Blanche Lazzell (1878-1956)
Born in West Virginia, Lazzell studied art at West Virginia University, the Art Students League in New York, and the Academie Moderne in Paris. She established a studio in Provincetown in 1915, and spent most summers and some winters there for the next forty years. From 1923 to 1925 she studied in Paris with Albert Gleizes, Andre Lhote, and Fernand Leger. Many of her subsequent prints incorporated the Cubist aesthetic. Lazzell taught color block printing in Provincetown and was one of the most prominent of the Provincetown Printers. Her work is in the collection of the National Museum of American Art.
Pedro J. de Lemos (1882-1945)
Growing up in Oakland, California, de Lemos studied art in San Francisco before making his way to New York where he studied at the Art Students League and with Arthur Wesley Dow at Teachers’ College, Columbia University. Returning to California de Lemos became the leading exponent of the arts and crafts movement. As a printmaker he worked in a variety of media including etchings, aquatints and relief prints in color. His color woodcuts, printed in heavy oil based inks, depict exclusively the Pacific Coast of California. However, his most influential roles were those of teacher, theorist, author and arts administrator. He wrote a widely used series of art books for public schools. In 1919 he became Director of The Stanford University Art Museum. His works are in the California State Library and San Francisco Art Museums.
Tod Lindenmuth (1885-1976)
Born in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the son of an artist and photographer, Lindenmuth studied in New York. He first exhibited in Provincetown in 1915. Lindenmuth was an original member of the Provincetown Printers, as well as a member of the Provincetown Art Association. Lindenmuth worked entirely in the color linocut method, mostly depicting the New England coast and waterfront environs of Provincetown. His muted palette of greens and blues dominate his prints. His works are in the permanent collections of the Toledo Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the Pennsylvania State University Museum.
Bertha Lum (1879-1954)
Bertha Lum was born in Iowa and studied at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. While on her honeymoom visit to Japan in 1903 she purchased woodcut making tools and tried to learn more about traditional Japanese techniques. After four years back in the U.S. she returned to Japan where she studied and worked in the studio of Igami Bokantsu. During her long career she travelled back and forth to the Orient several times. The very strong influence of Japanese woodblock printing makes Lum one of the foremost proponents of American Japanisme. Her subject matter ranged from Japanese and American landscapes to the interpretation of Japanese fantasy, myth and legends. She was greatly inspired by these later tales and legends, and they provided the themes for many of the prints in her large body of work. After several trips to Japan she went to China in 1922 where she invented and perfected the “raised line” woodcut. She was a member of the Asiatic Society of Japan, the California Society of Etchers and the Print Makers Society of California. Lum’s work is in the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Florence Lundborg (1871-1949)
Born in San Francisco, Lundborg studied with Arthur and Lucia Mathews at the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and also in Paris and Italy. She was a painter, muralist and illustrator who received a gold medal at the Mark Hopkins Institute and a bronze medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in 1915. She is best known today for the seven posters she designed for a literary magazine, The Lark, six of which – in the Arts and Crafts tradition – she cut the blocks herself. Her work is in the collection of The Oakland Museum and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ethel Mars (1876-1956)
Born in Springfield, Illinois, Ethel Mars studied at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Along with Maud Squire, a fellow artist and schoolmate, she moved between New York, Europe and Cincinnati until 1906, when they settled in Paris. Mars served on juries at the Salon d’Automne, exhibiting paintings there from 1907 to 1917. During this time, she was actively working in color woodcuts and other printmaking media. Upon returning to the U.S. at the outbreak of World War I, Mars and Squire moved to Provincetown and helped to establish the Provincetown Printers. In 1921, they returned to France where they spent the rest of their lives. Mars is represented in the collections of the National Museum of American Art and the Provincetown Art Association.
Lilian May Miller (1896-1943)
The daughter of the U.S. Consul General to Seoul, Korea, Miller was born in Toyko where she attended the American School before coming to the U.S. for high school and Vassar College from which she graduated. While in Japan, she studied with Kano Tomonobu (also Helen Hyde’s teacher) and later with the famed Bokusa Shimoda. In 1929 Miller had a large exhibition of her color woodcuts in Washington, D.C., where she demonstrated the Japanese technique, dressed in traditional native clothing. Her earliest prints were primarily figurative and floral. Her later prints were mostly landscapes made in Korea and Japan. She is represented in The Art Institute of Chicago, The Smithsonian Insitute and The Baltimore Museum of Art.
Gladys Wilkins Murphy (1907- )
Born in 1907 in Providence, Rhode Island, she attended The Rhode Island School of Design. Murphy went on to become a member of, and extensive exhibitor to, numerous print societies throughout the United States. Her subject matter, mostly New England environs and coast, is distinctive in her use of color variations. Like Jane Berry Judson, Murphy experimented in color, sometimes using the same blocks inked differently to convey a change in the time of day.
Bror Julius Olsson Nordfeldt (1878-1955)
Nordfeldt moved to the United States from his native Sweden when he was twelve. He studied at the School of The Art Institute of Chicago before returning to Europe in 1900. He went to England specifically to study under the renowned Frank Morley Fletcher, learning the Japanese technique of color woodcuts. Upon returning to the United States, he settled in Chicago in 1903, where he made a series of seventeen color woodcuts in between 1902 and 1906, fifteen of which were exhibited by Albert Roullier Gallery in Chicago.
He is however best known and widely credited for inventing and developing the one block or “white line method” of color wood block printing in 1915. This became commonly known as the “Provincetown Print”, presumably due to his developing it there. Many artists followed in his footsteps and were influenced by this technique, Blanche Lazzell among others.
His interest in wood block printing, however, was short lived and after World War I he moved to New Mexico where he painted for the rest of his career. His works are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, The Art Institute of Chicago and the New York Public Library.
Elizabeth Norton (b.1887 – c.1984)
Born in Chicago, Elizabeth Norton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later at the National Academy of Design in New York. She started wood block printing in the early 1920s in Provincetown and continued in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she did prints mostly of landscapes and animals. Her works are in the collections of the Library of Congress, Art Institute of Chicago, and the New York Public Library.
Chiura Obata (1885-1975)
Obata, born and educated in Japan, came to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1903 and spent most of the remainder of his life there. In 1928-30 he had a series of his watercolors of California scenes translated into color woodcuts in Japan. Like many Japanese living in America, he was interned during World War II after the Japanese attach on Pearl Harbor. Obata taught art at the University of California, Berkeley from 1932 to 1954, except during World War II. Exhibitions of his work have taken place at the University of California, Mills College, and the Oakland Museum.
Margaret Jordan Patterson (1867-1950)
Patterson studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute and learned wood-block printing in Paris. Her first one-person exhibition was in Paris in 1913. An active Provincetown woodcut artist, Patterson’s prints largely depict seascapes, landscapes and florals in a method which almost appears to be monotype. Her works are in the Library of Congress, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Walter J. Phillips (1884-1963)
Born in Barton-on Humber, England, Phillips is best known as a painter and woodcut artist of the Canadian West. Phillips studied at the Birmingham Municipal School of Art and moved to Winnipeg in 1913. Although Phillips sometimes included figures in his color woodcuts, they are predominantly outdoor scenes of the Canadian Rockier, lakes, waterfalls, streams and mountainscapes. His prints, which have the quality of watercolors, are well known for their subtle color transitions obtained through his use of thin water-based inks. An author of several books on woodcuts, he taught art history and printmaking at the University of Wisconsin and University of Alberta. He was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy and the Prairie Print Makers. His prints are in the collections of the British Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, Library of Congress, and Royal Ontario Museum.
Natt Piper (b. 1886 – ?)
Born in Pueblo, Colorado, little is known of the formal background of this woodcut artist. It is known that he worked in Southern California from his numerous listings in American Art Journal and Who’s Who in American Art. Piper’s prints are in the collections of the New York Public Library and the Ashton Collection of Wood Engravings, Springfield, Massachusetts.
William S. Rice (1873-1963)
A methodical craftsman who had a long and distinguished career as a teacher, Rice focused on printmaking as a medium for his private expression. Born in Pennsylvania, he studied at the Pennsylvania Museum of Industrial Art and the Drexel Institute before moving to the West Coast. His color woodcuts encompass a wide range of interests, but mostly depict the landscapes of the Sierra Nevada and coastal California. He was also an accomplished watercolorist. His works are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library and the National Museum of American Art.
Charles Richert (1880-1953)
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Richert’s paintings, gouaches and prints are almost entirely of New England subjects. Richert worked solely in the linocut method. His simplified forms which dominate his linocuts, lend themselves to the flat color fields and muted colors of his palette. He was a member of the Boston Art Club and the Boston Society of Water Color Painters.
Alice Ravenel Huger Smith (1876-1958)
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Smith studied at the art school of the Carolina Art Association. She was greatly influenced by a local collection of traditional Japanese wood-block prints. Smith created just a handful of woodcuts which largely depicted the South Carolina Low Country. Starting in the early 1920s, she turned her attention to watercolors. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art and the Morris Museum of Art in Augusta, Georgia.
Anna Heyward Taylor (1879-1956)
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, Taylor studied at the South Carolina College for Women and the University of South Carolina. Her interest in woodcuts stemmed from her contact with B.J.O. Nordfeldt and the Provincetown Printers of Massachusetts where she spent several summers working and exhibiting. An avid traveler, Taylor used her woodcut techniques to capture the flora and fauna of Central and South America. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Columbia Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History and the Fogg Museum of Harvard University.
Elizabeth O’Neill Verner (1883-1979)
Born in Charleston, South Carolina, she was an etcher, author and lecturer. Verner studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and traveled to Japan where she learned traditional Japanese brushwork. A charter member of the Preservation Society of Charleston, she was active in numerous civic organizations. Her etchings largely depcit historical Charleston and its environs. Her works are in the permanent collections of the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ernest Watson (1883-1969)
Born in Conway, Massachusetts in 1884, Watson attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School and Pratt Institute. He was one of the founders and directors of the Berkshire Summer School of Art. His linoleum cuts mostly depict New England coastal scenes, the area where he spent most of his working time. He was a member of the Prairie Print Makers and Editor Emeritus of American Artists Magazine. Watson published a book, Linoleum Block Printing, in 1929. His works are in the Library of Congress.
Eva Watson (1889-1948)
Eva Auld Watson, wife of Ernest, was born in Texas. She studied at the Pittsburg School of Design and Pratt Institute. A member of the Boston Society of Arts and Crafts, she was awarded an honorable mention at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Her works are in the Library of Congress.
For further information on these, or other artists working in the color woodcut medium at the end of the 19th and the early to mid-20th century, please feel free to contact us.
Andrew Terry Keats - Fine Art 