Clare Leighton:
Cotton Picker (BPL 491), Cotton Frontispiece, 1942
Framed (ref: 6007)
Original woodblock (cancelled)

Tags: Clare Leighton plate woodblock flowers work Garden Museum Slade Garden Museum

Provenance: The Artist's Estate

Cotton Picker was originally printed in an edition of 50 as part of Southern Harvest (New York, The Macmillan & Co.), 1942.

Leighton would typically take several days to produce a wood engraving, painstakingly carving the image with special tools strong enough to incise into the end grain of the block, which was typically made of boxwood, sufficiently hard to allow for a number of prints to be made before any loss of sharpness.

Exhibited: Sanctuary, Artist-Gardeners, 1919-39, Garden Museum, London, 25th February – 5 April, 2020

Literature: Christopher Woodward, Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners, 1919–1939, published by Liss Llewellyn, 2020