Stanley Anderson:Prints: A Catalogue Raisonné

Stanley Anderson RA (1884-1966) was a major figure in the revival of line engraving in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, he is best known for his series of prints memorialising England's farm worker and rural craftsmen. However, in a career spanning nearly half a century, his output was considerably more diverse: drypoints of continental market scenes, etchings of down-and-outs in 1920s London, and alternative city views of demolition and construction sites. This fully illustrated and annotated catalogue raisonné of prints gathers all of these works together for the first time. Drawing on original research, the authors bring to light the artist's wit, anger and growing disenchantment with his age. Sceptical of progress, Anderson commented on the elitism, spiritual emptiness and growing detachment that he regarded to be the hallmarks of modernity.Despite living through some of the most dramatic changes of the twentieth century, Stanley Anderson CBE (1884–1966) created a vision of an essentially timeless English rural tradition in his etchings and woodcuts. His training was as an engraver, first on a heraldic engraving apprenticeship with his father and later at the Royal College of Art and Goldsmiths College, London. Anderson became a master of his craft: elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1923. When he later took up woodcutting, he became immersed in a technique that was considered as deeply English as the subjects he depicted. Anderson was a key figure in the revival of engraving in the 1920s. The technique’s exacting craftsmanship, intimate scale and indelible sense of historicism were a stark contrast to the modernist explosion. This catalogue raisonné gathers together for the first time the complete œuvre of Anderson’s prints, from the townscapes of his early career to the fascinating twenty-year study of rural crafts, including hedge-laying, carpentry and barrel-making, that he carried out towards the end of his life, and for which he is best known