The Eragny Press 1895-1914: Lucien Pissarro in England
The Eragny Press 1895-1914: Lucien Pissarro in England
Publisher: Ashmolean Museum
ISBN: 9781854442536
Pages: 160
Illustrations: 146 color illus. & photos, 4 b&w
Paperback
* The story of Lucien Pissarro’s innovative Eragny Press, a venture born of Impressionism and influenced by both the English Arts and Crafts Movement and the Pre-Raphaelites.
* Many examples of wood engravings for Eragny Press pages and frontispieces
Eragny Press, so important in the history of the private press movement, was created by Lucien, eldest son of Impressionist painter, Camille Pissarro, and his wife, Esther, after they settled permanently in England in 1890. An illustrator, woodcut artist, and painter, he had first worked in Paris.
Lucien’s range of expression, in his treatment of the word and book as art, is revealed in his own illustrations and books for such writers as Coleridge, Flaubert and Laforgue, and varied illustrations for ballads and poems. The book also includes works of William Morris’ Kelmscott Press, Doves Press, and Vale Press, plus portraits and pastoral scenes by Camille that have seldom been reprinted. Excerpts from letters between father and son reveal the pushes and pulls between art schools that are more than a footnote to art history. Camille did not like the whiff of Pre-Raphaelitism detected in the illustrations, for instance. (The Ashmolean Museum, the publisher, is a foremost source for the study of French Impressionism.)
Lucien might well have given up and returned to France but was encouraged to remain by the support of Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon, Reginald Savage and other leading artists. The press endured through hardships and threatened insolvency but an obstinate belief in the value of their work kept Lucien and Esther going until 1914 when the last Eragny book was published and illness, exhaustion, debt and war combined with many other obstacles closed down one of the earliest and most inventive of the private presses. The remainder of Lucien’s long career belongs to the history of British painting.