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When I wrote my post A walk along High Street, I was aware that three of Eric Ravilious's evocative lithographs of shop fronts for High Street had first been published in the journal Signature: A Quadrimestrial of Typography and Graphic Arts , with an appreciation by John Piper. This short article, entitled "Lithographs by Eric Ravilious of Shop Fronts", was published in March 1937, while the book did not appear until the following year. What I had not realised was that the three plates in Signature varied significantly from those in the book. When I first noticed this, I thought it was merely a matter of variant colourways, but the more I look at these day tradings beautiful prints the more variations I see. I won't spoil the fun of this spot-the-difference game by pointing out every detail, but will simply put the two versions next to each other. All were printed by the Curwen Press, where the lithographs were executed directly onto the lithographic stones. Eric

One of the most interesting things about British art in the 1920s was the blurred distinction that arose between art and design. This can be seen in all kinds of areas, from textiles to advertising to architecture. In the field of pattern papers, the Curwen Press was at the forefront, commissioning designs from artists such as Edward Bawden, Margaret Calkin James, Claude Lovat Fraser, Albert Rutherston, Enid Marx, and Eric Ravilious. Curwen were so proud of these papers that in 1928 they published the delicious A Specimen Book of Pattern Papers Designed for and in Use at the Curwen Press, with an Introduction by Paul Nash. I don't, sadly, have a copy of this extremely rare and costly publication. But I do have a copy of The Woodcut: An Annual for 1927. Like the Specimen Book, this was printed at Curwen and published by the Fleuron. And it contains an essay by Paul Nash (identical with the introduction? I'm not sure, but probably) entitled Woodcut Patterns. It is illustrated wit

The name of Tirzah Garwood may well seem vaguely familiar, because it is unusual enough to stick in the mind. And I know some readers of this blog will recognize it immediately as the unmarried name of Tirzah Ravilious, who was married from 1930-1942 to the artist Eric Ravilious, and from 1946-1951 to Henry Swanzy. Tirzah Garwood, Yawning Wood engraving, 1929 Eileen Lucy �Tirzah� Garwood was born in 1908 into a conventional middle class background in Eastbourne, East Sussex. Attracted by the artistic life, at 18 she enrolled in a class in wood engraving at the Eastbourne College of Art. The teacher was Eric Ravilious, who was also born in Eastbourne, though by this time he was living either with Douglas Percy Bliss in London or with Edward Bawden in Great Bardfield. Tirzah Garwood, Kensington High Street Wood engraving, 1929 Tirzah�s first wood engraving was made on 24 November 1926. By 1927 she was already exhibiting engravings at the Redfern Gallery, London. Over the next four years

There was a serious question behind the quiz in my last post, and it was this�what was it that led a whole generation of British artists who in the 1930s were hovering on the brink of a commitment to abstraction to abandon that route, and retreat into Englishness?          It was not, I think, a failure of nerve that led artists such as Paul Nash or John Piper to turn their backs on abstraction. It was, rather, a stiffening of resolve in the face of the acutely perceived threat to the entire British way of life, as war with Nazi Germany loomed.          WWI�the war I still think of as The Great War�was the great fracture point of recent western history. After it, many artists were only too keen to embrace modernism, and to break with the safe rules of the past. In Britain, this was true only up to a point. When asked why he was fighting in WWI, the poet Edward Thomas picked up a handful of English earth and let it trickle through his fingers: �Literally for this,� he said. I think that