Kenneth Broad

Original Kenneth Broad woodcut.

Excellent impression with strong, bright colours from the only edition of 150 signed and numbered proofs.

Kenneth Broad made a number of colour woodcuts of northern France around the early 1930’s and busy fairground scenes were a favourite subject throughout his work. P. & D. Colnaghi were Broad’s dealers by this time and they exhibited impressions of this particular woodcut at their Bond Street galleries in London in 1932.

The accomplished colour woodcuts of Kenneth Broad record daily life in and around London and parts of northern France during the 1920’s and early 1930’s. Kenneth Stephen Broad was born at Stamford Brook in west London and went on to train at the Westminster School of Art. Like the outstanding etcher William Walcot, Kenneth Broad became a London based architect by profession, whose passion outside the rigid framework of draftsmanship was original printmaking – a field of art in which he was particularly gifted. He exhibited together with William Giles and Ethel Kirkpatrick as a member of The Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society at the Royal Academy in London and was an early member of the Colour Woodcut Society, becoming its president in the mid-1930’s.

Kenneth Broad’s earliest Royal Academy exhibits date from around 1922 and by the early 1930’s his colour woodcuts were being exhibited and handled by the famous dealers P. & D. Colnaghi in London’s Bond Street. In 1926 he exhibited his colour woodcut of “A Sussex Farm” at the 7th International Printmakers Exhibition in Los Angeles. Despite declared editions of 150 impressions each, Broad’s colour woodcuts are now comparatively scarce. After his death, all of Kenneth Broad’s woodcut blocks were destroyed by his son, as stipulated in his will.

On simile Japan paper, with margins as issued. Very good original condition.