Edmund Blampied exhibition opens at Saint Joseph College Art Gallery on Sept. 24
Edmund Blampied (1886-1966) Master Printmakeropens at the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery with a public reception on Thursday, September 24, from 6:00-7:30 p.m., following a special members’ preview at 5:00 p.m. that will feature a brief gallery talk by Art Gallery Director Ann H. Sievers.
One of the best-known artists to hail from Britain’s Channel Islands, Blampied achieved renown as a printmaker in the 1920s. He had taught himself to draw as a child living in rural Jersey, which provided inspiration and subject matter throughout his life. Having gained attention for his cartoon drawings of local worthies, Blampied was able to attend London’s Lambeth School of Art, following which he secured full-time employment as a newspaper illustrator. While illustration remained an important part of his career, it is the independent etchings, drypoints and lithographs for which he is best known today. Blampied learned to etch at evening classes around 1910. Just a few years later, he had also mastered the technique of drypoint and had been taken on by the Leicester Galleries in London, which planned to publish his prints (and did so in 1919, after the delay caused by World War I). Blampied’s work was prized by collectors and widely praised by critics throughout the 1920s, but as the boom in print collecting faded in the 1930s, he increasingly painted in oil and watercolor and eventually returned to Jersey.
Blampied’s early subjects – the farm workers, the seaweed collectors (“vraikers”), the townspeople of Jersey – were his lifelong inspiration. The island’s old-fashioned way of life held great interest for this artist who so admired Daumier and Rembrandt. Blampied wrote that “the human quality in art has always appealed to me...I have always sympathized most strongly with the human’s effort for existence, his tragic mistakes, his humour...” Blampied’s work embodies not only a deep sympathy for the laborer, but a sharp eye for human foibles as well.
The current exhibition, which has been drawn entirely from the collections of the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery, features many of Edmund Blampied’s most famous drypoints and etchings as well as drawings and a painting.
Also on view at the Saint Joseph College Art Gallery is a selection of American paintings from the permanent collection.
The Saint Joseph College Art Gallery is located in The Bruyette Athenaeum, part of The Carol Autorino Center for the Arts and Humanities. The Art Gallery presents regular exhibitions drawn from its permanent collections as well as loan exhibitions of historic art or of contemporary work by artists of national and international prominence.
The Art Gallery is open Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday: 11:00 a.m. - 4:00 p.m.; Thursday: 11:00 a.m. - 7:00 p.m.; and Sunday: 1:00 - 4:00 p.m.; closed Monday. Admission is free of charge.
