Online journals

A big thank you to Will at art and weird literature blog A Journey Round My Skull for his kind post about Adventures in the Print Trade, which has resulted in a huge increase in readers. Yesterday 753 people visited this blog, as opposed to 320 a week ago. So welcome to all my readers, new and old. I appreciate your comments, additions, and corrections.

Albert Haueisen (German, 1872-1954)

Kirchgang 

Woodcut, 1904

I began blogging in October 2007, as a means—as it says on the masthead—of sharing my excitement and discoveries in the world of prints. Unless otherwise stated, all the images I post are from original prints that are physically in my possession—the fruits of an obsessive collecting instinct that has led me to become a part-time print dealer, over at my website Idbury Prints.

Joan Galle (Flemish, 1600-1676) after Marten de Vos (Flemish, 1532-1603)

Has ducunt choreas...

Engraving, re-strike 1869

Despite its title (a nod to Dylan Thomas’s Adventures in the Skin Trade), this blog is not about the commercial side of the print world, but about the pleasure of discovery. Because I don’t have an art history background, each new print I acquire sends me on a fresh adventure. Researching the artists and their work is something I find endlessly stimulating.

Georg Jahn (German, 1869-1941)

Mädchenkopf

Engraving, 1904

I began with the idea of confining myself to French prints 1870-1970. “from Impressionism to Pop Art”. But just as categories such as Impressionism and Pop Art have proved porous and unstable, so too I have found myself extending the range of prints I acquire and write about; the images in this post are just a few recent acquisitions. The rate of posting can be sporadic, but I try to make each post accurate, informative, and interesting.

Raoul Dufy (French, 1877-1953)

Le Dauphin

Woodcut, 1911

“Blog” must be about the ugliest word in the English language, but blogging as a phenomenon fascinates me. In the right hands, the blog is developing into a new art form, and one that is surprisingly resistant to being converted into existing forms, such as the book.

Lucien Pissarro (French/British, 1863-1944)

Little May

Woodcut, c.1890

Anyway, as a nod of thanks to supporters of this blog such as Will at A Journey Round My Skull and PK at the mighty Bibliodyssey (the first person ever to link to me), here’s a list of six of my favourite blogs:

Stefan Filipkiewicz (Polish, 1879-1944)

Dorfkirche

Woodcut, 1908

Clive’s Art and the Aesthete may be the only blog out there by someone even more obsessed with prints and printmakers than I am.

Richard Lux (German, 1877-1939)

Strasse in Stein a. d. Donau

Etching, 1914

Jane Librizzi has been a friend of this blog from the start. She sheds the highly-sensitive light of her Blue Lantern onto a wide range of forgotten and overlooked artists.

Norman Janes (English, 1892-1980)

Coke Ovens

Wood engraving, 1935

Philip Wilkinson’s fascinating English Buildings inspired me to start this blog. It’s not just about architecture, but history and landscape, and the quirky details that bring all three of these subjects to life.

Andreas Gering (German, 1874-1956)

Krieg

Lithograph, 1916

What can I say about Roxana’s Floating Bridge of Dreams, except that it lives up to its beautiful title? Roxana has the uncanny ability to seemingly photograph spacetime, or to strip away everything from an image but the fading pulse of an emotion.

Joseph Crawhall (English, 1821-1896)

I'll not resolve one thing or other, until I've first consulted Mother

Woodcut, 1889

Spitalfields Life by the gentle author is my latest discovery—an utterly addictive daily slice of East End cultural and social history, and its vibrant contemporary life.

Ludwig Michalek (Austrian, 1859-1942)

Bildnis des Schriftsellers Karl M. Kuzmany

Etching, 1912

And last but not least, of all the literature blogs I have come across, I think the best is Wuthering Expectations, from that inspired title through to the daft challenges that Amateur Reader sets himself and his readers.

The Beggarstaff Brothers

Over 20 years ago we viewed a house in Blewbury, Oxfordshire, seduced by the estate agent’s promise that it contained a separate structure in the garden that had been the painting studio of Sir William Nicholson (1872-1949). The house itself was Nicholson’s last home, shared with his companion, the writer Marguerite Steen. Needless to say, the dream painting studio turned out to be a small, dank hut, and we didn’t buy the house. But it sparked my interest in William Nicholson, who at that time had rather sunk from view, eclipsed by his artistic children: the painter Ben Nicholson, the fabric designer Nancy Nicholson (first wife of the poet Robert Graves), and the architect Kit Nicholson.

William Nicholson, Bookplate for the caricaturist Phil May

Woodcut, 1895

Born in Newark, Nottinghamshire, William Nicholson studied at the private art school run by Hubert von Herkomer, and then at the Académie Julian in Paris. He married a fellow-student from Herkomer’s, Mabel Pryde. From 1900 William Nicholson’s primary occupation was painting, but he is better remembered today for his boldly graphic woodcuts, mostly created in the 1890s. Many of these were published in portfolios such as An Almanac of Twelve Sports, London Types, An Alphabet, and Twelve Portraits. Under the joint pseudonym The Beggarstaff Brothers, William Nicholson and his brother-in-law James Pryde also attempted to make a living as poster designers.

 William Nicholson, Bookplate for the publisher William Heinemann

Woodcut, 1897

There was a major retrospective of William Nicholson’s work at the National Gallery in 1942, by which time he had ceased painting following a stroke. More recently, his art was celebrated in the exhibition Sir William Nicholson: Painter and Printmaker at the Royal Academy, 2004-2005.

William Nicholson, Cabriolet

Woodcut, 1898

That William Nicholson himself was something of a dandy can be seen in James Pryde’s evocative portrait of him, with a stiff high collar and yellow kid gloves.

James Pryde, Portrait Study of W. P. Nicholson

Lithograph 1898

William Nicholson’s woodcuts, with their striking use of thick black outlining and their off-centre composition, draw on Japanese models, filtered through artists such as Lautrec and Bonnard. But unlike an artist such as Henri Rivière (see last post), William Nicholson did not painstakingly imitate Japanese methods. Instead he looked back to the work of the Newcastle artist Joseph Crawhall (1821-1896), whose own work was a conscious homage to the naive woodcuts that adorned early C19th century chapbooks, simple publications sold by wandering pedlars. Oddly, Joseph Crawhall was to suffer the same overshadowing by a more famous son, also called Joseph Crawhall (1861-1913), one of the “Glasgow Boys”.

Joseph Crawhall, Babes in the Wood

Joseph Crawhall, George Barnwel

The Crawhall images above are woodcuts (Crawhall calls them "sculptures") taken from the 1976 Scolar Press reprint of Crawhall’s Chap-book Chaplets (1883), in which the hand-coloured woodcuts were reproduced by lithography.