I would like to dedicate another post to Midsummer night first exhibited in 1912 by William Giles. There are various reasons for this. Firstly, there is the sheer unforgettable impact of the method Giles dreamed up for the print. It was not simply a matter of the image being a work of the imagination; the whole process involved inventiveness at such an astonishing level, I find it hard to credit Giles gave his work so much care and attention. When Mabel Royd's husband, E.S. Lumsden, made his sympathetic portrait of Giles in 1921 (below) he decided to depict him with the tools of his trade, emphasing the artist-craftsman distracted from his work rather than a portrait that suggested traits of the personality of the sitter. It was the same dedication and power of concentration that his friend, Walter Phillips, noticed when they went out on a sketching trip around the same time Lumsden made his portrait. Phillips had left Giles sketching in front of a tree only to find him still there in front of the same tree when he went back hours later.
It perhaps goes without saying that Giles work is stylised and lack spontaneity. It can also be a touch hackneyed. As one of the curator's said at the V&A when we were looking at Midsummer night, it was typical of the era (not his exact words). What is astonishing is the intricacy of the branches of the tree and the way depiction is so intense it begins to look like fantasy. There as an occult side to Giles. Here was a man for whom the ancient places of Britain and the phases of the sun and moon had a strong meaning but a man who also held back and always kept his occult tendencies in check. How he did this is another thing and it leads on to the second remarkable aspect of this print.
In 1899, the French dealer, Goupil, held an exhibition at the London gallery of some diminutive but sensational etchings and aquatints by Theordore Roussel who lived at Parson's Green in west London. Eight years later, Goupil came up with the idea of an exhibiting society of printmakers with Roussel as nominal leader and then about two years after the exhibitions began making colour versions of the metal plates he had shown at Goupil in 1899. More to the point, in 1912 he exhibited Summer night at Abingdon with the Graver Printers. Whether it was was this print that gave Giles the idea for Midsummer night is hard to say exactly, but I tend to think it did simply because until that point Giles had never made a metal plate. I also tend to think Roussel and Giles were working in collaboration. Both artists were used to this. Roussel had worked closely with James MacNeill Whistler till inevitably they fell out and Giles had worked in collaboration with Allen Seaby in their final year at Reading School of Art. Abingdon is also in Berkshire where Giles came from and Giles had also studied in Paris in the late nineties before he returned to do that final year alongside Seaby.
In other respects, Giles and Roussel were unalike. Roussel was an artist in the great French tradition - objective, detached, given to formal experiment but with an inwardness and delicacy that marks out so much of French C18th and C19th art. In my view, the example he set for Yoshijiro Urushibara with the colour version of L'agonie des fleurs (above from about 1912) was far more important that any of the designs he adapted from Brangwyn. It may not seem obvious bow but Roussel was full of ideas which expressed in a series of prints where both spontaneity and subtle allusions to the art of the past were keynotes. Giles described himself as an art worker but followed the traditions of the British romantic movement, notably of William Blake who had been the last person to make artist's prints in colour in the 1820s.
For Roussel, printmaking was a subsidiary art he could use to explore new ideas, as French artists had been doing since Edouard Manet began making etchings in the 1860s. For Giles, they were an end in itself and if Roussel had class, Giles had appeal and I think you can see from these few examples how far each artist learned to modify their approach from the other. Roussel's Moonrise in the New Forest, 1914 (above) is case in point. It would not have been possible for him to make a print of such luminosity and depth of colour without the example of Giles. Too much emphasis has been placed on the importance of the Japanese manner of printmaking to these artists. Method and styles owned just as much to French art although in the end it is the sympathetic dialogue between that provides the most interest. Take for instance, Elizabeth Christie Austen Brown's French landscape, By the lake, from much the same time (below) to judge how far this period of creativity derived from the rapport that existed between them.
