Edward Wadsworth was born in Cleckheaton Yorkshire in 1889. By 1913, when he started printmaking, he was newly married and living in London. During the next eight years, a brief period overshadowed by the Great War, he produced over 50 woodcuts, and, from 1919, five lithographs, a couple of etchings, and 23 copper engravings for the book Sailing-ships and Barges of the Western Mediterranean and Adriatic Seas.
The woodcuts are of great interest in themselves and also because of the variety of subjects that caught Wadsworth's imagination: harbour, the industrial valleys of his childhood, the Greek island on which he was stationed during the war, the dazzle-camouflages ships and the Black Country. For each subject he found a distinctive artistic language that was rarely used elsewhere.
Nearly half of the woodcuts are in colour - two, three or four printings - and are remarkable for the inventiveness of the variant colour printings that Wadsworth devised for them.
As the anxiety and tension of the war period faded, so did Wadsworth's Vorticist preoccupations, and when he made the engravings for Sailing-ships and Barges in 1926 they were tranquil and reflective: his fascination for precision and detail was now used to show rigging and boat construction accurately.
Then his interest in graphic art ceased and, apart from a lithograph in 1938, he concentrated almost entirely on tempera painting for the remainder of his life.
Scolar Fine Art are proud to have the opportunity to present a show of Wadworth graphic works. The exhibition includes many rare prints, of which some are almost certainly the only impressions taken from the blocks. The show has been timed to coincide with the publication of a catalogue raisonne of Wadworth's graphic oeuvre, published by the Woodlea Press.
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