Studio: international art (55.1912)

New School of Colour-Printing

easier for them by offering, at their School of
Colour-Printing, the valuable results of their own
experiments in reviving an old technique easily
suitable to the medium in its modern manner.
They are both convinced that there is a great
future for the original colour-print, that it is an
art capable of almost limitless development, ex-
pressive as well as decorative, and that it must be
possible to produce from metal plates the whole
gamut of colour-tones as luminously beautiful as
the Japanese colour-printers and certain of their
European followers have obtained from a series
of wood-blocks. And this reminds me to add that,
in response to a desire on the part of some of the
students, as well as several painters who have been
fired with ambition to emulate these examples, the
teaching of the school has recently been extended
to embrace wood-block cutting for colour-printing
according to the Japanese method. Mr. Dawson,
having practised this technique for some years past,
and exhibited his coloured woodcuts, has taken
charge of this new branch of the school’s teaching.
So already pupils are learning, at 26 St. Peter’s
Square, to cut their designs upon the plank way of
the wood, to mix their water-colours with rice-
paste, and take off the impressions on to absorbent
paper by rubbing with a pad in the manner of the
Japanese. The tools which Mr. Dawson uses are,
I understand, actually of Japanese make. We
may, therefore, look forward with confidence to
seeing, before long, some additions to that small
but notable group of wood-engravers whose colour-
prints are always among the most interesting
features of the exhibitions
of the Society of Graver-
Printers in Colour, and with
which I propose to deal in
a future article. One may
presume that, in due course,
colour-lithography will also
receive practical attention
at this excellent School ot
Colour-Printing for Artists.

There is certainly a great
field for it, and, when one
recalls the harmonious tints
and beautiful gradations of
tone, so pictorially expressive,
of such appealing things as
Mr. Sydney Lee’s The Two
Brewers and Mr. Thomas
R. Way’s Twilight in the
Old Harbour, one must be
convinced that colour-litho-

graphy offers to artists a very happy medium of
direct personal expression. Since the very nature
of lithography makes for spontaneity in the
pictorial presentation of vision, and the possible
range of tones is infinite, there must surely be sub-
jects demanding richness and subtleties of colour
which can be treated with even more artistic
success upon the stone, or, I should say, the
stones, than upon the aquatinted metal plates, or
the wood block. With what enthusiasm and suc-
cess colour-lithography is practised by a number
of artists in Germany, readers of The Studio are
already aware, and, as I understand that there is a
very large demand in England for the prints of
Carlos Grethe, Angelo Jank, G. Kampmann, H.
von Volkmann, Marie Ortlieb, and others, and the
inexpensive method of production enables them
to be printed so cheaply that the County Council
buys them by the thousand as a means of edu-
cating public taste, it is obvious that here is a
field for English artists that has not yet been
exploited. M. C. S.

Mr. Edward Stott’s “ Hagar and Ishmael.”
—This picture, of which a reproduction was pub-
lished in our February number, is in the collection
of Captain J. Audley Harvey of St. John’s Wood,
who is also the owner of the copyright. Captain
Harvey’s ownership of the work was not brought to
our notice until after the publication of the
number, and we desire to express our regret that
he was not consulted beforehand in regard to the
reproduction.

BY ROBERT LITTLE, R.W.S.