John Hall Thorpe

Having looked at my bank statement this morning and feeling pretty broke, I have decided to cast away a few treasures, a few of them recently acquired. Does mentioning my wares on the blog qualify as definitively selling out? This morning I put a Ned Jacob charcoal and an Edward Borein watercolor on ebay. The starting bids are about cost and I will see how they go. I have to admit that the Borein is a bit macabre but as they say in the biz, there is an ass for every saddle.


I have also decided to list one or both of a pair of woodblock prints I recently purchased from the Australian artist John Hall Thorpe (1874-1947). Perhaps I can advertise and give an art history lesson.

Thorpe was one of a handful of Australian print makers who won great acclaim and following internationally in the 1920's. He painstakingly cut separate blocks for each color of the woodcut. I believe that he worked in pear wood.

Thorpe was born into a family of English immigrants. His grandfather an artist, Thorpe showed an early interest in botanic studies. He  apprenticed at John Fairfax & Sons  as a wood engraver, where he became a staff artist on the Sydney Mail. He left for England in 1902.  Between 1920 and 1927 Hall Thorpe created the majority of his flower and landscape prints. These are two of the flower blocks he is very famous for creating. The first print is titled Cowslips and is circa 1922.

The English and Australian woodblock movement paralleled similar roads of tangency in Vienna,  Berlin, Kyoto and the United States. Early American artists during the time and a bit earlier were Bertha Lum, Helen Hyde, Elizabeth Keith, Margaret Jordan Patterson and the Provincetown white line devotee Blanche Lazell. In Northern California William Seltzer Rice and Frances Gearhart brought new brightness of color to the works, lakes and skies as sweet as candy. Alice Geneva Glazier was an etcher, a student of Perham Nahl, who left Berkeley and married the poet Phillip Kloss. In Taos she became the master of the aquatint with a new name, Gene Kloss. One of the greats was the Indiana artist Gustave Baumann, whose southwestern subject matter brought the whole craft to a new apex.

I can see these John Hall Thorpe's in my minds eye in a paneled english cottage, brightening a bright corner, back in the day.

Here is the second Hall Thorpe, Primroses, also from 1922. Simple, the palette reminds me somewhat of Milton Avery. Almost cactus like in hue. It is my understanding that the works of this artist underwent a bit of an upsurge, coming back into vogue a few years ago. I heard that the same buying demographic collected Clarice Cliff. I hope that there are still a few extant.