Wood Engraving Wednesday
JOAN ELLIS
Former Exeter Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) curator Hal Bishop introduced us once again to a wood engraver we are unfamiliar with, English artist Joan Ellis (1904-1989). It may not be surprising that we were ignorant of Ellis’s work. Bishop writes:
It seems extraordinary that an engraver of exceptional talent should be lost for over half a century, but this was the fate of Eleanor Joan Ellis; between 1924 and 1934 she produced around forty wood-engravings, most of astonishingly high quality in creativity, composition, and execution. But between 1934 and 1994 she largely disappeared from the history of wood-engraving, unnoticed by art historians, other engravers, and most collectors.
The engravings shown here were printed from the original blocks as an insert for Bishop’s article “Joan Ellis: a Lost Engraver from the Underwood School,” published in Matrix 17, Winter 1997, pp. 41-52. Ellis studied at Leon Underwood’s progressive Brook Green School of Art from 1923 to 1925. Her classmates were a virtual who’s who of artists and wood engravers of the time, including Henry Moore, Gertrude Hermes, Blair Hughes-Stanton, Nora Unwin, and Mary Groom. Bishop concludes:
It may have taken over sixty years but the critical acclaim which greeted her work when it was gathered together for the first time in 1997 (for a retrospective exhibition at RAMM) will ensure that she will be overlooked no longer.
Matrix 17 was printed in an edition of 770 copies by John and Rosalind Randle at the Whittington Press in England, and is a donation from our friend Jerry Buff.
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