Fine Art Prints Department

 

Objets d’Art offer a range of limited and unlimited edition fine art prints by contemporary and historical artists. Most of our prints are landscape, seascape and townscape views of Britain, with emphasis on the tranquil beauty that is now under so much threat in modern times.

 

Limited Edition

 

These are prints that are individually numbered in a specified series that is supervised by the artist or publisher himself (e.g. 10/250 - Print number 10 out of and edition limited to 250 in number). Once the print run has been completed, the master (plate or file) is destroyed to prevent any further impressions being made. Typically, limited edition print runs number from 10 to a few hundred copies - any more than that and the unique value attaching to a limited edition becomes rather meaningless. In addition to the main run there are usually up to 6 ‘Artist’s Proofs’ that are the final test prints before the artist gives the OK for the main sequence to be printed.

Limited edition prints are usually signed by the artist and some are impressed or embossed with the printer/publisher’s stamp - the so-called ‘chop mark’.

 

Original Prints

 

These are prints that are produced by the artist or under his/her close supervision and are thus contemporary with the artist.  Some genuine prints may be produced from original blocks, but subsequent to the artist’s lifetime, these lack the touch of the artist.

 

Digitally Re-mastered Prints

 

These are prints that have been produced when the original plate is lost or not available. Our skilled technicians use the very latest software technology together with artistic skills to scan at very high resolution and reproduce prints, etchings and engravings on the finest quality archival papers using archival quality, pigmented inks. This technique produces near-continuous tone prints that reflect the quality and characteristics of the original work. The result is a beautiful, gallery quality print that does full justice to an original that in some cases may have been lost or destroyed many years ago.

 

These prints should not be confused with some relatively crudely-printed book illustration plates that are sometimes offered for sale.

 

Types of Print

 

Original prints may be made by a number of techniques:

Engraving where the image is cut into a copper or steel plate using a manual tool called a burin.

Etching where the image is acid-etched into a metal plate using a chemical resist (e.g. Wax) to protect parts of the plate.

Wood-block where the image is carved into wooden blocks.

Linocut where a thick linoleum ‘plate’ is carved into an image which is then printed.

Silk-screen where a negative image is painted onto a taut silk panel and ink is then forced through the unpainted parts to form the image on paper.

Gicleé, where a digital image is printed at very high resolution using a seven or eight colour ink system.

Lithography, a three or four colour based offset printing technique used on a commercial scale.

Some artists represented in our gallery

 

E. W. Haslehust 1866-1949.

 

Born at Walthamstow in Essex, in 1866, the eldest son of William Henry Haslehust of Lee, Kent. He studied at the Slade School of Art. A keen gardener and nature lover with an interest in scientific instruments. During his working life he was a prolific painter working mostly in the medium of watercolour. He is most famous for his increasingly nostalgic views of scenes throughout Britain. We offer an extensive selection of his work because we feel they represent a romantic view of Britain which is rapidly disappearing. Our fascinating selection of quality colour prints provide a view of the countryside, villages and towns, and a way of life in England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland before the First World War. Taken from watercolour paintings executed between 1910 and 1915 our prints are as popular today as they were at the time. Indeed they were so well thought of that the famous A&C Black publishing empire commissioned much of his work for inclusion in their series "Our Beautiful Homeland" between 1911 and 1940. Objets d' Art have possibly the most comprehensive collection of prints from this popular and talented artist available anywhere.

 

Henry G Walker 1876-1932.

 

Henry George Walker was born in 1876 in the Birchfield area of the city of Birmingham where his father was in the coal trade. From 1897 - 1901 he attended the well-known Birmingham Municipal School of Art, now part of the University of Central England. He may have designed jewellery for a time after finishing his training there. By 1907 he was working as a freelance designer and commercial line artist from his own studio in his Birchfield home. The patriotic Bulldog in a naval cap probably represents one of his commercial commissions during the First World War, though it was used again at the beginning of the Second, several years after his death and remains an enduring image today.

 

He became active as an etcher from around 1921. when he first exhibited at the Royal Birmingham Society. To make a living, he concentrated on popular architectural and topographical plates in various combinations of soft-ground etching, dry-point and aquatint, both coloured and monochrome. The etchings are titled and signed in pencil Henry G. Walker, with H.G.W. or H.G. Walker on the plate itself, though he was known to friends and family as 'Harry'.

 

He produced over 150 designs, more than half of them of places in the South West, with varying degrees of market response, though many sold out editions of 400. He was particularly successful with studies of harbours like Tenby and Brixham with their trawlers.

 

As the 'etching boom' of the 1920's began to recede with the onset of the Depression, he seems to have started to experiment with ink-and-wash designs for reproduction as coloured prints. They were chiefly of cats and dogs in humorous situations, somewhat in the manner of his older contemporary Cecil Aldin. He moved down to Babbacombe in Devon in 1929, and set up his studio in a new house. Unfortunately, the new venture was cut short by his early death in 1932. He was buried in Barto Cemetery Torquay, next to the grave of the Victorian sculptor Sir Bertram Mackennal.

 

Objets d'Art is delighted to be able to offer beautiful, gallery quality prints of many of his works held in our library that do full justice to the original soft ground hand coloured etchings.