The Haulers is a color linocut from 1929 by Canadian artist, Sybil Andrews. It is pencil signed in the lower left and editioned 19/50. The references for this work are White 4 and Coppel SA4. The Haulers was printed in four colors by the artist on ivory laid Japanese paper. The image measures 7-3/8 x 12-1/2 inches.
Andrews imagery is highly stylized. In The Haulers, strength, power, and movement are rendered via repetition of lines and elements although the picture plane is quite flat. The great weight being pulled by the haulers is suggested by the tautness of black ropes biting into their curved shoulders and backs and the width between the men's front and back legs. Their blocked feet are planted by the strain. While the men work in unison, the artist gave them individuality with varied coloring of their shirts and pants.
Sybil Andrews, printmaker, painter, sculptor, and teacher, was born in Bury St. Edmunds, East Anglia, England on 19 April 1898. She completed high school but was without funding to attend college courses. Instead, she participated in art classes via correspondence. During World War I, she worked in Coventry at the Standard Motor Company building parts for airplanes. Andrews returned to Bury St. Edmunds where she taught school and studied art with Cyril E. Power, with whom she would have a close working relationship for the next two decades. In 1922, Andrews moved to London and attended Heatherley’s School of Fine Art and, in 1925, she joined the newly formed Grosvenor School of Modern Art, working as a secretary while learning the techniques of color linocut from Claude Flight.
Her color linocuts were included with other Grosvenor School artists in the First Exhibition of British Linocuts at the Redfern Gallery, London in July 1929 and were included in numerous exhibitions at the Redfern Gallery through 1936. In 1931, her work was represented in the Twelfth International Print Makers Exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum in California; this being the first of five exhibitions with the Print Makers Society of California. Andrews was a noted modernist artist in England during the 1920s and 1930s.
In 1942, Andrews returned to war work in the yards of the British Power Boat Company near Southampton. The following year she met and married Walter W. Morgan, and in 1947 they immigrate to Canada. Andrews commenced her work in linocut and a solo exhibition of her prints was mounted at The Vancouver Art Gallery in November 1948. That same year an exhibition of forty of her linocuts was organized by the Allied Arts Center in Calgary and it traveled to various venues across Canada. Andrews’ work was featured in the Thirty-Third Annual Exhibition of The Society of Canadian Painter-Etchers and Engravers at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1949 and she was elected into membership of the society in 1951. Andrews also became a member of and exhibited with the Northwestern Printmakers at the Seattle Art Museum. There were several solo exhibitions of her work over the next three decades.
Sybil Andrews lived long enough to experience the resurgence of interest in the Grosvenor School color linocuts. It was long in coming but justly deserved. Her work is represented in the collections of the Glenbow Museum, Calgary, Canada; the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; the British Museum, London; the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Andrews died 21 December 1992 in Campbell River, Canada.
