Beefeater

Artist: Sir William Nicholson English (1872-1942) Also known as Beggarstaff along with James Pryde, Scottish (1866-1941)

Title: Beefeater

Plate: NLT. 02

Description: Condition A.
Original Lithograph bookplate from "London Types"
Printed by William Heinemann, London 1898
View the Complete Set and more works at the Nicholson Collection

Sheet Size: 10 3/8 in x 13 in 26.4 cm x 33 cm

Price: $250.00

The Tower by W.E. Henley (British poet, 18949-1903) from "London Types"

 

His beat lies knee-high through a dust of story
A dust of terror and torture, grief and crime;
Ghosts that are ENGLAND's wonder, and shame, and glory,
Throng where he walks, and antic of old time;
A sense of long immedicable tears
Were ever with him, could his ears but heed;
The stern 'Hic Jacets' of our bloodiest years
Are for his reading, had he eyes to read,
But here, where CROOKBANK raged, and CRANMER trimmed,
And MORE and STRAFFORD face the axe's proving,
He shows that Crown the desperate Colonel nimmed,
Or simply keeps the Country Cousin moving,
And stays such Cockney pencillers as would shame
The wall where some dead Queen hath traced her name.


"Nicholson’s portfolio of London characters anticipated even the boldest of contemporary graphics with an approach to design that pulled no punches. Little wonder, then, that by the turn of the century, and at the age of just twenty-six, he was touted as Britain’s greatest living printmaker."  (goldmarkart.com)
 ca.1930 Colour Postcard. Yeoman of the Guard/ Beefeater


"William Nicholson's woodblock prints of the 1890's were amongst the most revolutionary British print images of the era. They used a treatment of form, with a stylised simplification of shape, and a handling of perspective and picture space which had had no precedent in British art. Influences of Japanese art, and a parallel thinking to, if not a direct knowledge of, the ideas of Toulouse Lautrec and of the Nabis painters in Paris at the same period can certainly be felt, although there is no record that Nicholson had actually studied either at this date. 

One of the most famous of the groups of prints that Nicholson cut at this period was the series known as 'London Types'. This was made at the instigation of William Heinemann, who published all William Nicholson's early prints. The series portrays typical figures from London life of the period. Such as the girls who sat with the baskets of flowers for sale who were a familiar sight near 'Rotten Row' where the fashionable people of London society rode out on their horses at the edge of Hyde Park by Park Lane. The impressions of this popular edition were printed by taking a transfer from his woodblock onto a lithographic stone and adding lithograph colour" (Weston)