Edward Calvert - Engravings

Edward Calvert Engravings goldmark

As in all of Calvert’s wood-engravings, the whole design may be enlarged enormously without the loss of eect.

Even at this [enlarged] size the engraving appears so fine that one is amazed by it; no coarseness is visible at all.

How much more wonderful it is in its original size!

Ramond Lister, Edward Calvert, 1962

Edward Calvert First Edition

Engravings

Formerly in the collection of art historian Kenneth Clark (Lord Clark)

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1. e Sheep of his Pasture copper engraving first edition, 3.9 x 7.5 cm £1500 e composition is very close to that of cut number VIII of Blake’s Virgil series . . . Yet the work has a character and strength of its own. It is another instance of Calvert’s mystical view of a lush and cornucopian nature, as much pagan as Christian. is pastoral might as well have come from Virgil’s Eclogues as from the Twenty-third Psalm; it could be a paean of praise to Demeter as much as to Christ.

Edward Calvert When William Blake died in 1827, Britain lost the most revolutionary artistic figure it had ever seen. To the ‘Ancients’, a group of visionary artists who centred around Blake, his death meant the loss of a tutor and idol. e profound influence of Blake’s work did not die with him, however, and for one such Ancient - the young Edward Calvert - his death would galvanise an already proficient artist into a period of unparalleled conception and expression.

Calvert, born in 1799, began life with a brief stint in the Navy before the death of a close friend during a bombardment of Algiers prompted him to leave and follow a less promising career as a painter and printmaker.

Early technical encouragement came by way of the Royal Academy, where Calvert was admitted in 1825, but it was a subsequent friendship with the younger Samuel Palmer, who would introduce Calvert to Blake and his mystic circle of companions, that proved instrumental to his artistic development.

Time spent with the Ancients was, for Calvert, illuminating and inspirational, their meetings in Palmer’s cottage - ‘Rat Alley’, as it was affectionately known - involving discussions of poetry, printing technique and deeper spiritual musings. e elder Blake, whom Palmer described as a ‘prophet’ and a ‘man without a mask’, impressed upon Calvert and the group an ardent religious appreciation for Nature and the earth, as well as instructing the young artist in the process of wood-engraving and the visionary artistic style.

Calvert’s work after Blake’s death immediately matured, as if the loss of such an inspirational figure had spurred him on to greater heights. e period that followed from 1827 to 1831 is universally considered to have been Calvert’s pinnacle, comprising wood and copper engravings and lithographs all characterised by fine, dextrous lines depicting sylvan vistas imagery redolent of both classical pastoral scenes and symbolic Christian parables.

Viewed alongside the work of his mentor, Calvert’s engravings possess that same naive confidence so typical of the Ancients’ work, and the influence of Blake cannot be ignored. We can see in prints like ‘e Bride’ that expressive quality; the Christian allegory of the stray lamb; the classical figure of the nude. But it is a confidence that belies the exquisite smallness and intricacy of Calvert’s work that is essentially his own, wherein lies both his uniqueness and his significance. ‘e Chamber Idyll’, Calvert’s magnum opus, is as near a perfect example of miniature art as has perhaps ever been produced.

It is surprising, then, that the first ever publication of such prints came posthumously.

Calvert was a supremely self-critical artist: those works that survived his own periodic purges represent the very best of his output, and in his lifetime were only viewed by contemporaries and friends. Ten years after his death, however, Samuel Calvert, Edward’s third son, published his Memoir in 1893 with an edition size of 350.

Included in the Memoir were ten impressions, all dating from that exceptional period, and it is these prints that are on offer here. While the two lithographs were reproduced from process

blocks, all eight engravings contained were printed from the original woodblocks and copper-plates. A later portfolio was printed by the Carfax Gallery in 1904, but the edition size was minute with only 30 copies printed. As a result, and as Calvert expert Raymond Lister noted in his monograph on the artist, such prints are extraordinarily scarce, with individual impressions in the earlier states being ‘virtually unobtainable.’

In the tenth of Virgil’s pastoral Eclogues, the urbane elegiac poet Gallus vows to give himself to the rural life of the shepherds and ‘carve [his] love on the young trees.’ Calvert was in many ways a Gallus of his own time. Like Palmer and Blake, he was deeply and devotedly spiritual; but beside their Christian mysticism stirred an enchantment with rustic classical ideals, with countryside idylls and Nature’s pagan beauty.

Where Gallus carved his elegies onto the Arcadian woodland, Calvert carved his own mix of Christian and classical imagery onto wood, copper and stone blocks. e resulting prints are enigmatic, intimate and of real importance to the history of British art.

Max Waterhouse, 2014

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2. e Lady and the Rooks wood engraving first edition, 4.5 x 7.5 cm £1500 ‘e Lady with the Rooks’ is one of Calvert’s prettiest works. In it he leaves the timelessness of classicism and mysticism, and becomes mediaeval . .. A young woman, graceful and beautiful, flimsily clad, walks towards us. e time could be early morning or late evening in summer, for the sun is low in the sky, the atmosphere is quiet, and the breeze is still. If it were not for the existence of ‘e Chamber Idyll’ I should place it as perhaps the most original and perfect of Calvert’s engravings.

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3. e Chamber Idyll wood engraving first edition, 4.0 x 7.5 cm £7500 Appropriately the last of Calvert’s visionary works is his chef d’oeuvre; it is that fragrant little woodengraving, ‘e Chamber Idyll’, made in 1831, without doubt one of the supreme achievements of the art. In this one work Calvert rose to unsurpassed heights of artistic conception and expression . .. We are eavesdropping on a moment of idyllic intimacy, the first delicious rapture of a honeymoon. It is a

scene of peaceful love before sweet repose, after the labour of harvest and plough. e original block for ‘e Chamber Idyll’ is now in the British Museum. It is, in itself, a perfect little work of art. It seems hardly credible that human hands could have made those fine incisions, which are as if a cobweb has been lightly dropped upon the surface of the wood. So fine, indeed, are the engraved lines that prints were made from it only with difficulty. It is in his blocks, when we are confronted with the actual physical fact of the cut wood, that we begin really to appreciate the close relationship of Calvert’s work to celature, which was, after all, an art of sculpting and graving.

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4. e Ploughman wood engraving first edition, 8.0 x 12.1 cm £2000

As in all of Calvert’s wood-engravings, the whole design may be enlarged enormously without the loss of effect. To assist me in writing this monograph I had an enlargement made of this engraving, measuring 11¾” x 7¾”. Even at this size the engraving appears so fine that one is amazed by it; no coarseness is visible at all. How much more wonderful it is in its original size of 5⅛” x 3¼”!

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5. e Brook wood engraving first edition, 5.0 x 9.0 cm £1000 e scene is again pastoral.. . Two bare-shouldered women, their flimsy dresses slightly activated by the breeze, bring hydriai to the water to be filled . . . It is a sign of Calvert’s breadth of vision that ‘e Brook’ could be taken to illustrate both a lush pagan landscape, or to show a Christian view of the River of Life, with the Sheep of His Pasture grazing amidst plenty.

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6. e Cyder Feast wood engraving first edition, 7.5 x 13.0 cm £2000 is engraving is full of contrasts. It is bathed in the light of the great harvest moon. In spite of the absence of colour, one can well imagine the blue, purple and yellow contrasts of this rich night in late summer, with its pungent smell of crushed apples, its hint of approaching autumn.

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7. e Bride copper engraving first edition, 7.5 x 12.5 cm £3500 It is as if we are looking into the Garden of Eden before the Fall, or are eavesdropping upon the Song of Songs ... As in all his other visionary works, Calvert in ‘e Bride’ lovingly works over each detail, giving it due importance, yet keeping it within the general composition without obtrusion.

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8. e Return Home wood engraving first edition, 4.5 x 7.5 cm £1000 ‘e Return Home’ is the last of the 1830 engravings.

It shows a weary shepherd, crook in hand, being borne on the back of a donkey. His wife awaits him in the doorway of his cottage at the distant end of the track along which he is riding. .. Apart from its obvious spiritual affinities with Blake’s Virgil engravings, the most memorable thing about this little engraving is its texture... It is almost pointillism, if the term may be applied to a composition in black and white.

9. Ideal Pastoral Life process block after lithograph 4.0 x 7.5 cm

£750 actual size

10. e Flood process block after lithograph 4.0 x 7.5 cm

£750 actual size

e remarks on Calvert’s prints have been taken from Raymond Lister’s comprehensive monograph on the artist: Edward Calvert, R. Lister, G. Bell and Sons Ltd, London (1962). His book remains the authoritative history and analysis of Calvert’s life and work and was greatly enhanced by Lister’s personal knowledge of miniature art as an active member of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters.

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All engravings are shown actual size.

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Born in 1799, Edward Calvert studied art at Plymouth and the Royal Academy. He became a member of the Blake-infuenced group known as the Ancients which met at Samuel Palmer’s cottage in Shoreham, Kent. Amongst Calvert’s finest works are these exquisite miniature engravings which were only seen by his friends until published by his son in 1893.

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