Walberswick Ferry

James Hamilton Hay

Liverpool artist James Hamilton Hay had only created a handful of etchings in the late 1890s before focusing entirely on painting, for which he found success and helped to bring forward Liverpool's standing as an artistic community on the world stage. This remained his pursuit until friend and fellow artist Francis Dodd had him sit for a drypoint portrait around 1912. Intrigued by the process and drawn to its delicate effect, he learned the medium and spent the next three years redirecting his attention to the plate. He created fifty-three drypoints, none of them editioned and all of them presumed small. He died three years later at age forty-seven, just as his second career as a printmaker was beginning to take root.

This ephemeral rendering of the Walberswick Ferry on the Suffolk coast in England belies a genius for the plate that many other, more experienced drypoint printmakers only hope to achieve. In the small format he achieves depth and atmosphere with ease. The old ferry house with its rumpled roof and its siding reflected on the still surface of the lake; the figures in the mid ground going about their daily lives; the distant lighthouse in the dunes: no detail is spared, yet in all remains delightfully uncluttered.