School of Art

Contact Details

School of Art
Aberystwyth University
Buarth Mawr
Aberystwyth
Ceredigion
SY23 1NG

Tel: +44 (0)1970 622460

Fax: +44 (0)1970 622461

Email: artschool@aber.ac.uk

No Day Without a Line

The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers 1880-1999; Diploma Collection

An Ashmolean Museum, Oxford touring exhibition

6 March – 14 April 2000

The Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers was founded in 1880 by the artist Francis Seymour Haden (1818-1910) brother-in-law of James McNeill Whistler. The aim of the Society was to raise the status of artists producing original work in the media of etching, engraving and mezzotint. From its inception the Society attracted an international membership; it received royal recognition in 1888 and its president Seymour Haden was knighted in 1894. Under the presidency of Frank Short the Society gained many of its new members from the Royal College of Art where he taught.

In 1920 artists producing innovative work in woodcut and wood-engraving were admitted as members. It was not until 1955, when Malcolm Osborne was President, that colour relief or intaglio prints were accepted. Abstract styles were not encouraged until the 1960s under the presidency of Robert Austin and the doors were only opened to those producing screenprints, lithographs, monoprints and computer prints in 1987. This embracing of all print media necessitated a change in name to the present title The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.

The exhibition contained prints by 99 artists from the Diploma Collection of the The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers; the work is selected from the diploma prints presented by the members on their election to the Society, now deposited in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The exhibition included work by the following artists:
Norman Ackroyd, Robert Austin, Elizabeth Blackadder, Gerald Brockhurst, Bernard Cheese, Paul Drury, F L Griggs, Francis Seymour Haden, S W Hayter, Hubert von Herkomer, Gertrude Hermes, Laura Knight, Agnes Miller Parker, Auguste Rodin, Michael Rothenstein, Walter Sickert, William Strang, Graham Sutherland, James Tissot, Julian Trevelyan, Charles Tunnicliffe, Joseph Webb & many more.



 
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