FINE ARTS

Wairarapa Times-Age, 10 September 1941, Page 6

FINE ARTS

PROCEEDS SWELLING BRITAIN’S WAR CHEST. SHIPMENTS TO AMERICA. America is a steady and increasing buyer of British fine art reproductions: mezzotints, wood-cuts, etchings, drypoints, colour-collotypes, lithographs and 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 valu£ of this luxury trade, the survival of which in war time, without any actual increase at all, would have been astonishing, is today in the neighbourhood of half a million dollars a year. Into the workshops of British publishers, in a steady stream, are coming for reproduction by the collotype process works from outstanding American artists like Hovscp Pushman, Ethelyn Stewart. R. E. Bishop and Wayne Davis. Before the war Germany exported] many collotype reproductions, a market j which British publishers have now en-| tirely captured. Today Britain is the leading producer of mezzotints, paying her engravers one thousand dollars a plate and turning out work which is being collected by discerning American collectors. They are today 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, shared by South Africa, Australia and New Zealand, is for collotype and four-colour process work.