Edmund Blampied
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Edmund Blampied (born Jersey 30 March 1886, died Jersey 26 August 1966) was one of the most eminent artists to come from the Channel Islands, yet he received no formal training in art until he was 16 years old. He was noted mostly for his etchings and drypoints published at the height of the print boom in the 1920s, but was also a lithographer, caricaturist, cartoonist, book illustrator and artist in oils, watercolours, silhouettes and bronze.
[edit] Early years
Edmund Blampied was born on a farm in the Parish of Saint Martin, Jersey in the Channel Islands on 30th March 1886, five days after the death of his father, John Blampied. He was the last of four boys and was brought up by his mother, Elizabeth, a dressmaker and shopkeeper in the Parish of Trinity, Jersey. His first language was Jèrriais. He finished parochial school at the age of 14 and went to work in the office of the town architect in Saint Helier, the capital of the island. Some of his pen and ink sketches of an agricultural show in May 1902 were noticed by Mlle Josephine Klintz, a woman who ran a local private art school. She gave the young Blampied his first formal lessons in art and introduced him to watercolours. His caricatures of politicians such as the Constable of St. Helier, Philippe Baudains, during a local election brought Blampied to the attention of a businessman named Saumerez James Nicolle who offered to sponsor him at art school in London, provided he tried to get a scholarship.
[edit] Art school
In January 1903, aged 16 years old and barely able to speak English, Blampied left Jersey for the Lambeth School of Art where he was taught by Philip Connard R.A. and Thomas McKeggie. After taking a test and submitting some drawings, in May 1904 Blampied won a £20 London County Council (LCC) Scholarship for 2 years to continue his studies at any LCC art school. Later that year he was selected by the head of the Art School to work part time on the staff of a national newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, which enabled him to earn some extra money. His first published illustrations appeared in the Daily Chronicle on 13th January 1905.
In September 1905 Blampied transferred from Lambeth Art School to the LCC School of Photo-engraving and Lithography at Bolt Court for the final year of his scholarship. It is believed that, after finishing full time studies at Bolt Court in the summer of 1906, he continued to work at The Daily Chronicle and then perhaps at other newspapers while studying in the evenings at Bolt Court, though very little is known about this period in his life.
[edit] Etching
Blampied’s earliest etchings are dated December 1909, suggesting that he did not begin to learn this technique until the academic year 1909 – 1910; his teacher at Bolt Court was Walter Seymour. Blampied’s prints were first shown at an exhibition of students’ work in March 1914, where his etching of an ox cart was noted by the correspondent of The Times. The first print believed to have been published was an etching entitled At the wings (illustrated) which was reproduced in the Annual Report of Bolt Court in 1914. Blampied later recorded his method of working on zinc for etching and copper for drypoint in Ernest Stephen Lumsden's treatise The Art of Etching (Seeley Service, 1925). Blampied wrote: I generally chose from amongst my various drawings one which would tend to produce a successful plate. I do not trace on to the copper, but copy a few important lines on to the bare metal with litho-chalk. I then sketch over this with an ordinary sewing needle and rub in a little black oil-colour. . . From the first my efforts are to improve on the sketch until I consider the plate finished. . . In very few cases do I touch a plate after the first proof, so the majority have but one state. If I am dissatisfied with either the composition or details, I prefer to start afresh upon another plate rather than make radical alterations.
[edit] Independent artist
At the end of 1911, while he was developing his skills as an etcher, Blampied decided to try his luck as an independent artist with his own studio. The rapid developments in colour printing and advertising of the time were creating a great deal of work for commercial artists for the many book and magazine publishers in London. The first recorded illustration was for a piece of sheet music entitled the Glamour Valse, published by Ascherberg, Hopwood and Crew. Blampied quickly gained commissions to provide drawings for Pearson’s Magazine, The Sketch, The Sphere, The Ladies Field, The Queen and The Graphic, many of which were signed “Blam”, a diminutive first recorded in The Tatler in January 1916. He also designed dust jackets for about 30 books published by Hodder & Stoughton between 1914 and 1916 (see illustration) and illustrated presentation editions of two very popular romantic novels: The Money Moon by Jeffery Farnol and The Way of an Eagle by Ethel M. Dell.
Blampied’s etchings were brought to the attention of Ernest Brown and Phillips of the Leicester Galleries in London through an introduction from H. Granville Fell, an artist and well-known art editor. The Leicester Galleries offered Blampied a contract and his first three prints were shown to the general public in February 1915 in the first of a notable series of exhibitions of prints called Modern Masters of Etching. Blampied’s most famous print, called Driving home in the rain, which had been designed in 1913 and transferred to a zinc plate in 1914, was not shown at the Leicester Galleries until November 1916 where, according to a Jersey newspaper of that time, it received a great deal of attention and admiration.
Edmund Blampied married Marianne van Abbé, the sister of Dutch-born artists Joseph and Salomon van Abbé, in August 1914. They had no children. Marianne had acted as his agent for nine years before they married, and continued to do so until Edmund's brother John began working as an artist's agent in the 1920s. She was a great support to Blampied in his work and prompted him to travel and see the world.
[edit] Military service
When conscription was introduced in Britain in 1916, Blampied returned to Jersey in the autumn of that year to be prepared to be called up for military service. In June 1917 he was classified as not fully fit for active service and was put on guard duties in the Royal Jersey Militia. Although there was a gap in commissions for illustrations while he settled into military life, by early 1918 he had re-established his connections with the Scottish book publishers Thomas Nelson and Sons of Edinburgh, for whom he illustrated many fine children’s books and annuals during and immediately after the war.
Blampied quickly re-established himself in London in September 1919 after his return from Jersey and his etchings were acknowledged by the Royal Society of Painter Etchers and Engravers who elected him an Associate in March 1920 at the same time as the wood engraver Gwen Raverat. He was elevated to the full fellowship a year later, a rapid progression in terms of the society. Blampied was elected at the end of what has been called the "etching revival", but there was still a very strong market for prints, mainly as an inexpensive investment in art.
In October 1920 Blampied held his first solo exhibition of 28 etchings and drypoints at the Leicester Galleries, many of which were prints that had been held back because of the war. Driving home in the rain was shown but the copy had been lent, suggesting that all proofs had been sold. His first exhibition of drawings and etchings in the USA was held at Kennedy and Company in New York in early 1922.
[edit] Gold medal at 1925 Paris exposition
Blampied had started to experiment with lithography in 1920, as two lithographs were shown at his first solo exhibition, but they had been transferred to the lithographers stone from paper, and he wanted to learn how to draw directly onto the stone. Blampied turned to Archibald Hartrick, a founder member of the Senefelder Club of lithographers, who was teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts, and started evening classes there. His early efforts, as with etching, proved to be very successful, especially a print named Splash, splash which caught the eye of the art critic Malcolm Salaman. Salaman included it in 1923 in the first of a long-running series of annual volumes called Fine Prints of the Year, which included examples of Blampied’s work each year between 1923 and 1937.
In 1925 the Central School of Arts and Crafts submitted two of Blampied’s lithographs with the work of other students to the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris, the exhibition that gave rise to the term “Art Deco”. The School won a Grand Prix for its works on paper and Blampied was one of 12 students who were awarded a Gold Medal as a collaborateur.
In 1924, having been inspired by an exhibition at the Leicester Galleries of models in wax by Degas, Blampied produced his only bronzes: Kicking horse, in an edition of 15, and Homewards evening (edition unknown). Blampied held another major exhibition of his work, also at the Leicester Galleries, in March 1925 where he showed 8 etchings, 25 paintings and 18 drawings, but his bronzes do not seem to have been shown at an exhibition until 1929.
[edit] Illustrations for books and magazines
While developing his skills as an etcher and lithographer in the early 1920s Blampied continued to work extensively for magazines and contributed hundreds of political cartoons and decorative drawings to The Bystander magazine between 1922 and 1926; he illustrated short stories by E.F. Benson and other authors in Hutchinson’s Magazine, and continued to design book jackets for publishers including Hodder & Stoughton, Herbert Jenkins, T. Fisher Unwin, Eveleigh Nash, William Collins and Constable. The books for T. Fisher Unwin included dust jackets for new impressions in 1923 of eleven of E. Nesbit’s famous children’s novels and James Hilton’s rare second novel called Storm Passage. Blampied also illustrated a film edition of Black Beauty by Anna Sewell and a new edition of The Roadmender by Michael Fairless.
Blampied held his first exhibition of paintings and drawings, rather than prints, at the Leicester Gallery in February 1923 while continuing regularly to exhibit his prints at the annual shows of the Royal Society of Painter Etchers and Engravers and the Senefelder Club of British lithographers, named after Alois Senefelder, the inventor of the method. Blampied was a member of the Council of both societies for periods between 1924 and 1938.
[edit] Travel in Tunisia
At the end of 1926 Blampied gave up his work for books and magazines, sold his house and studio in south London, and travelled in southern France and north Africa for about 5 months. Some of his drawings from this period were bought by Martin Hardie for the Victoria and Albert Museum and for Eton College, a private school. For the next three years after his return to London in April 1927, Blampied designed many prints, mostly using drypoint, dabbled in abstract art during an illness to produce what he called his “Colour symphonies”, and produced watercolours and oils for a major exhibition held in May 1929 at the galleries of Alex Reid and Lefevre.
[edit] Blampied as humorist
When the market for etchings collapsed during the great depression in the early 1930s, Blampied reinvented himself as a cartoonist and caricaturist at an exhibition in 1931 called “Blampied’s Nonsense Show”. This brought out his love of the absurd and led to his only book, obscurely entitled Bottled Trout and Polo. In this period Blampied also published more than 30 humorous lithographs, many of dogs, that are not recorded in either of the catalogues raisonné (see Bibliography).
After illustrating a new edition of Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson , Blampied returned to work for magazines in 1933 with a weekly series of illustrations of British life in ink and sepia wash for The Illustrated London News. Blampied’s few published portraits are known from this time, although he did not particularly enjoy doing them. From photographs he drew small pencil portraits of authors and actors for a magazine called The Queen and an oil of Queen Mary (Mary of Teck) for the Christmas issue in 1934; he collaborated with his great friend and benefactor John St Helier Lander, a noted portrait artist and fellow-Jerseyman, on a picture of King George V; and he did an etching of the Jersey-born politician, Lord Portsea (Bertram Falle), which was shown at the Royal Academy in 1934. After finishing his work for the Illustrated London News in 1935 he continue to work for magazines until 1939, mainly doing occasional cartoons for The Sketch, often featuring two tramps called Horace and George.
[edit] Peter and Wendy
In May 1938 Blampied was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists. Later that year he was asked to prepare some new illustrations for a lavish edition of Peter Pan, the rights to which had been bequeathed by J.M. Barrie to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Sick Children. The Blampied Edition of Peter and Wendy was published in 1939 by Hodder & Stoughton in the UK and by Scribners in the USA, and is one of the finest illustrated editions of this book. But again, a war interrupted Blampied’s life as an artist.
[edit] German occupation of Jersey
By the time Peter and Wendy was published Blampied had moved from London to Jersey with the intention of settling there. Even though by June 1940 it was clear that the Channel Islands would not be defended from the Germans, Blampied and his Jewish wife had decided to remain in the island. Jersey was occupied on July 1, 1940 and Blampied was trapped there for almost 5 years by the German Occupation of the island until its liberation on May 9, 1945. During this period he was unable to remain in contact with publishers and dealers, and had great trouble obtaining artists’ materials. But there were two notable commissions.
The lack of currency in Jersey led to a request to design bank notes for the States of Jersey in denominations of 6 pence, 1 shilling, 2 shillings, 10 shillings and 1 pound, which were issued in 1942. A year later he was asked to design six new postage stamps for the island of ½ d to 3 d, and as a sign of resistance he cleverly incorporated the initials GR in the three penny stamp to display loyalty to King George VI. The only exhibition of his work during the war years was held at the Cleveland Museum of Art from February 1941 which showed 187 works mostly from the collection of Harold J Baily, an American lawyer who had been a notable patron of Blampied since 1927. The etching A Jersey vraic cart, which Blampied had just managed to have printed and signed before the island was invaded, was issued to the Print Club of Cleveland to coincide with the exhibition.
Blampied did not return to London after the war but remained in Jersey, mostly working in oils and watercolours, except for a series of 12 silhouettes he published in 1950 and a few etchings in 1958, one of which he exhibited at the Royal Academy. He designed a postage stamp to celebrate the liberation of Jersey in 1947, and the first Jersey regional stamp issued in 1964. He continued to sell his watercolours and oil paintings in the UK and USA, mostly at the annual exhibitions of the Royal Society of British Artists and through the dealers Annans in Glasgow and Guy Mayer in New York. A large exhibition of his work was held at the John Nelson Bergstrom Art Center and Museum, Neenah, Wisconsin in July 1954.
[edit] Body of work
Blampied was a prolific illustrator and over 600 issues of magazines and newspapers have been recorded containing his work between 1905 and 1939. His illustrations appear in around 50 books, and he designed the dust jacket for some 150 other books, mostly novels. He also designed menu cards, loyal addresses, sheet music, Christmas cards, commercial advertising material and bookplates.
During his career Edmund Blampied produced some 200 etchings and drypoints, and more than 80 lithographs and lithographic prints, many of which depicted rural life in his beloved island of Jersey. His scenes of collecting seaweed, called vraic, from the beaches of the island using a horse and cart were, he said, his signature tune.
Besides his work in the visual arts, he also amused himself and his friends by writing poetry in Jèrriais, signing himself as Un Tout-à-travèrs. He wrote nonsense verse for children, and in 1944 wrote words for an insulting anti-Hitler song entitled La chanson Hitleur. In 1933, La Chronique de Jersey considered publishing a booklet of Blampied poems illustrated by the artist himself, but the plans came to nothing.
Blampied’s prints, drawings and pictures are in the collections of: the British Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, UK; the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, USA; Cincinnati Art Museum, USA; Cleveland Museum of Art, USA; Boston Public Library, USA; Leeds City Art Gallery, USA; Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, USA, Hecksher Museum, New York, USA; Glasgow City Art Gallery, Scotland; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, USA; McLean Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland; Saint Louis Art Museum, USA; Brooklyn Museum, USA; Art Gallery of South Australia; the Société Jersiaise, Jersey, Channel Islands; and in the collections of many British and American universities.
Edmund Blampied (Edmund Bliampi) R.E., R.B.A. died in his beloved island of Jersey on 26th August 1966, aged 80 years. His ashes were scattered in St Aubin's Bay, Jersey.
Illustrations and photograph reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Edmund Blampied.
[edit] Selected bibliography
- Dodgson, Campbell (1926). A Complete Catalogue of the Etchings and Drypoints of Edmund Blampied. London: Halton and Truscott Smith.
- Salaman, Malcolm (1926). Modern Masters of Etching No. 10 Edmund Blampied. London: The Studio.
- Allhusen, E.L. (1926) The etchings of Edmund Blampied. Print Collector’s Quarterly 13 (1): 69 - 96.
- Salaman, Malcolm (1932). The lithographs of Edmund Blampied. Print Collector’s Quarterly 19 (4): 298 -319.
- Baily, Harold J.(1937). Blampied: artist and philosopher. Print Collector’s Quarterly 24 (4): 363 - 393.
- Syvret, Marguerite (1986). Edmund Blampied. London: Robin Garton.
- Arnold, Jean & Appleby, John (1996). A Catalogue Raisonné of Etchings, Drypoints and Lithographs of Edmund Blampied. Jersey: JAB Publishing.
- Hall, Andrew, in preparation. An illustrated life. The work for books and magazines of Edmund Blampied.
[edit] Notable books illustrated by Edmund Blampied
All published in the UK unless otherwise noted.
1912. Me as a Model by W. R. Titterton: Frank and Cecil Palmer and Mitchell Kennerly, USA
1914 The Money Moon by Jeffrey Farnol: Sampson Low Marston.
1915 The Chronicles of the Imp by Jeffrey Farnol: Sampson, Low Marston.
1919 Two little scamps and a puppy by Angela Brazil: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1919 Terry and Starshine by Amy Whipple: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1920 John’s visit to the Farm by Evelyn Sharp: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1920 At the Farm by Evelyn Hardy: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1920 The Jolly ABC by Blam: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1920 The Breezy Farm ABC by Blam: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1921 Blam’s Book of Fun: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1922 Black Beauty by Anna Sewell: Jarrolds.
1923 Untamed. The Horses of the Wild by David Grew: T. Fisher Unwin (3rd imp).
1923 Trapping Wild Animals in Malay Jungles, by Charles Mayer: T. Fisher Unwin (4th imp).
1924 The Zoo Book: Thomas Nelson and Sons.
1924 The Roadmender by Michael Fairless: Duckworth and Co.
1931 Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes by Robert Louis Stevenson: John Lane, The Bodley Head, UK and Dodd Mead & Co, USA.
1934 Albert goes through by J. B. Priestley: William Heinemann.
1936 Bottled Trout and Polo, by Blampied: George Newnes.
1937 Hand-picked Howlers by Cecil Hunt: Methuen.
1937 Cours de Francais I. En route by E. Saxelby: Ginn and Co.
1938 More Hand-picked Howlers by Cecil Hunt: Methuen.
1938 Cours de Francais II. En march by E. Saxelby: Ginn and Co.
1939 Ripe Howlers by Cecil Hunt: Methuen.
1939 Cours de Francais III. En France by E. Saxelby: Ginn and Co.
1939 The Blampied edition of Peter and Wendy by J.M. Barrie: Hodder & Stoughton.
1940 Hand-Picked Proverbs by Cecil Hunt: Methuen.
1945 Jersey in Jail 1940 - 45 by Horace Wyatt: Ernest Huelin.
[edit] References
- Bulletîn d'Quart d'An, L'Assembliée d'Jèrriais, Jersey, 1952-1977
- Les Nouvelles Chroniques du Don Balleine Vol. I, 32, 33, 34, Le Don Balleine, Jersey, 1997
