International studio (59.1916)

Printing from Wood Blocks

whose view of Delft is far and away the greatest
landscape ever painted. These men were pro-
digious artists, but they did not have the faint-
est conception how to introduce vibration into
their landscapes, how to flood their canvases
with the light and air; neither had the Barbizon
men, or Constable and his school, the latter the
first artists to take their easels out-of-doors.
This was the discovery of the Impressionists, of
Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir, Sisley.
The impressionists’ technique was, however, at
first more scientific than artistic. Later they
developed it, still employing the colours of the
spectrum, but abandoning the technique of painting
in dots. Lawson, an innovator, like all artists of
real genius, has pushed these discoveries and
developments even further. There is as much
sparkle and sense of outdoors in his picture en-
titled Winter, here reproduced, as there is in a
Monet, but there is nothing at all eccentric or
unpleasant in his technique. Nor is there in the
Squatter's Hut, painted in 1914, a year earlier
than his Winter. He has always gone straight to
nature for his inspiration and painted his pic-
ture in a sane and sincere manner, combining
strength with a lyric quality, virility with ten-
derness. Such a canvas is the scintillating Road,
at the Palisades, sold last January in the Hugo
Reisinger sale and now beautifully hung between
two Monets at the Saint Louis Museum of Fine
Arts. His brush work and his use of the palette
knife is forceful and vigorous, full of spontaneity.
He has a great sense of colour and there are in
his paintings delicious passages of greens and blues,
but never even a suggestion of “sweetness.” As
drawing and structure have not concerned hint
as much as has colour, black and white reproduc-
tions of his paintings give only a hint of their beauty.
Lawson’s art is realistic, but he abhors the
sordid and the ugly (so many moderns wrongly
think this is synonymous with character). He
paints the prosaic, but seen through the eyes of
an artist, not through the lens of a camera. This
is what Whistler did, waiting for the poetry of
the evening mist on the embankment, or for
darkness, as he said, to change the poor factory
into a campanile. And Lawson has also found
beauty at home: for many years he lived in the
northern part of Manhattan Island, near the
Washington Bridge, and this is where he has
painted many of his pictures, even as Rembrandt
found beauty in the Jewish quarter in Amsterdam.

RINTING FROM WOOD BLOCKS
BY ARTHUR WESLEY DOW
I have been asked to say something
about my colour prints. Printing in
water-colour, from a wood block cut with a knife,
is the subject of these few paragraphs. The side
of the board is used, not the end. The colour is
applied with a brush, and the paper laid upon the
block and rubbed down. The process is so differ-
ent from ordinary printing—with inks on a
press—that it may fairly be called “painting
with wood blocks.”
It is a painter’s art, for creative colour is the
aim and purpose of the whole thing. It is a free
craft, for the artist is his own engraver, printer,
and publisher, producing, by hand, single prints,
no two alike.
Colour variation has always fascinated me.
There is a peculiar pleasure in seeing the same
design appear in different colours—the design
seems to have a soul in each colour-scheme. I
remember these sensations in childhood when
I found in a garret two copies of the famous
“Blue-back” spelling-book with the wood cuts
of the fables coloured differently in each—the
fox was red in one, but blue in the other. This
was a surprise, the same kind of surprise that
comes many times over to the collector of Hiro-
shige’s prints.
Then too, I was familiar with another sort of
colour variation. The Ipswich sailors painted
their boats in bright hues, using different colours
for the inside, outside and streak. They had a
limited palette—dark blue, canary yellow, orange,
orange-red, several greens, black, and white.
They were not content to keep a colour scheme
very long, in fact they varied it from year to
year, perhaps borrowing one another’s paint pots
when they freshened up the boats in the spring.
“Smart as paint,” said John Silver.
These boats were like colour prints as they lay
on the shore in the dark shadow of the willows,
or slanted in companies down the heaps of white
clam shells—and the tide and the sailors always
kept new combinations going.
Under the spell of these, and the old picture
books, I tried to make wood engravings to colour
by hand, but it was not until I became acquainted
with Japanese prints that I found a simple way
of creating colour variations. The Boston
Museum’s vast collection showed me every pos-


xv