BAXTER'S COLOUR PRINTS

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 90, 13 October 1923, Page 14

BAXTER'S COLOUR PRINTS

TE°HNICAL GENIUS AND APPALLING TASTE.

Philatelists are Berious enough, but even they do not approach the solemnity of the worshippers that gather in the afternoon at the exhibition of the Baxters Society, in Leicester square decares the "Manchester Guardan" IXZT'l 1 W^Ch haS "S headqSr. with tT S, t ml IT eS a monthly Journal with the latest thoughts on the -prices o Baxter colour-prints, and at the exnatation a congregation-there is no George Baxter seems .to have been a colrn^ ?K% B u egin ««g with Bewi ck ? s methods > he dev«l°Ped printing in colour lna new way by use of a succession of colour blocks on an engraved fn tin?? % !? c?hanical improvements ™ P ft j" d ln Printi°S inks., and -the Prince Consort on a balcony in hZl^l tlShtß> men and wo^en in bright tartans swan-necked ladies with annntf- hOUI, dm, OglinSbld «* trees and putting love-letters in holes thereln > ™andieres "Pomare, Queen of the Tahiti, surrounded by her family at the afflicfang moment r when the French forces were landing/ 1, aniline pictures of Swiss and Scottish scenery. There are filigree card baskets containing coloured medallion portraits of Queen VieS c* r pe" Ck °™Ssia ' Napoleon lU., the Empress Eugenic, and other personages; needle-boxes with needle ev'enk-iTsoon^ 0"18^ reUgi °U£ u JivTffr us, who threw away th<^ ugly httle colour-prints that used to decorate the bedrooms of our fathers' and grandfathers 1 houses little knew that Lr\ W°UM u COme when such Thrf h e7°/. th m°ney in the m«ket. The bad draftsmanship, „.t h e meanness of design, and the false "naturalism of the co ours, however, should not blind us to the inventiveness and skill which Baxter possessed and developed, but what sticks in the mind is the poverty of the aesthetic result as compared, for ns™?'^ Thomas Shotter Boys's tinted lithographs or the art qualit/ in the work of th e mezzo-tinters ■: 7 a nd aquatmters who provided the popular prints up to Baxter's time P°Pmar