Edgar Holloway

Original Edgar Holloway drypoint.

Exceptionally rare - only one other impression of this drypoint has been traced. At the time of publication of Meyrick's leading catalogue on The Etchings and Engravings of Edgar Holloway in 1996, no impression of this drypoint could be located. In subsequent years one single impression was found which is in the permanent collection at Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery. Despite being numbered from an edition of 55, the impression offered here is the sole other example to have been discovered of this early work by Edgar Holloway.

One of Edgar Holloway’s earliest printed works, Cawood Castle, Selby dates from 1930, the year in which Edgar Holloway created his first significant group of original prints at the age of only sixteeen. During this year he produced around 30 original drypoints, the majority of which depict views in and around North Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.

Edgar Holloway’s father owned a picture framing shop in Doncaster and upon discovering that he could sell his son’s works, in 1929, his father bought him a proper etching press and the materials for printmaking. During 1930, father and son made excursions together around Yorkshire and Lincolnshire making drawings and drypoints for sale in the shop. By the end of the year Edgar Holloway’s father sent a selection of his son’s drypoints to the doyen print critic of the day, Malcolm Salaman. Salaman arranged for Edgar Holloway’s drypoint of The Hayfield to be published in The Studio of November 1930 and showed the young Holloway’s works to James McBey who was equally enthusiastic. By the end of 1931 Edgar Holloway had been given a one-man show at the prestigious Twenty-One Gallery in London and his standing as a gifted original printmaker was already established.

The gatehouse seen in this drypoint, with the domestic wing to one side of it, is all that remains of Cawood Castle, once a stronghold of the Archbishops of York. It stands in the flat land south of York in the small town of Cawood, where there is a bridge over the Ouse. The gatehouse was built upon the instructions of Archbishop Kempe in the fifteenth century, when the castle had become less of a fortress and more of a palace; his Cardinal’s hat, of which he was proud, appears on several of the finely carved stone shields over the archway. It was here that Cardinal Wolsey was arrested, being at odds with his King and his plans to marry Anne Boleyn. After the Civil War, Cawood was partially dismantled and in the eighteenth century the gatehouse was used as a courtroom.

Excellent signed proof impression on cream laid F J Head & Co paper, with full margins and deckle edge. White paper tape at extreme top corners of sheet. Excellent original condition.