Resounding Sea (after Paul Dougherty)

Henry Wolf

In 1915, the year before his death, the American wood engraver Henry Wolf won the Grand Prize for his printmaking at the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. The Wolf prints we have were available for sale at the PPIE and many were the actual prints exhibited and have the label from the PPIE.

The subject of “Resounding Sea” could either be the coast of Monhegan Island, Maine, or St. Ives in Cornwall, the two places between which Paul Dougherty divided much of his painting career after his return to the U.S. in 1902. Dougherty was famous for his depictions of stormy seas, especially where they met the shores of northern Atlantic coasts, and the geological formations of the Maine and Cornwall terrain are very similar.

In “Resounding Sea,” executed late in Henry Wolf’s career, master meets master at each artist’s peak. Wolf captures the complexity of Dougherty’s composition in the dramatic waves and looming cliffsides with equal expertise, managing to extoll the beauty and force of the scene on a much smaller scale, and in monochrome. This was likely engraved between 1904 and 1914.

Henry Wolf won the Grand Prize for printmaking at the 1915 Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. One of the last of the great reproductive wood engravers, he exhibited 144 wood engravings at the PPIE, a few of these were his own compositions, such as "Evening, Swan Lake, Central Park, New York."

Henry Wolf, born in Eckwersheim, Alsace, France in 1852, was the premier wood engraver working in America from the late 1800's through his death in 1916. He studied with J. Levy in Strasbourg, and came to New York in 1871, after exhibiting throughout Europe, Paris in particular.

He primarily copied the "greats" for publication in the three most popular literary magazines of the time, Century Magazine, Harper's Monthly, and Scribner's Magazine. The American artists he presented for public consumption included John Singer Sargent, Gilbert Stuart and Frank Weston Benson, the Europeans included Jan Vermeer, Edouard Manet and Jean Leon Gerome.

In the book The Life & Work of Henry Wolf by Ralph Clifton Smith, there is a quote from a letter received by Wolf in 1905 from W. Lewis Fraser, for many years connected with the art department of the Century Magazine, referring to Gerome, "'Many thanks for your letter. Gerome's expression as he looked at the proofs of your engravings of his paintings was 'they are beautiful, Mr. Wolf knew better than my brushes what I wanted to do.'" He began publishing original works of his own design, beginning in 1896 with 'Evening Star.' He worked until his unexpected death in 1916, at the age of 64.