Modern Printmakers

The BBC news website as got well and truly into the Hokusai mood with a nice feature http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-40830628 on different manifestations of the famous Hokusai print on the end of people's houses. The one you see here is in Washington D.C. (and we expect a full report on that).

The piece is timed to coincide with the current Hokusai exhibition at the British Museum, but it is too late for readers to go if they haven't been already. It's a sell-out and all the tickets are gone.

When Alphonse Legros was professor at the Slade School in London, he would encourage the students to make models in clay as a way of understanding 'form'. I suppose, to some extent, this makes sense, but I don't believe that is all there is to it. Legros was versatile and understood the need of students to find out for themselves - I was going to say 'explore', but that sounds too modern.

Legros had made sculpture and medallions himself and during his early days at a school of drawing in Paris, he had also made friends with the sculptors, Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou. He also made etchings and was a leading member of the early revival in the 1870s, but what really interests me is the way artists associate prints with modelling and sculpture, without perhaps being too conscious of it, and I think Jules Chadel was one of them who did. You only have to look at his Magpie and bee (above) to get my drift. It is flat, but he still imagines everything in the round and achieves a lot of what the print is about by a deft and vigourous use of perspective. For an experiment in colour woodcut, it is remarkably self-assured. What I should add is this: it also appears more Japanese than it actually is.

Chadel first trained as a sculptor, but moved from there to jewellery design and about 1905 went to work for Robert Vever, the leading Parisian maker of jewellery. Vever was a notable connoisseur of   Japanese art with an impressive collection of Japanese woodcuts. Vever would be 'at home' on Sundays and enthusiasts like himself would come along to indulge their passion, as collectors always have. Vever was also a member of Les amis de l'art japonais, an exclusive society of designers, connoisseurs and artists, who would meet eight times a year at a Paris restaurant (usually the Cardinal) and took turns to produce illustrated menu cards and place-cards in the manner of ukiyo-e woodcuts.

For a number of years, Chadel worked on his cards with the fabric designer, Alphonse-Prosper Isaac. It was one of those happy arrangements; Isaac had been making these small prints for a while had learned how to print them, but Chadel was the better artist of the two, and between them, they made some of the small colour woodcuts you see here. Simple but subtle, and well-designed, there were nothing throw-away about them and, for all their self-evident charm, they were made with complete seriousness. You can see Chadel and Isaac's two stamps at the corner of print of the bird with the cherry and, though I am not absolutely sure, this little print appears to make use of the technique of karazuri, or shallow embossing, to suggest the breast-feathers. If so, Isaac was hardly a beginner.

Chadel also went on to make prints in editions like Le port de Douarnenez. As you see, it is a more conventional French prints, with nothing much that is Japanese about it. For me, the most interesting aspect of the print, is the way he is still working 'in the round' and making great use of perspective. It reads from bottom to top the way a Chinese print would but the conception is western. But I also think the first prints he made for Les amis de l'art japonais are less Japanese than they appear or, at least, that writers on art have emphasised what Chadel took from Japan without considering what else might be there. I don't think this has done Chadel justice, but this has been the standard approach to colour woodcut and especially to artists using the Japanese manner of making prints. In Britain, this was the approach taken by Alan Guest who did the first research hereand has been followed by his collaborator, Hilary Chapman. Alan (who was both mentor and friend) came to colour woodcut as a librarian with a specialist knowledge of print technique and as a collector with an interest in Japanese art and generally there has been too much emphasis on Japan and technique.

This view of mine is nothing new. It was taken by John Dickson Batten and S.R. Koehler in the 1890s (as Alan knew) and by Herbert Fust in 1924 (and picked up from him by the linocut artist, Claude Flight). Both Furst and Flight were hostile to colour woodcut but were not well-informed enough to make a lot of sense. I am far from hostile; I just tend to think there is more to most artists than the commentators say, Chadel included, and that writers have tended to take one aspect of their work as it suited them and make more of it than they should. This has happened to Flight and his linocuts. You only need to look at Chadel's wonderful Dragonflies to see its works the way that it does by combining aspects of western and Japanese art; it is a synthesis like the work of Mabel Royds. This is what gives it that typical turn-of-the century decorative clout. The wings and leaves are mainly flat against a flat background, but the bodies and the way the wings overlap rely on conventional perspective despite Chadel attempting to cover this up. It's not a crime; it's just more Paris than Tokyo. Dragonflies (and insects in general) are typical of Japanese art. Here they allow for unprinted space. But sculpture also relies on what isn't there - the space between arms and bodies, the holes in a Henry Moore. Sculptors also have to see their subject in the round and Chadel was looking at his dragonflies from above and below and from the back and the front, something that came naturally as a designer, but a designer who knew Katsushika Hokusai's manga (see below for an example).

You will see that the menu with the cat image was made for a dinner held on 8th November, 1912, and had a magic ingredient. This was called Yoshijiro Urushibara. Urushibara had arrived in London in May, 1910, and first visited Paris in the December of that year when he addressed Les amis. Isaac and Chadel, in particular, were always grateful for the lessons he gave them; Isaac's own lessons went on daily for months and his way of making woodcuts improved. But look again. The cat manages to suggest both Japanese brush technique and European lithography, which had come into its own in the 1890s and was being widely used by artists like Pierre Bonnard and Henri Riviere and not just for the famous posters of Steinlen and Lautrec . It works not because it's Japanese; it works because, like Isaac and Chadel, two cultures of tradition and innovation, had become firm friends.

The mural was painted by John McConnell, an architecture student from Harvard University, in August, 1974, for friends who lived at the house. He used Sherwin-Williams house paint, which, he says himself, has held up remarkably well. Fortunately, the current owner wants to maintain the mural and is seeking advice about its restoration. McConnell now works as an architect in Winchester, Massachusetts.

His mural is at 3510 O St NW, Georgetown, Washington, DC.

Quite a long time ago, I tried to write a post I called 'The studio in Liboc' about the early woodcuts made by the two Czech artists, Walther Klemm and Carl Thiemann. I must admit I didn't have much to go on on except a great liking for the work of both artists. I wasn't helped by the lack of images available online and especially a lack of dates for any of the ones I knew. Im Frankfurter Hafen (1906), below, was one of those frustrating prints I have had illustrated in a book for many years but was too large to scan. But here it is now, in all its glory - and, I must add, owing something to Hugo Henneberg's print showing Trieste harbour (see the relevant recent post about his linocuts).

I am pleased to say that only today I heard about a book I think you need to have. It is Klemm & Thiemann: moderner holzschnitt in Prag published in Prague in 2016. It is in German and Czech and available from Narodni Galerie in Prague and EastView in the States. It is well-illustrated and I understand indispensable. Anyway, they are both artists Modern Printmakers approves of, so you can't go wrong. You only have to apply the plastic.

There was a related exhibition Land Tier Stadt at the Ostdeutsche Galerie in Regensburg. Although that is now over, the gallery may be another source for the book for readers in Germany. All being well, Modern Printmakers hopes to review it at some point soon.

In 1907, the National Gallery in London acquired Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot's Marsh at Arleux (below). The picture had been painted in Artois in 1871 during the revolutionary period of the Paris Commune. Many artists had left the city and moved to the Pas-de-Calais and continued to paint whatever they saw there. But Corot's picture is strange, lacking in detail, laden with atmosphere and with a deliberate lack of finish. There is a sense of dislocation and foreboding that looks forwards to modern art. Corot is not an artist I would associate with an image, pure and simple, but it does show exactly why French artists had so much to learn from colour woodcut artists like Hiroshige to whom the meaningful image was naturally a part of what they did.

By the lake (at the top) by E.C.A. Brown was first exhibited (so far as I know) in February, 1911, and shows one of the lakes at the village of Camiers in the Pas-de-Calais where she lived with her husband. The couple moved backwards and forwards between France and accommodation in London and while I do not know whether Brown saw Corot's picture newly-arrived at the National Gallery, you will agree, her woodcut takes so much from Corot, it is uncanny. The picture was given to the Gallery by Mrs Edwin Edwards. She and her husband had made strong links with French artists, including Henri Fantin Latour and Alphonse Legros, as well as Whistler, who had been close to Theodore Roussel, and it is always possible that all these artists had already seen the Corot.n at their home.

Brown knew Charles Bartlett who went to work in Tokyo with the publisher Shazaburo Wantanabe and, as Modern Prinmakers said some while back, used Georges Seurat's A Sunday afternoon on the Grande Jatte as a basis for his colour woodcut Silk merchants, India. What you see here is the first time a British colour woodcut artist made direct use of modern French art rather than a Japanese ukiyo-e woodcut. Roussel's Moonrise from the river made in London (where he lived) in 1914 is an interesting variation. The mood has changed again to something far more neutral. There is more I could say, but what you can see here is the beginning of Urushibara's work with Frank Brangwyn and this is why.

All of these artists - Corot (above and below), Fantin-Latour, Whistler, Legros and Roussel - made prints and all of them, apart from Corot, knew London and some of the artists working there. For Corot what mattered most in a picture was what he called himself 'the value of tone' - and he meant the tone of the overall picture, so it made particular sense for him to produce etchings because he could explore and use tonal value in a new way. Corot was remarkably diverse in the things he did. Despite the basic similarity of the subjects, The dreamer (made in 1854 but not printed until 1921), is very different in approach - basically a type of northern expressionism, if you like - from his etching, Near Rome (1866) He was a translator and an interpreter and that would make him interesting to other artists.

One of them was Brown. By the lake was not the only print she made that drew on Corot. With others, it is just less obvious, but I think it is still there and the French art historian and critic, Gabriel Mourey, who saw Brown's prints when they were first being exhibited in Paris, said the same thing: 'the countryside between Montreuil-sur-Mer and Etretat is the countryside of Cazin and Corot'. Corot was based at Arras in 1871, but he and his biographer-friend rented a house at Arleux 30 km to the east during July and August, where Corot made a prompt return to the scratchy technique of the first etching.

There are two points here. The importance of French art to the first British colour woodcut artists like Brown hasn't been talked about. It has been very easy to discuss the importance of Japan simply because so little is known about what they were doing and what the artists were actually thinking and doing (and because some of the people doing the writing knew more about C19th Japanese colour woodcut than they did about C19th French etching). The fact that Brown and her friends and colleagues were using the Japanese method is almost beside the point; her husband's prints were mainly colour etchings and as she was the better printer, she printed at least one of them herself (above). And what she achieved there was a sense of tone; it was already an interpretation of Thomas Brown's work because he was never as subtle as that.

Urushibara's main contribution to Frank Brangwyn's Bruges portfolio (1919), above, was its tone. This wasn't a by-product of being very clever when it came to making prints. As The Studio said in 1920, he was translating Brangwyn and to me, at least, that is what Corot was doing, and what Brown did, when she printed her husband's fishing fleet at Etaples. She was a co-artist on that print and signed it on the left. This was where Urushibara's work with Brangwyn began; this was the environment Urushibara came into when he arrived in London in 1910. People talk as if he were some kind of boy-genius who has arrived from the wilds of Tokyo and did it all by magic. Urushibara was in Paris over the winter and where By the lake, as well as Roussel's etchings, was exhibited and I would think it likely that he saw all of them, along with other colour woodcuts by British artists, simply because his French colleagues were interested, too. So, I am not saying he began by studying Corot etchings; there was no need to, he was surrounded by people who had.

I have just heard today from Mark Allaby who tells me he has published a book about the talented British designer, Charles Paine, a designer, I have to add, who gets the full approval of Modern Printmakers. As soon as I get a copy, I will be reviewing the book and giving details of how you can get a copy of your own.

Paine worked as head of applied art at the School of Arts in Santa Barbara in the twenties, so there will be something for everyone. You see him here in his smock with what appears to be a design for stained-glass windows behind him. It's an odd combination, the rural smock and the discriminating modern face. I'm not sure what he is holding (probably his pipe ) but all will be revealed.

Here, at last, is a short book that gives a real idea of what it was like to be a graphic artist during the nineteen twenties and thirties. Charles Paine's uncle showed some of his work to the designer, Gordon Forsyth (who was then working for Pilkington's near Manchester) and after a favourable reaction from Forsyth suggested to Paine's father that he ought to study art rather than work as he was in the production of rubber. He was shown the door. Mark Allaby doesn't say who supported Paine's eight years of study at Salford School of Art (where he was trained to make stained glass) and then at the Royal College, but after reading this valuable book twice, it does seem remarkable that so much talent could have gone down the Swanee. Paine never had a straightforward career and his life was not always an easy one, but here are designs by someone who took his work as seriously as his father appeared to take his own.

Paine followed a general course in design at the R.C.A. Walter Crane described the college in 1898 as a kind of mill for teachers and according to Henry Moore, it was much the same at the time Paine graduated. The diploma course he took was a preparation for a job as a teacher of art at a state school and, going by the enthusiasm expressed by his students in this book, Paine was an inspiring teacher. What is noticeable about the work illustrated here is the inspirational tone: a talent for psychology and design had been uncovered; here is graphic design that speaks with skill and directness, something that was new in 1919 and 1920. Boat race 1921, with its downward view of the boats on the river, was so original and impressive, it became a default setting, with Kearny and Burrell in 1924, Percy Drake Brookshaw in 1927 and Cyril Power's The eight (1930) all following in its wake.

After graduation in 1919, he was offered a job by Frank Morley Fletcher running the department of applied design at Edinburgh College of Art. Fletcher had worked on a stained glass project with students at Reading and two years later another stained glass artist arrived, apparently to take over from Paine. This was John Platt, but Paine and Platt were by no means equals. Platt would have great success with his colour woodcut The giant stride at Los Angeles in 1922, but Paine was the better draughtsman, closer in his modern sensibility to younger R.C.A. graduates like Eric Ravilious, and he moved onto work as a graphic artist for the firms of Guthrie (who made stained glass in Glasgow) and Sundour at Lancaster. Colour woodcut was in his make-up as a designer; Boat race 1921 was inconceivable without the example of Hokusai and his colliery scene takes the schematic approach of the colour woodcuts of Edward Loxton Knight.

In 1923, Fletcher left Edinburgh to work at the Community Arts School in Santa Barbara and Paine went to work with him as head of applied arts on two occasions in the twenties (and would have returned a third time if the school hadn't hit such hard times). In fact, after his second stint, he and Fletcher handed in their notice on the same day. It was a pattern, never staying anywhere very long untill he and his second wife settled at Welwyn Garden City. Eventually,she bought a house on Jersey with his knowledge and both went there to live. By then, he was cut off from the places he needed to be to more a proper living as a commercial artist and he turned to watercolour. At this stage of the story, I become nervous, wondering what I will find, but his watercolour designs are excellent and nearly not well-known enough. The plan is to give then a post of their own.

All this depends on Mark Allaby. Apart from the boat race poster, everything you see here has not appeared online before and is a testament to the care he has taken with this book and the presentation of Paine's imagery - with much of it available only on CD. The book is a half-way house between biography and Paine's graphics and intended not only for readers interested in his designs and watercolours. There is a lot of material in the form of appendices; nothing much is left out and none of the images in the post can be found in the book. Sometimes I got lost, especially over Jim, who was a girl, and I would have rather had Paine down as 'Paine'and not 'CP', but these are quibbles. For a book that has been published by the author, a mere two typos may well be a record.

Mark is seriously considering a Charles Paine blog. He has some diverse material, which I think would be a considerable interest to any student of mid-twentieth century design, a period that has remained fashionable for almost forty years. Only ten copies have been printed so far, but Mark tells me if there is real interest, a revised edition (less the typos) may be printed. Contact me at cgc@waitrose.com and I can pass your details on to the author.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not only that, you will notice that Brewer used Japanese technique in areas of Thirlmere. I had previously seen details of The pergola which promptly disappeared from my Junk box, but these are more telling. In themselves, I think the details are expressive even if the overall effect of the print is rather conventional. You will notice obvious signs of application of the ink by hand. That strongly suggests Brewer was using a water-colour medium in common with the majority of British colour woodcut artists at the time rather than the printer'sink used by most of the colour linocut artists. I also think you can see the way the ink has run to the edge of the block. I like the camouflage effect he achieved here very much, something that suggests wartime as well Platt's brown and green on Sails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gordon Clarke

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Christmas tends to bring out the colour prints on ebay and Eric Slater's A downland mill has to come out of the sack first simply because it is going to cost so much. I know I am not going to please everyone by saying what I think about Slater, but that isn't what blogs are for. I understand what his appeal is but he is seriously overpriced and always has been. One of the reasons is that he became popular almost as soon as he began exhibiting in 1927, the prints sold well and there are enough of them around for dealers to offer them for sale now and for prices to keep on going up.

This one is already over £800 and with four days left and Santa on the way, it will probably go for even more. I can't exactly say why this should be, but if you look at the image, to appears to be laid down, something that always put me off.

A downland mill was first exhibited in 1934 so comes in the middle of his career as a colour woodcut artist. The idea of depicting mills and Martello towers came from George Graham who had a house built at Winchelsea Beach around the time Slater moved into Alards in Winchelsea. I mean some of them are OK, but by 1934 he had overdone windmills and other his other colour woodcuts made around the time were better. As usual, the muted colour and shadows are likeable, but the image is not only static, it is weak. In particular, the unattractive line of keyblock on the left hand side of the mill suggests how simple his approach could be.

William Nicholson's A fisherman has been hanging around for some while. Published in The dome in 1897, it was only the second of Nicholson's colour woodcuts and the only one to be printed directly from blocks that had been inked. All the rest were coloured by hand. The on you see here is not the image offered for same on ebay. This one comes from Annex Galleries website. I am also not at all certain about what its status is as a print. I have seen some images that are signed which may mean that Nicholson printed them himself. All the other unsigned prints I assume first appeared in The Dome. I should also add that none of Nicholson's prints are true woodcuts. All of the were cut on end-grain on box. Nicholson only adapted the style of old hap books because he had come across some blocks in Ridges bookshop in Newark in Nottinghamshire where he had been brought up.

For any fans of Eric Hesketh Hubbard, here is the chance to buy his portfolio The gateways of Salisbury Cathedral Close printed at his own Forest Press and published in three editions in 1925. It is made up of five prints, mainly in sepia tones, but with the addition of some light green. I think one edition was printed on the press, the other two by hand and with the most expensive being on japan. I cannot say for sure which one this is but almost certainly not the one printed on the press.

Hesketh Hubbard founded the Forest Press in an old shed on the common at Breamore near Salisbury in 1923 and wound it up only six years later. I know of thirteen colour woodcuts made during that time. I gave one of elms trees to my mother and she liked it a lot. I don't what happened to it and I have never seen it on the internet either. None made use of the Japanese manner and some of the ones are tougher paper are a bit crude. That said, many of them are interesting and some of them dramatic, but I wouldn't call them fine prints. Hubbard was in fact an accomplished professional artist and entrepreneur and the small group of woodcuts he made are not all that typical of his best work. But there you are. This is a quirky period piece. I have seen the complete portfolio for sale before but you would meed to be an enthusiast to buy it I would say.

Last but not least is Towards he downs, a colour linocut by Sybella Stiles. It's OK, I suppose, but not stylish enough to set the heart racing. I don't know much about her but she made various prints, including wood-engravings. It all depends what it goes for.

I do not know how easy it is to tell the difference between the colour woodcuts and colour linocuts made by S.G. Boxsius. Most of us are not all that expert and Boxsius made it harder by using a water-colour based medium that people generally associate with British colour woodcut. Boxsius was not alone here. So far as I know Isabel de B. Lockyer never used printer's ink and always used a water-based medium for her linocuts. She started out by making colour woodcuts and adopted lino about 1923 or 1924. Anna Findlay made colour woodcuts until about 1926 or 1927 when she turned to lino (though I do not know what medium she used simply because I have never seen one of her prints in front of me). In my view Boxsius used wood and lino throughout most of the time he was making colour prints. The difficulty is there are no exhibition records I know of prior to 1928 when he exhibited Rain, St. Michael's Mount (below) at the Royal Society of Arts.

Both Rain, St Michael's Mount and Twilight, Winchelsea (top) say something about his attitude to lino and perhaps why he began using it in the first place. There is about ten years between the two print but both of them are candid about how much he owed to the example of William Giles. Winchelsea in particular is seen in terms of Rothenburg ob der Tauber where both Carl Thiemann and Giles worked before the first war. The white fences and the use of purple Boxsius lifted from Giles'At eventide, Rothernburg am Tauber (below c 1906). I strongly suspect Boxius was a students of Giles at the Royal College of Art about 1899. By this time, Giles had studied color woodcut with Frank Morley Fletcher but had not published his first print September moon (1901). To my mind, the intimate knowledge of Giles' colour prints is a personal one, of a student and artist who saw things develop as a young man. By 1916 when Boxsius was himself a teacher at Camden School o Arts and Crafts, the students were commended for the high standard of their colour prints. Bu were they wood or lino? Or were they both. One answer was provided by Giles who asked Boxsius for an article on linocut about 1925 . Unfortunately, The original colour prints magazine folded before the article could appear. The fact remains Giles had great confidence in Boxsius while Boxsius' admiration for Giles' Storm over Jura was well-justified.

Like Giles, Boxsius took a pragmatic approach to making prints and used the medium that best suited his purpose. For a long time I assumed all his early prints were woodcuts. Some may have been but most of the smaller prints are lino. But there is another category that are definitely woodcuts and are easy to distinguish. None are signed in pencil ever and have SG BOXSIUS carved within the print - and they are the only ones that are like that. I have not traced all of them but there are about six or seven, including his most well known prints, Autumn and Winter. There is also Spring but there is no print for summer. Not by SGB, anyway.

The proofs of Autumn and Winter that I have seen are printed on fine japan while the linocuts tend to be on something similar. This implies that the prints were made by hand-printing not on a press (as many more recent linocuts are). That was also true of the Grosvenor School students. Claude Flight believed the result of using a press was 'mechanical' and his books all describe the same method. Allen Seaby also made linocuts and one was made available in the 1920s but again I never seen a proof. Seaby and Giles had been friends since the 1890s but what made Giles specially open-minded about method was his experience working in Germany and Paris. By 1904 lino was being used by both Austrian and German artists and most notably Hugo Henneberg. He had been an innovatory photographer before he began making prints and based his linocut of a boat in Trieste harbour (below) on a photograph he had taken during a visit in 1898.

None of that would matter all that much if Boxsius had not done exactly the same thing in about 1933, the difference being the subject was the British ship Waterwitch and the place was Looe. I have never seen Henneberg's photograph but a image of the Waterwitch used to be online and is in the collection of a national museum. Which one I can't remember but Boxsius' linocut is similar to it. I am conscious that I have said some of this before (and have a post 'Hugo Henneberg the first linocut virtuoso') but I still think it is useful to go over the subject if only because I know more than I did then. I would like to know more of course and realise I need more hard facts. Whether any of us are ever going to turn them up is another thing.

Over the past few days a number of readers have written in to express their astonishment at the price of the recent Eric Slater sale on ebay. A couple of days later there was further ado about the price fetched by Elizabeth Keith's ditzy fashion show of 1922, Kamakura, summer reflections. Ignore the hype and look elsewhere - and you could do worse than consider an artist who continues to be affordable despite making colour woodcuts to a standard well beyond the capability of Slater.

Hans Frank studied at the Vienna School of Applied arts between 1902 and 1906. This was a period when artists and designers of the calibre of Josef Hoffman, Koloman Moser, Alfred Roller and Hugo Henneberg were members of staff, so in buying an early colour woodcut by Frank like his three peacocks (above), by default you buy a piece of art history, hardly something you could say when you fork out £1725 on a Slater. You can tell by the date 04, this was designed during either his first or second year at the Kunstgewerbeschule. It may not have been printed then, but you can buy this on ebay today for a quarter of what you would pay for a Slater. This is nothing new. I once bought a Frank at auction for £6 and some time later was offered Slater's Martello tower for £60. I turned it down.

As we all know, ebay has its uses. But you will also know, ebay prices are consistently inflated. Frank's white peacock (above) sold in March, 2018, at Dorotheum in Vienna as little as 160 euros - and this was not a blip. The truth is Frank does not have the clout of Carl Thiemann or L.H. Jungnickel, but was such a prolific artist, there is still work available for everyone to buy. I am not a big fan of the landscapes, but the bird prints are another thing. And if peacocks are not to your taste, there are other birds, including his eagle from 1916 (below), cranes and seagulls.

As you will know, Modern Printmakers is not the Racing Post and is not in the habit of handing out tips to readers, but just this once I will point something out in case you didn't know. Like his teacher, Anton von Kenner, Frank made bookplates. This means for of few pounds, you can pick up a small Frank colour woodcut on japan signed in pencil and with proper margins. OK, it may not be to the same standard as Frank's personal ex libris (below) made in 1917, but you can't really go wrong with Frank. His training at the School of Applied Arts and afterwards at the Academy was too thorough for him to make a wrong move.

I was disbelieving myself when I bought one with a butterfly perched on a letter, but there you are. It is possible. All you have to do is get yourself a small Daler portfolio and some acid-free and put them in. There is a special intimate pleasure in such small things as many artists have known for a long, long time. And while you are at it, do remember you read it here first.

Going on with the short series of posts on affordable colour woodcutters, we come to the accomplished artist, Gesso Yoshimoto, and prints he made like Cuckoo in the rain (above). A classic shin hanga or new print artist of the 1920s and 1930s, not very much is known about him, but he was sufficiently well-known for the dealer and collector, Robert Muller, to have a large number of prints by him in his stock or collection at his death in 2003.

The term shin hanga was introduced by the Tokyo publisher, Shozaburo Wantanabe, after his first success with Goyo Hashiguchi's Woman in a bathroom in 1915. Gesso would have been thirty-three or thirty-four by then and was soon working in a manner that very subtly combined old-style ukiyo-e woodcuts and Western descriptiveness and perspective. Like Ohara Koson, his main genre was kacho-e, meaning bird and flower prints and usually (though not always) the size of pillar prints like the ones here. Ostensibly there were designed to hang on the wooden pillars supporting Japanese homes, but many were intended for the Western market.

As Japanese artists go, Gesso was fairly conventional, but no matter. As you see, he was a colourist and designer with sensitivity and flair. The sensibility was also quite different from Koson who was bolder and more dramatic. The other difference is that you can acquire a Gesso on the open market for £125 or less, not something you could say about Koson.

At the risk of making Modern Printmakers sound like Anfield or the Derby again, I will add this. If readers have not done so already, they should familiarise themselves with the signatures of Koson and Gesso and the like. Original prints by Koson are still lying around antique centres and design shops in the UK for an asking price that is well, well below what they are worth. Within the past two or three years I bought a pair of Koson prints in a retro shop in Caernarfon for £35. Even if birds and flowers are not your thing, shin hanga made to this standard are always worth ten or twenty quid of your money. And I would not tell you wrong.

I picked this etching up many years ago in Newark, Nottinghamshire, partly because it was such a powerful period etching and partly because Hammond (1875 - 1970) came from Arnold near Nottingham and was related to my father's uncle. It is a landscape painter's etching, larger than most landscape etchings of the twenties, with a superb and unusual tone, soft and black like the background of a Ohara Koson woodcut and very different from the descriptive work of so many of the artist-etchers of the time. He made a few other etchings, but none of them as eloquent as this one. It is a classic Hammond pose if ever I saw one.

Hammond took evening classes at Nottingham School of Art when the sculptor, Joseph Else, was headmaster. (Another student of Else was James Woodford who worked with John Platt at Blackheath). Hammond eventually got fed up with the restrictive regime at the art school, but the rugged sculptural effect of the tower and rocks suggest what he learned from Else about form and how well he put it to original use in this etching.

William Peverel was part of local lore. A combatant at Hastings and claimed by William I as one of his sons, he died at Nottingham Castle on 17th April, 1115, but was buried at Calvados in Normandy. Peveril Castle is at Castleton in the unkempt northern wilds of Derbyshire. The lonely tower is Hammond's recreation and is much more appealing than his dutiful image of Haddon Hall near Bakewell.

Hammond moved to Stockport in 1914 and began making use of the etching press at Manchester School of Art. It would make sense if Peveril of the Peak was produced around that time. The tone of the one I have is remarkable. A good pastel of workmen on Long Row in Nottingham once turned up at my local auction-house and I tried to get my dad to buy it, though he failed to take the bait. The downside is the current Buy-it-now price on ebay. You could not properly put a value on an artist as modish and variable as Hammond was, but I would not pay £200 for any of his castles and I strongly suspect you won't either.

As a proof of Hugo Henneberg's colour linocut Pine trees at Durnstein (above) is currently for sale on U.S. ebay, it provides an opportunity to have another look at the important series of prints the linocut belongs to. The history is fairly complex and has been poorly understood outside Austria. The image I have used here comes from the British Museum collection. The Museum acquired several prints by Henneberg in 1980, but incorrectly described them in the catalogue as woodcuts thereby missing the true value of the historic linocuts in the collection.

Not only that, Henneberg's print acted as an example to other printmakers like S.G. Boxsius who is also in their collection. Pines (above) may not be one of the linocuts held by the Museum, but readers will see how much he depended on Henneberg as an example when he produced his own original work. This is worth saying because the history of linocut has been badly misunderstood in Britain simply because writers on the subject have often repeated a series of misleading remarks made in the 1920s by Claude Flight who saw linocuts made in a children's class at the School of Applied Arts in Vienna at an exhibition held in London in 1920.

In 1903, Henneberg made a series of woodcuts (like the one above) showing the Wachau area of the Danube valley. The art journal Ver Sacrum reproduced two of them that year, possibly in the final edition (but I have not seen them as yet). Many of the artists and designers contributing work to Ver Sacrum were associated with the Kunstgewerbeschule or School of Applied Arts (and the Secession) and went on to provide designs for a new journal of graphic art called Die Flache, with the first edition coming out in 1903. Many designs made use of wood, stencil and lino and this may be the first time lino was used as a conventional print medium by professional designers. Stencil designs like the fish on page 161 partly derive from Japanese dyer's stencils. One or two of the other designs may have used lino in the same way Edward Bawden did for wallpaper designs in 1928.

Some of these designs were figurative, some repeat patterns, others were for lettering. What appeared to happen then was Henneberg decided to use lino as a medium for a fine colour print and in 1903 or 1904 made his sumptuous Der blaue Weiher or The blue pond (which you can find on the original post by clicking on Henneberg's name on the new index). He then went on to make a series of seven colour linocuts he published in 1910 as a portfolio usually described as the Wachauansichten or the Wachau Portfolio. After his death in 1918, a further edition was printed in 1920. Many of the prints now available belong to that edition and were printed from Henneberg's blocks and have a studio signature in black (below) rather than being signed in pencil by the artist. Other prints, like the 1903 series of castles, have a studio stamp on the back. This doesn't make them not worth having, but it does make the issue complicated.

It also should not detract from Henneberg's innovation and his ability to adapt, specially when it came to using a medium as cheap as lino that had none of the history of woodcut behind it. There was also co-operation between artists who were making prints and it is no longer at all clear to me what happened when Henneberg and his neighbour, Carl Moll, worked together, (mainly because my German isn't good enough). Galleries in Austria now say colour prints I thought were by Moll are the work of Henneberg, although at the time I did think it was odd. Worse still, they now describe prints as lino that were once called woodcuts. Obviously research and knowledge has improved even over the past ten years and contemporary Austrian sources like Galerie Walfischgasse are most likely to be correct. They describe the print below as a colour linocut by Henneberg rather than by Moll as I thought it was! Either way, it is a remarkable use of a medium that has so often been promoted for its expressive use.

An informed view always helps when it comes to buying old prints and this is nowhere more than case than with early C20th colour print. I know there is more than one reader of Modern Printmakers who is an enthusiastic collector of the work of Boxsius. Part of the idea behind this post is to place Boxsius in a proper context and suggest the way a British printmaker took the lead from Austrian colleagues. Some readers will also be aware that a proof of Boxsius' A Devon village was sold only yesterday. This is another print that owes some of its success to the example set by modern European printmakers who were experimenting with a surprising range of mediums that have left some tell-tale signs on mid-twentieth British prints as the next post hopes to show.

The Great Wave as gable-end

The colour woodcuts of Jules Chadel

The Great Wave of Georgetown

Klemm & Thiemann, modern woodcut in Prague: Eva Bendova (ed)

From Corot to Urushibara: Corot, E.C.A. Brown and Theodore Roussel

Charles Paine: a new book by Mark Allaby

Charles Paine, his life and work, by Mark Allaby

The colour woodcuts of James Alphege Brewer

The woodcut technique of James Alphege Brewer

Haydn Mackey's 'Jacke of Newberie'

Edna Boies Hopkins: the Derbyshire connection

Romney Marsh Weavers

A tale of two bridges

Portrait of Miss Jessie Garrow

Christmas on ebay

S.G. Boxius: wood & lino

Hans Frank: peacocks & other birds

Gesso Yoshimoto (1881 - 1935)

Arthur Knighton Hammond 'Peveril of the Peak'

Hugo Henneberg & the history of linocut