Legends Of The Prints Hall Thorpe And His Ilk

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday June 28, 2008

Peter Fish pfish@smh.com.au

Far from the hot air and hype that haunt the fine art auction rooms, the nation's workaday print dealers are keeping up the good work - the relatively mundane trade in rare prints and multiples. Not to be confused with commercial posters and reproductions, prints have involved artists as diverse as William Hogarth and Pablo Picasso, who saw it as a way to make their output available to a wider audience - but turned print-making into an art form in its own right.

Another aspect of the market covers the rare and decorative flora and topographical lithographs once available only to wealthy book collectors. All are strands of an international print market that is big in the US and Europe.

Arthur Boyd and Lloyd Rees are among the prominent names on prints on show at the latest Australian art exhibition at Josef Lebovic Gallery in Paddington, where many works are priced below $3000.

Also on show is a near-complete array of the vibrant colour woodblocks of one of Australia's few internationally successful artists - John Hall Thorpe, who achieved great success in England in the 1920s and whose prints have long had a big following here (see next item).

Lebovic's images range from colonial buildings, for instance, A.H. Fullwood's 1894 etching The Black Horse, Richmond, to Sydney in the 1900s as shown in the Alfred Coffey etching Old Pyrmont Bridge - through to modernist works like the Vera Blackburn linocut The Deer and the Christian Y. Waller linocut art deco study Male And Female Figures At Dawn.

Arthur Boyd's maroon and brown etching Shoalhaven Landscape With Figures, from an edition of 200, is priced at $2200, and Lloyd Rees's soft-ground etching in blue ink The Lane Cover River, from an edition of 90, is $2600.

The Antique Print Room, in the Queen Victoria Building, has also assembled a large offering of decorative prints and plates.

They include large hand-coloured lithographs from Australian Orchids by Robert Fitzgerald, published in the 1880s, priced at $65 and up, and a collection of 150 copper engravings by William Hogarth - whose works were a commentary on the people, morals, customs and sights of 1700s England - at $125 and up. Visually magnificent are the 60 lithographs published in David Roberts's great book Views Of The The Holy Land - scenes around Jerusalem and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre - at $150 upwards. More for the medically minded are meticulous anatomical lithographs from the 1830s that predate the legendary Gray's Anatomy, published 1858.

Bonham & Goodman's also has a variety of prints at the Bay East rooms in Young Street, Waterloo, for tomorrow's auction of traditional and contemporary artworks. The B&G art specialist Virginia Mitchell has been rounding up plenty of fascinating works for these second-line sales. This weekend's offerings range from Sidney Nolan, Charles Blackman and Ray Crooke to Hall Thorpe and other prints, plus drawings and caricatures.

FLORAL TRIBUTE

Hall Thorpe's colour woodcut images of flowers are as distinctive as Margaret Preston's hand-coloured woodcuts - albeit more affordable. Despite achieving great success in Europe and the US between the wars, his work was sometimes later dismissed as conservative and overly decorative. But it has attracted fresh buying interest in recent decades.

Hall Thorpe was one of few 20th-century artists to achieved success in such a challenging medium - using separate wood blocks which he cut himself to print each colour. His landmark flower study The Country Bunch, 75.9 centimetres by 63 centimetres, involved no less than 15 separate wood blocks.

Brochures survive showing examples of this work were first offered about 1923 for seven guineas. That is a surprisingly high price for an era when prints by Preston - and even originals by Grace Cossington Smith - commanded only two or three guineas when exhibited in London. The Country Bunch is $2800 at the Lebovic show.

John Hall Thorpe was born in 1874 into a family of English immigrants. His grandfather was a landscape artist of some merit. As a youngster he showed an interest in flower studies. After completing his education at St John's Grammar in Parramatta, he was apprenticed to John Fairfax & Sons (today Fairfax Media, publisher of the Herald) as a wood engraver, where he became a staff artist on the Sydney Mail.

In 1902, according to Robert and Ingrid Holden's introduction to the 1980 book Hall Thorpe Coloured Woodcuts, he left for Britain to study at St Martin's School of Art as well as continuing his illustrative work. While most of his output was black and white, the end of World War I marked a turning point.

By 1919 he had clearly fallen for the English countryside, with its picturesque villages and quaint cottages. But he railed at the tacky decoration he saw inside the homes - walls "thickly hung with old Christmas supplements and enlarged photographs of the family", as he wrote in the Studio Year-Book at the time.

What they needed, he resolved, was a less cluttered interior with colourful and "uplifting" pictures - landscapes and flowers, for instance. For this he returned to woodcuts.

He established a studio producing prints that soon attracted a huge following, particularly in the US. With their freshness and flat areas of often vivid colour, the woodcuts have an art deco boldness that struck a chord with home decorators between the wars. But while he exhibited alongside well known figures like Lucien Pissarro and Frank Brangwyn, both formidable print artists, Hall Thorpe seems to have run his own race with no particular influences obvious in his work. By 1929 the studio was sending works all over the world, along with brochures that began to take on an increasingly moralising tone, probably reflecting the artist's conversion to Christian Science. His strict views even prevented him accepting medical treatment for the pneumonia that took his life in 1947.

ASIAN ART SURPRISES

A surprise $13,200 for a Chinese blue-and-white porcelain vase was the top price among a sizeable offering of oriental ceramics at the Sotheby's Connoisseur sale last month.

Oriental and European art from the collection of the former Dalgety accountant John Weller was a highlight of the sale, much of it Chinese blue-and-white and blanc de chine - a type of pure white, undecorated porcelain.

It was Weller's 26-centimetre ovoid vase decorated in underglaze blue with a scene of scholars drinking wine and an inscription that brought the $13,200. The catalogue described it as early Kangxi from the Qing dynasty - dating it to around 1660 - with an estimate of $500 to $700. The catalogue dismissed as probably apocryphal a six-character mark of the earlier Chenghua emperor of the Ming era. Chinese porcelains are often marked for earlier emperors, more as a mark of respect than as an attempt to defraud.

But the price achieved suggests that either it was a really superior Kangxi piece or that the Chenghua mark was right and its origin was some 200 years earlier than had been thought.

Another surprise among the Weller wares was a large giltwood and polychrome European figure of a kneeling saint clad in flowing robes. Some 90 centimetres high and catalogued as dating from the 18th century, it brought $17,400, four times the lower estimate.

Among the accountant's large assemblage of the Blanc de Chine, an 18-armed figure of Doumu, 18th/19th century and 32 centimetres high, sold for $12,600.

A gilt-bronze figure of Buddha described as late Ming, circa 1600 and 34 centimetres high, tripled the lower estimate to fetch $25,200. A Khmer sandstone multi-armed torso described as "probably 13th century" brought $13,200. It must have had good bones - but doubtless the provenance to David Jones Art Gallery helped validate the piece.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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