#Joan Hassall

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

Engraved Title Pages by Joan Hassall

These engraved title pages by the prolific English wood engraver and book illustrator Joan Hassall (1906-1988) are from The Wood Engravings of Joan Hassall, with an introduction by the Scottish book and type designer Ruari McLean, published in London by the Oxford University Press in 1960. 

Hassall was one of the most sought-after wood-engraving illustrators of her generation, yet her process was slow and deliberate, but also intuitive. Ruari McLean writes:

She does the minimum of drawing on her blocks first, putting down only the bare outlines of the composition, so that the detail of the design is developed by the graver, almost as a series of afterthoughts. She often engraves a block completely, only to find that it does not satisfy her conception: she will then offset the design into a fresh block and entirely re-engraved it. At this stage, an exasperated publisher is often waiting in great impatience, so it implies a very firm resolve indeed not to let a block go until she is satisfied.

The title page for Devil's Dyke is for a book by her brother, the actor, dramatist, and poet Christopher Hassall (1912-1963), with whom she was very close.

Our copy of The Wood Engravings of Joan Hassall is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff. 

Read more about and view more engravings by Joan Hassall.

View more posts with women wood engravers

View more posts with wood engravings!

[most-normal-eccles-cake-ignorer]

^this one is large, definitely open it in new tab to view full size if you're on desktop!

^ The woodcut-style illustration from chapter 10 and the banner I did for @gorgeousundertow's gorgeous fic, Half Agony, Half Hope, as part of the Ineffable Idiots Big Bang!

@queenofthecute also did some lovelyyy art for chapter 2 that everyone should see!

closeups and info about inspirations under the cut:

faces and southwark cathedral in bg // snek do a hiss // lol i really like to make these guys aaalmost touch hands

As you can see I got very excited about the regency AU and decided to do art inspired by illustrations in Jane Austen novels.

The banner is me trying to be like Charles and Henry Brock with a dash of snek and nightingale.

The ''woodcut'' is inspired by Joan Hassall's work with a Brock-esque ribbon frame bc I liked doing the one in the banner so much.

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I also wrote a separate post where I share some of the resources I found while researching and show some of the amazing artwork by Hassall and the Brocks that inspired these pieces! You can read it here.

[letterboxd-loggd]

Carry On Loving (1970) Gerald Thomas

July 16th 2023

[elmorinn]

Janeuary Day 27 - Cousins ❤️‍🩹

@janeuary-month

Edmund comforting Fanny in the beginning of the book was just so cute pp_pp💞💞💞 i love them <3

i used this wonderful woodcut illustration by Joan Hassall as a reference:

https://pemberley.com/janeinfo/jabrokil.html#mansf

[antonio-m]

“Portrait of Christopher Vernon Hassall” (actor and dramatist), c.1930–31 by sister Joan Hassall (1906-1988), English artist, engraver and illustrator. National Portrait Gallery, London. oil on canvas

[ripplefactor]

Christopher Vernon Hassall by his sister, Joan Hassall, c. 1930–1931, National Portrait Gallery .. @beyondbloomsbury ..

[1five1two]

'The Stricken Oak'. Joan Hassall. 1906-1988.

[allyouknowisalie]

Joan Hassall (1906-1988) “The Striken Oak”. Wood engraving for “A Portrait of a Village” 1937.

[kindafondawanda]

Joan Hassal - The Broken Wall

[coltonwbrown]

The Water Splash, 1937 (print made) Joan Hassall

Victoria and Albert Museum: Source

[uwmspeccoll]

Wood Engraving Wednesday

JOAN HASSALL

These engravings by the prolific English wood engraver and book illustrator Joan Hassall (1906-1988) are from the 1960 book The Wood Engravings of Joan Hassall, with an introduction by the Scottish book and type designer Ruari McLean, published in London by the Oxford University Press. McLean writes:

Joan Hassall has subordinated her talents as an illustrator to her skill as a wood-engraver, rather than the other way about. . . . Her exceptional sense of design underlies all her work. . . . She would admit that, as an engraver, she has accepted Thomas Bewick as a master; but she has in no way allowed his influence to be limiting or narrowing -- although she is proud that her work is entirely English in feeling and technique. Surveying her output as an artist so far, we cannot but be impressed by the wide range of subject-matter which she has accepted and accomplished: she is really versatile.

Our copy of The Wood Engravings of Joan Hassall is another gift from our friend Jerry Buff. 

Read more about and view more engravings by Joan Hassall.

View more posts with women wood engravers

View more posts with wood engravings!

[most-normal-eccles-cake-ignorer]

Darkness Lane by Joan Hassall [ x ] - the piece that most inspired my recent woodcut-style piece.

When I found out I was drawing for @gorgeousundertow's regency AU fic, Half Agony, Half Hope, as part of the @ineffableidiotsbigbang, I started looking up Jane Austen novel illustrations for inspiration and ended up finding some really cool art and websites! I'm posting about some of the images and resources I found because I think it may be interesting to others too (and even if it isn't, I'll have gotten the infodump out of my system haha).

Illustrations from Mansfield Park by Joan Hassall [ x ]

The link above points to a gallery on pemberley.com which has deliciously old-school DIY website HTML and a wealth of Jane Austen illustrations, as well as references for regency clothing. This was where I discovered Joan Hassall's work and decided I wanted to do a woodcut style piece (and then subsequently regretted it many times during the process of making it because I had no idea what I was doing). The detail, visual texture and dramatic lighting in her work is so cool and I just got more obsessed the more I saw.

See more Joan Hassall on tumblr via @uwmspeccoll (a very cool account!) here, here, and here.

The gallery on pemberley.com also had a bunch of Charles Edmund Brock illustrations, which I could not get enough of and so returned to the searchpage and found Molland's Circulating-Library. SO COOL! Jane Austen fans have bought illustrated editions of her novels and uploaded scans of them and oh my gosh they are all so beautiful.

Northanger Abbey watercolour illustrations by C.E. Brock [ x ]

Side note about Henry Tilney (Catherines' love interest in NA), I also came across this old fan page for him from a mostly-broken-links-now site called THE CULT OF DA MAN and um it's great haha, check it out. (reviews of artists representations of him, more delicious HTML, and pixel art (!) of da aforementioned man)

There's also an article on Molland's about Charles and Henry Brock and their Jane Austen works that I found interesting. Charles is better known and did far more JA illustrations, but I do really enjoy Henry's tinted line pieces! (the article also dunks on some bad reproductions of them haha)

Pride & Prejudice tinted line illustrations by H.M. Brock [ x ]

C.E. Brock also did really cool title pages and when I found out that fic banners were a thing I knew what I wanted to do! (with the help of the symmetry tool and undo haha, so much respect for traditional art)

Title pages illustrated by C.E. Brock [ x ] and my banner - the banner design uses elements of both of the Brock images.

So, research in hand/bookmarks folder and banner completed, I decided on a scene from Chapter 10 where our beloveds are standing beside the Thames in the moonlight after walking around London for hours together and talking (CUTE). I wasn't sure what buildings to include in the background, so @gorgeousundertow gave me a few suggestions: Old Southwark Bridge, London Bridge, Southwark Cathedral, and Clink Prison. I realized after a bit of sketching that bridges would be hard to show with the straight-on view I wanted to do, so I decided on the Cathedral, partially because I had also considered drawing a scene that takes place in Salisbury Cathedral in Ch. 7.

OK BUT HOW? I struggled finding reference images for a while until I realized this was LONDON and would be very Google Earth-able. Big ups to Frank Cosgrove, whoever they are, for uploading this haha. This was also where I found out that all the suggestions were from a very small area!

View of Borough High Street, London, 1830, by George Scharf [ x ]

The building in front of the cathedral looked too new, so I went searching for an older image and found the second image. It's a completely different angle but it was enough to get me past the 'oh no idk what do'.

the much brighter concept vs the much darker finished product, featuring a barely-visible Southwark Cathedral

While looking for images of the Thames pre-Google Earth, I also found this website called Dictionary Of Victorian London which has a whole bunch of old images and excerpts from newspapers, etc on a variety of topics. One of the categories, Sex > 'unnatural offences', had this excerpt from The Times (1863), which reads:

Thomas Lane, a coffeehouse keeper, No.9, Love-lane, Eastcheap, city, and James Mortimer, a seaman, were charged with unlawfully meeting each other to commit an unnatural offence. ... The Magistrate committed both prisoners for trial.

Ugh. I hate that so much. Some sexy stuff happens right after the moment I'd chosen, and reading that reminded me that such things would be much more comfortable and safe in darkness (or if ppl just stopped being homophobic, but barring that). I wanted them to feel alone, like the whole world was asleep and it was just them, outside of time.

With that in mind, the iconic Thames Walk Lamp had to go bye bye, and when rendering the background I tried to minimize any light - it's just the suggestion of buildings. I also added tree cover! I tried to imitate how Joan Hassall does trees in some of her artwork, but when she rendered trees like this they were usually farther away/smaller, so my version looks more stylized with how prominent they are.

The ribbon border and book quote presentation is of course more Brock, but by making it black and having the interior image use it as a border instead of a fade-out inside it, I made it a bit of a reference to the very cool foliage edges you see in the very first Hassall image at the top.

I used the procreate brushes from this post on the Procreate Folio forums if anyone wants to try them!

Also fun fact! The font for the quote is called Chanson D'Amour <3 (I initially downloaded it when making the banner before changing the banner font to one called Dark & Black)

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That's all I have to say about the process for the piece, but here's a comic from Dictionary Of Victorian London, Thames > Sanitary condition that I thought was cute (and gross ig? but also cute):

a Punch comic from 1850, I can't link the page due to how the website URL system works but it's from the Thames > Sanitary condition page

[ebonetnoir]

Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts by Rupert Brooke, Edward Marsh & Christopher Hassall. Collected, Compiled and Annotated by John Schroder. With a Frontispiece by Joan Hassall ILLUSTRATED FIRST EDITION LIMITED EDITION, #73 OF 400 COPIES Publisher: Rampant Lions Press, Cambridge, UK Copyright: 1970 This book details the catalog of an extensive collection, comprising 481 items, including full documentation of Sidgwick and Jackson's printing and publication of Brooke’s works, summaries of Brooke’s correspondence with Edward Marsh and Sybil Pye, and Marsh’s correspondence with Mrs. Brooke and Denis Browne. CONDITION: This book is in near fine condition. Hardcover. Olive green cloth boards with bright gilt titles on the spine. Green endpapers. The text block is pristine. Top edge gilt. First and sole edition featuring a frontispiece and eleven additional plates in the text. This edition was limited to 400 copies, printed on rag paper, and bound by the Wigmore Bindery. This book is hand-numbered #73 out of 400 in the rear of the book and has a removable, acetate protective wrapper. Designed and printed by Will and Sebastian Carter.

BUY ON eBAY

[grundoonmgnx]

Joan Hassal, (1906-1988), Harvest Mouse, 1964 

Wood engraving, 49 x 30 mm

[unsaltedsinner]

Beautiful ladies.

[sheiladelaney]

Rupert Brooke illustrated by Joan Hassall, from Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts by Rupert Brooke , 1970.