John Dickson Batten (English, 1860–1932)
Apples and Red Admirals, 1920
John Dickson Batten, born in Plymouth, Devon, was an English painter of figures in oils, tempera and fresco and a book illustrator and printmaker. He studied under the tutelage of the seminal French painter, etcher and sculptor Alphonse Legros. He is sometimes credited with introducing the practice of making colour woodcuts after the Japanese method into England.
- Ten 3½ x 5 in. blank notecards with envelopes in an acetate-topped box
- Published with the British Museum
- ISBN 9780764981616
Ten 3½ x 5 in. blank notecards with envelopes in an acetate-topped box
Published with the British Museum
Mary Delany (English, 1700–1788)
Parnassia Palustris Grass of Parnassus (detail), 1776
Mary Delany became known for her drawing, garden design, shellwork and needlework but primarily for her paper collages of flowers all made between 1772 and 1782. She created nearly a thousand collages before failing eyesight caused her to stop in 1782. They filled ten albums, which were bequeathed to the British Museum by Augusta Hall, Baroness Llanover.
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box
Printed on recycled paper
Published with the Toledo Museum of Art
The great Kant? earthquake and ensuing fire in 1923 crippled Japan’s woodblock print industry. Publisher Watanabe Sh?zabur? quickly reopened, rebuilding his business with some of the finest artists of the shin hanga, or “new prints,” movement, among them Ohara Sh?son. He painted landscapes and depicted the Russo-Japanese War, but Sh?son’s bird-and-flower works, kacho-e, established him as a master of Japanese nature prints.
Kacho-e subjects, along with other prints of the time, were better received by Western collectors than at home. Two seminal exhibitions at the Toledo Museum of Art, in 1930 and 1936, established Sh?son in Western art circles, sparking the artist’s most successful period. He worked prolifically, creating naturalistic prints that displayed his delicate lines and skilled shading.
These four Sh?son prints are in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art, whose collection of modern Japanese prints developed as a result of those two early exhibitions. Today it holds more than five hundred shin hanga prints, making it one of the most significant collections of this art form in the United States.
Contains 5 each of the following images:
Plum Blossoms and Bullfinch (Baiha ni Uguisu), published 1931
Camellia and Rice Birds (Tsubaki ni shirobunch?), 1929
Magnolia and Magpie (Mokuren ni Onagadori), published 1931
Vine and Japanese Bunting (Tsuta ni Hojiro), published 1934
Ten 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 2 designs) with envelopes in a decorative folio
Printed on recycled paper
Published with the Barnes Foundation
ISBN 9780764978487
Pierre-Auguste Renoir (French, 1841–1919) is one of the best-loved painters in the history of modern art. After exhibiting with the impressionists in the 1870s and early 1880s, Renoir went on to paint for three more decades, focusing on the bucolic landscapes of the south of France, idealized bathing groups, scenes of his family, and portraiture. His paintings are charming and accessible, yet often boldly experimental, with loose brushstrokes and unexpected compositional arrangements. Throughout his career Renoir looked to the past for inspiration and was influenced especially by eighteenth-century French painters and by the artists of the Italian Renaissance. He is known above all for his mastery of color and facility in the handling of paint—qualities that during his own time won him the admiration of his peers, including Henri Matisse, and which continue to astonish us today.
The two paintings reproduced in this notecard set are from the extraordinary collection of The Barnes Foundation in Pennsylvania, which houses one of the world’s finest collections of impressionist, post-impressionist, and early modern art, including 181 paintings by Renoir.
Contains 5 each of the following images:
Portrait of Jeanne Durand-Ruel (Portrait de Mlle. J.), 1876
Promenade (La Promenade), c. 1906
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box
Printed on recycled paper
Vincent van Gogh (Dutch, 1853–1890) is often considered a tragic figure—struggling against madness, in and out of mental hospitals—yet he created works of genius. Shimmering with light and color, saturated with the intensity of his vision, they resound throughout the world of art.
Van Gogh could be delightfully amusing. Writing to his sister Willemina from Provence, the artist offered a self-portrait in prose: “My complexion has changed from green-greyish-pink to greyish-orange … and I am always very dusty, always more bristlingly loaded like a porcupine, with sticks, painter’s easel, canvases and further merchandise. Only the green eyes have remained the same.”
He sold only one painting in his lifetime, but over the course of a single decade he produced more than two thousand drawings and paintings.
Contains 5 each of the following images:
Farmhouse in Provence, 1888
Oleanders, 1888
Wheat Field with Cypresses, 1889
Irises, 1890
Twenty assorted 5 x 7 in. blank notecards (5 each of 4 designs) with envelopes in a decorative box
Printed on recycled paper
Published with the British Museum
William Giles (1872–1939) is widely considered to be one of the most important and innovative British colour printmakers of the early twentieth century. Born in Reading, England, he studied at London’s Royal College of Art and later in Paris, focusing on the Japanese woodcut relief method, a technique new to the Western world at the time. With his partner, Ada Shrimpton, he experimented with applying the relief method to metal plates. In some of his best-known works, the artist combined use of the woodcut and metal relief printing. Unlike most colour woodcut artists of the time, Giles did not use a key block in his works. Eliminating this once essential element gave way to a softer blending of colour and form, and his woodcuts are often mistaken for paintings.
Contains 5 each of the following images:
Midsummer Night, 1919
The Sources of the Clitumnus, 1910–1914
When Winter Wanes, 1924
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, 1900–1939
