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Sonia Delaunay was born Sara Stern in 1885 in Odessa in Ukraine, into a relatively-poor Jewish family. At the age of 5 she was adopted by a wealthy uncle, Henri Terk, and renamed Sofia Terk (though she was always known as Sonia). She doesn't appear to have had much if any contact with her birth parents after this point. She grew up in St. Petersburg in wealthy, educated circles, becoming fluent in English, German, and French. In 1904 she went to Germany to study at the Karlsruhe Academy, moving two years later to Paris to study at the Acad�mie de la Palette. Sonia's early paintings, mainly highly-coloured portraits of people in her circle, were influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin, but also by the German Expressionists of Die Br�cke, and by the Fauves, who were just exploding onto the Paris art scene. She met and married the art dealer William Uhde, in what was essentially a marriage of convenience; Uhde was gay, and Sonia wanted to stay in Paris. Uhde put on her first show i

When Vincas Kisarauskas and Saule Ale�keviciute met while studying at the Lithuanian Art Institute in Vilnius in the late 1950s they forged a powerful personal and artistic partnership that was to introduce a Picasso-inspired Modernist aesthetic into the conservative Lithuanian art scene, which typically encouraged socialist realism or the exploration of safe ethnographic themes. The 1960s was a decade of turmoil and revolution not just in the West, but also in the Soviet bloc. In his article " Vincas Kisarauskas' Arrow Is Still In Flight ", Marcelijus Martinaitis recalls how in those heady days, "Fragments of modern Western art were hunted for, art albums 'from over there' were scanned, books and articles were read." Saule Kisarauskiene One approved route into Western art circles was participation in international congresses of collectors and creators of exlibris bookplates, and both Vincas and Saule became keen exlibris artists. All of my examples of t

This is just to alert my readers to the fact that I have taken the plunge into the world of social media, and set up Twitter and Facebook accounts for Idbury Prints. The Twitter feed will just feature a single image with minimal information: artist, title, medium, date. The Facebook page will feature the same image but with a brief, informal text about it. I'll also try to work out how to link the Facebook page to this blog, so that the longer, more considered pieces I post here should also go there. Ludwig Heinrich von Jungnickel, Pantherkopf Colour woodcut, 1916 This is the first image I chose for this new project, a really stunning colour woodblock print by one of the masters of the medium. It was published in 1916  in the Vienna art revue Die Graphischen Kunste. Jungnickel made two different versions of this print - this one with the white background, and a second one with an orange background. You can compare the two in the informative post on L. H. Jungnickel at Modern Prin

The aristocratic Swedish artist Count Pehr Louis Sparre, commonly referred to in German as Louis Graf Sparre (Graf meaning Count), was born in Gravellona Lomellina, Italy, in 1863. He was married to the Finnish artist Eva Mannerheim, and lived in Finland for nearly twenty years from 1889. Louis Sparre is regarded as one of the founders of Karelianism, alongside his close friend and colleague Akseli Gallen-Kallela. This shiveringly cold etching was created by Louis Sparre in 1904, and published in 1906 by the Gesellschaft f�r Vervielf�ltigende Kunst, Vienna, in Die Graphischen Kunste. Louis Graf Sparre, Winter Etching, 1904 Besides a long career as a painter and printmaker, Louis Sparre was a leading ceramicist, and directed the first Finnish feature film. If that wasn't enough, he also competed as an individual and team fencer at the 1912 summer Olympics. Louis Graf Sparre died in Stockholm in 1964, at the age of 101.

I've posted before about the German Expressionist artist K�the Kollwitz, so I'll not rehearse all my previous thoughts again: you can read them here . But having acquired a new etching by Kollwitz I felt I wanted to share it with you, partly as my own inadequate response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris. Initially this picture seems to have nothing to do with war or terror: it is simply a mother caressing her baby in the cradle, the kind of image Mary Cassatt made famous. K�the Kollwitz, Frau an der Wiege Etching, 1897 Klipstein 38 IIIc, Knesebeck 40 But look again at that mother. She is not entranced by the happy, healthy presence of her baby; she is traumatised by the anticipation of grief and loss, already holding her head in her hands. When she made this image in 1897, after the birth of her second child, Peter, how could K�the Kollwitz have known that such sadness lay ahead? But it did. Peter was killed in action in WWI in October 1914, aged just 19. Everyone knows h

I offer the robust woodcut A Breton D�jeuner by F. H. Eames to my readers with all my best wishes for a happy and healthy 2015. May your tables overflow with food, wine, and the laughter of friends. Felix Henry Eames, A Breton D�jeuner Woodcut, 1930 I really like this highly-accomplished work, which was contributed to The London Mercury in 1930. Around this time Eames was also contributing woodcuts or wood engravings to another London literary and artistic revue, The Town Crier. So I was surprised when researching him to find almost nothing about F. H. Eames, either in standard reference books or on the internet. I did manage to expand the initials to two given names, Felix Henry. I also discovered that he was born in Matlock, Derbyshire, in 1892, and that he died in 1971. And that is about the sum total of my knowledge. From the Breton subject-matter of A Breton D�jeuner and the Post-Impressionist aesthetic of the piece I would suspect that Felix Henry Eames was one of those artists s

I suppose I've been aware of Gwen Raverat's wood engravings for most of my life, though without ever knowing how to pronounce her name: the final "t" is silent, so the correct pronunciation is more like Raverar. Her husband, the artist Jacques Raverat, was French, and Gwen and Jacques lived in Vence from 1920 until Jacques' early death from multiple sclerosis in 1925. It was in Provence that Gwen created what for me are her most perfect works, from a lifetime total of nearly 600 engraved woodblocks. Frances Spalding, Gwen Ravert: Friends, Family & Affections Cover design incorporating an oil self-portrait, c.1910-11 Gwen Raverat was born in Cambridge in 1885. Her eccentric family were part of the intellectual elite of Cambridge. Charles Darwin was her grandfather, and late in life she wrote a brilliant childhood memoir, Period Piece , which brings the family dramas of the Darwins to life. She would be an interesting person simply for her Darwin heritage, her c