Leonard Griffiths Brammer is famed as an original printmaker for the remarkable visual record which he created of the Staffordshire potteries. An industrial landscape now lost and changed - for those of us who were not alive to witness the potteries in their heyday Brammer's etchings will forever remain their most accurate and evocative memorial.
The son of a builder of pot ovens, and the grandson of a master potter, Leonard Brammer specialised in depicting the industrial landscapes of the Staffordshire potteries in the area surrounding his native town of Burslem. Having studied at the Royal College of Art under Malcolm Osborne and Robert Sargent Austin from 1926 to 1931, Leonard Griffiths Brammer was one of the few original printmakers to begin etching during the twilight years of the British Etching Revival and to continue creating original etchings after the Second World War was over. From 1934 onwards his etchings were printed in editions which never exceeded 25 impressions; consequently, all of his printed works are now rare.
Between 1946 and 1948 Leonard Brammer was commissioned to make a series of prints depicting the Wedgwood Etruria pottery works at Hanley, near Stoke-on-Trent - a series of prints for which he is justly renowned. The heavy atmosphere of Brammer's images succeeds in capturing the oppressive character of this industrial region perfectly. Indeed, Leonard Griffiths Brammer is now beginning to be perceived as one of the great British printmakers of the twentieth-century, for his style fuses the stark modernity found in the prints of C.R.W. Nevinson with a new and distinctive view of industrial landscape and its people which can be found reflected in the works of England's most famous painter of industrial scenes, L.S. Lowry. Often sombre in their nature, Leonard Brammer's original printed works are widely regarded as one of the outstanding portrayals of the Bristish industrial landscape. [
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