page_title: Sydney Lee (engraver)
section_title: Wood engravings and other work
hierarchical_section_title: Sydney Lee (engraver) / Wood engravings and other work
caption_attribution_description: English: Offered for sale by Abbott and Holder in January 2020 when it was described as "LEE Sydney R.A. (1866-1949) ‘St Ives Harbour’ (RM.35). Woodcut printed in colours. 1905-10. Signed. 14.75x10 inches."
context_page_description: Sydney Lee RA was a British wood engraver, active at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers. He was also a painter in oils and a Royal Academician.
context_section_description: Lee was a versatile artist in a wide range of media, oils, wood engraving and the woodcut, as well as etching, drypoint, aquatint, mezzotint and lithography. His work was popular during his lifetime, but he has lapsed into obscurity since his death.
  Lee was a founder member of the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920, and exhibited with them from 1920 to 1923. Along with Edward Gordon Craig and Lucien Pissarro he was one of the elder statesmen of wood engraving. They, however, were exponents of black line engraving, whereas he was an exponent of the modern white line engraving promoted by Noel Rooke. Salaman states that Lee had already started to produce white line wood engravings in 1900, which makes him one of the earliest wood engravers to do so.
  His wood engravings, largely traditional in approach, featured scenes and buildings, and appeared regularly in the Studio Magazine. The October 1915 issue had an article on him which featured The Limestone Rock (1904–1906), one of the largest wood engravings ever produced (230 mm × 295 mm (9.1 in × 11.6 in)).
  In 1922 he contributed a wood engraving to Contemporary English Woodcuts, an anthology of wood engravings produced by Thomas Balston, a director at Duckworth and an enthusiast for the new style of wood engravings. Campbell Dodgson, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, wrote about him in his introduction to the book: "Mr. Sydney Lee, the senior of the contributors to this volume, is, I think, the only artist of the group who has used this method [i.e. the Japanese ukiyo-e method] as well as the European process".
  Lee produced colour woodcuts in the ukiyo-e manner as well as white line wood engravings. Salaman states: "But while Mr. Lee is loyal to the hard box-wood and graver for his black-and-white expression upon the block, he has yielded for colour to the lure of the softer woods—the cherry and the pear—and, in the manner of the Japanese, has taken knife in hand and cut designs of a broad simplicity appropriate to the colour-print. He, indeed, was one of the first to follow Mr. Morley Fletcher's lead in this direction." At the Central School of Art and Crafts he taught classes on how to produce colour woodcuts in the ukiyo-e manner from 1906-1910.
  Lee also worked in oils.
  There are a number of examples of his work in public collections, included the Tate Gallery, the Ashmolean, the Royal Academy, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
caption: St Ives Harbour (circa 1905-1910), Lee's woodcut, printed in colours
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