in Devon, Looe, Marazion, Sennen, but not Lamorna so far.

Neither Lamorna nor Sennen, John Platt's Pilchard Boats must show Newlyn harbour, with the deep anchorage beyond the wall. (You can see a view from the other direction in Ethel Kirkpatrick's Boats at rest on the post about her watercolours). All of Platt's Cornwall prints date from 1921 and 1922 so he was presumably down there painting some time before then. (He was in Edinburgh by autumn, 1920).

Not obviously a Newlyn woodcut but probably one of the few we know that were actually made in Cornwall, this witty image by Cicely Jesse, showing that young artists studying down in Newlyn with Stanhope Forbes were nevertheless hip to the Vienna Secession. She made this while living at Myrtle Cottage above the harbour. It makes a change from the sea.

Of all the artists I have dealt with here, SG Boxsius has turned out to be one of the most well-liked. He has also proved to be the most tricky. There is a photograph of him sitting in the cast-room at Bolt Court surrounded by his young students, his face as expressionless as the statues around them. The bonhomie of his cricketing companion and long-time colleague Huskisson on a staff photo is all the more noticeable as Boxsius stares doggedly away from the camera. It's paradoxical because one of the things he did best was intimate detail. With Boxsius, chimney pots are not impersonal objects; each one is an individual, with a character all of its own. Only a liveliness of vision and an intensity of concentration could produce a work like Old Whitby that hovers somewhere between the book of hours of the Duc de Berry and Walt Disney. It's all the more surprising that there is no record of him exhibiting prints like this untill he was over fifty. For all his rigorous control of perspective and colour, the freshness of vision is captivating. The rendering of the eroded, mottled brickwork on the seaward side is both acute and wonderful. (You can see the way the tide is coming in). There isn't anything showy about this; it is something you have to work out for yourself.

The view shows the river Esk at high-tide, with the upper harbour beyond the swing-bridge. The viewpoint is a fairly popular one for professional photographers (obviously the position Bosxius worked from is farther to the right than the one you see above). But almost everyone employs a wide shot. Only Boxsius subtracts and intensifies. His image isn't powerfully Japanese, but it is what the Japanese do. He also does what the camera cannot do; he not only tells us how it looks, he tells us how it feels. His print Autumn was originally published with a note that includes this dictum: 'The designer of colour prints, if he is wise, will not strive for realism or for naturalistic effect, but for beauty of design or form, based on a true regard for necessary convention'. Now, I don't believe these are Boxsius' own words, but what they say, in their rather sanctimonious way, is true of Old Whitby, and true of many other prints he made.

In a way, what is more significant is the identity of the writer. It strikes me the person was, like Boxsius himself, an alumnus of the Royal College of Art. If it is Wlliam Giles (and I am pretty certain of that) this suggests the status Boxsius himself had achieved by 1930, the year he must have worked on Autumn. Giles wasn't only the leader of the colour print movement, he showed insight into his contemporaries. His comments on Allen Seaby's work have never been bettered, not so far as I know. How was it then that Giles thought so highly of an artist who apparently didn't begin to exhibit untill 1931? And how come his Original Colour Print Magazine was promising an article by Boxsius in 1926? Perhaps someone, somewhere has the copy, but the magazine folded before Boxsius took his turn after Claude Flight and Urushibara.

The Bargeman, with the daring way he lets the big sailing barge, with its massive furled sails and web of rigging, dominate the conversation between the two people, was certainly exhibited in 1936 as a linocut. But is Old Whitby a linocut as well? For years, the conventional wisdom about Boxsius went along these lines: 'His prints are so finely cut and printed in water-based inks they are easily mistaken for colour woodcuts'. It now begins to appear they are not mistaken for colour woodcuts at all. Some of them are colour woodcuts. The conversation taking place in The Bargeman is between the old school and the new.

What I am suggesting is fairly obvious: that we still don't know enough about these artists, but in writing about them, as we do, while knowing so little, we do them an injustice. I am conscious of the fact that my first post on Boxsius looks rather irrelevant in light of what I've learned about him since. (I am indebted to a number of correspondents for crucial information and the loan of images.) Today I am only trying to put some of the record straight. The pairing off of imagery is something he does with subtlety and without ostentation. Pines is paired off with At Winchelsea, and The Bargeman makes use of a similar dominant structure. I've tried to suggest a similar pairing off with his friend Huskisson, who had been a colleague at Camden before going to work under him at Bolt Court, just as I suggested his relationship with other artists in 'The Sussex Boys'. But it's a process and I hope readers take what I say about SG Boxsius as work in progress, a notching up of runs - and, yes, that is the pitch he played on).

The mid-week round-up on ebay

Ethel Kirkpatrick & watercolour

Claude Flight: a linocut evangelist

John Austen

Alice Coats

Goodbye, Japan: British colour woodcut in the twenties

Mid-week on ebay

The Antipodes, the arts & crafts & Margaret Preston

How prints start: Helen Stevenson, William Giles, Ursula Fookes

Bror Nordfeldt & colour woodcut

Kenneth Broad: the information act

S G Boxsius: At Walberswick

This week on ebay

Elizabeth York Brunton

Ethel Kirkpatrick: an outgoing fleet

Janet Fisher

More from Mary Wrinch

Portrait of the artist

Lamorna & Sennen

SG Boxsius: poet of understatement