FINE ART

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 152, 8 September 1941, Page 2

FINE ART

THE WAR CHEST

500,000 DOLLARS WORTH A YEAR

America is a steady and increasing buyer o'f British fine art reproductions: mezzotints, wood-cuts, etchings, drypoints, colour-collotype?, lithographs end four-colour process work. In the first three months of the present year one British publisher alone sent across the Atlantic 70,000 dollars worth of reproductions. Most of these went to buyers in New York, Boston, Chicago and Washington. The total value of this luxury trade, the survival of Avhich in war time, without any actual increase at all, would have been astonishing, is t.o-<lay in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars a year.. Into the workshops of British publishers, in steady stream, a:e coming for reproduction by the collotype process works, from outstanding American artists like Hovsep Pushman, Ethelyn Stewart, R. L. Bishop and' Wayne-Davis. Before the war Germany exported many collotype reproductions, a market which British publishers have now entirely captured.

To-day Britain is the leading producer of mezzotints, paying her engravers one thousand dollars a plate and turning cut work which is being collected by discerning American collectors. They are, to-day. paying as much as 60 dollars for a single reproduction. Rare impressions from fine mezzotint plates have realised up to 1000 dollars for one impression. " Canada is also a buyer of British fine art reproductions. There the preference, chared by South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, is rer collotype and four-colour process work.