Brixham Town is a color woodcut created in October 1927 by British printmaker John Edgar Platt (1886-1967). It is pencil signed, titled, and editioned 53/150. It was printed by the artist on ivory wove paper and the image measures 9-3/4 x 13-5/8 inches. The reference is Chapman 16 and is illustrated as plate I in Colour Woodcuts by John Platt.
Brixham Town offers a view of the harbor of the small fishing town Brixham, England with moored sailing vessels in the foreground backdropped by a hillside of houses. Platt was one of the earliest British color woodcut artists who used the Japanese method of printing with water-based inks. For this image, he utilized the Japanese technique of bokashi, which is done by hand applying a gradation of ink to a moistened printing block. In his book Colour Woodcuts, he wrote about his printing techniques: “Gradations of colour over wide areas are readily produced and have a directness and spontaneity unique to this medium. Enveloping effects of light and atmosphere can be beautifully suggested by these gradations, and the relief of one plane from another. The clean-cut character of the flat colour masses leads to a definiteness of form; the gradations provide a gracious element.”
John Edgar Platt was born in Leek, Staffordshire, England on 19 March 1886. He was educated at the Leek School of Art before attending the Royal College of Art from 1905 to 1908. Platt quickly developed his skills in oil painting, watercolor, and woodcut, and held his first exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1913.
After World War I, Platt exhibited at the New English Art Club and, in 1922, won a gold medal at the International Print Makers Exhibition. He held numerous teaching positions until he moved to London in 1929 to become head of Blackheath School of Art. Throughout the 1930s, Platt produced a number of highly regarded woodcuts and paintings. In 1938, he published Colour Woodcuts: a Book of Reproductions and a Handbook of Method. He was the president of the Society of Graver Painters in Colour from 1938 to 1953.
During World War II, a number of Platt’s paintings were purchased by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee and in 1943 he was awarded a full-time contract to produce paintings for the Ministry of War Transport. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Massachusetts; the British Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, California.
John Edgar Platt died on 29 April 1967 in Eastbourne, England.
