International studio (54.1914/1915)

The Woodcuts of Sydney Lee, A .R.E.

The woodcuts of mr.
SYDNEY LEE, A.R.E. BY
MALCOLM C. SALAMAN.
Readers of The Studio will scarcely need to be
told that Mr. Sydney Lee is a versatile artist, with
a variety of mediums ready to his hand. A painter
first and foremost, he skilfully handles the etching
needle and the mezzotint-scraper, while he has
been one of the most prominent and effective
members of the Society of Graver-Printers in Colour.
Of his admirable colour-prints from a series of
wood-blocks in the Japanese manner I had
occasion to speak in these pages last year, when
some of them were reproduced (The Studio,
May 1913); but Mr. Lee is not content to handle
the wood only for the purposes of colour-impressions,
he is an original wood-engraver in the fine tradition
of Bewick, and the black-and-white woodcuts he
has already produced may be regarded as notable
factors in the interest awakened in the revival of
wood-engraving as a vehicle for original expression.
Among the varied activities of the graphic arts in
England to-day this revival has attracted a certain
amount of attention, mainly through the beautiful,
original and poetic work of Mr. Charles Ricketts, Mr.
Charles Shannon, and Mr. Sturge Moore, most of
which has been done with the view to book-decora-
tion. The movement grew out of the gradual
decline of reproductive wood-engraving, which,
—leaving behind it the splendid triumphs of the
eighteen-sixties, when great illustrative artists were
content to draw upon the block for such excellent
engravers as Swain, the
Dalziels, Hooper and
Linton to treat with artis¬
tically sympathetic crafts¬
manship—was gradually
ousted, through the
exigencies of the periodical
press, by the photographic
process plate. But with
artists of originality eager
for vehicles of expres¬
sion, it was not likely
that the venerable craft of
wood-engraving should be
allowed to fall into disuse
in this country, especially
with the noble example of
Auguste Lepere in France ;
so the material that served
immortally the genius of
Diirer, Lucas Van Leyden

and Holbein, and was responsive to the graphic
imagination of Blake and Calvert, and the fertile
fancy of Bewick, came once more to the service of
original pictorial expression. It is not too much
to say that the lovely woodcuts of Charles Ricketts
and Sturge Moore are likely to make a new
tradition in this expressive art.
Altogether different in manner and conception is
Mr. Sydney Lee’s handling of the art; yet I
contend that his fine print, The Limestone Rock,
reproduced here, is distinguished among the best
original wood-engraving of our time by not only
its pictorial qualities, its design, its well-balanced
masses of tone, but by the expressive manner in
which the material has been used, the absolute
eloquence of the wood itself in terms of black-and-
white. Mr. Lee realises that when the artist does
his own cutting, as of course he should do, the
capabilities of the box-wood block, cut on end of
the grain, are for original expression very great.
If these be properly understood a result may be pro-
duced which is absolutely peculiar to the material—
a result that could not be imitated or achieved in
the same way by any other process whatever.
In The Limestone Rock this claim for the wood-
block is admirably exemplified. It could not be a
drawing, or a mere reproduction ' of a drawing.
It could, in fact, have been produced only from
wood-blocks cut by the artist himself, with full
understanding of his material and what can be
got out of it. The actual workmanship and
method of work are so intimately bound up with
the design itself that they could not have been


“ SPANISH MILL.” FROM AN ORIGINAL WOOD-ENGRAVING BY SYDNEY LEE, A.R.E.
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