Joseph Webb

Original etching by Joseph Webb.

Very good, dark impression with considerable tonal range. Signed proof in the completed state of the plate. In this state Webb felt that he had achieved both the sense of recession which he sought and the effect of the early morning mist dissipating with the rising sun.

This image is of the greatest significance in Joseph Webb’s œuvre. Here, for the first time, the artist’s mature style has emerged, fully fledged. Its subject is the sleepy pastoral setting of a Cotswold village, much in the vein of Palmer, Griggs and Tanner; but set firmly at its heart is the church – the lynchpin of the composition – the tower rising out of the sleepy mists of an otherwise pagan rural setting like a symbol of hope above the early morning mists. It was this fundamentally religious devotion, linked to a sense of optimism, which so distinguished Webb’s etchings from those of Palmer, Drury, Sutherland and, more recently, Robin Tanner.

“Dawn, An English Village (etching, 1928) was the most sophisticated and resolved etching to result from his time in Gloucestershire. Showing the sleepy Cotswold village of Wotton-under-Edge, viewed from a nearby hill at sunrise, it was his first etching to be burnished and re-etched through several finely wrought states, the softened forms and focus recapturing the artist’s experience of an early morning haze.” (Robert Meyrick, Joseph Webb – the lights that flit across my brain, Aberystwyth, 2007, p.10).

On cream wove paper with full margins. Discolouration to sheet, otherwise generally good original condition.