Castle Rock, Lynton

Steven Hutchins

Nothing is found on the life and art career of Steven Hutchins save for a couple of anecdotes online. Among them, a post on the Modern Printmakers blog by Haji Baba on September 2, 2011 (https://haji-b.blogspot.com/2011/09/steven-hutchins.html). The blogger tells of their experience meeting the print dealer and sometime-printmaker Steven Hutchins at the Portobello Road market in 1983:

"A friend had been on one of his search-and-spend visits to Portobello Road in London and popped in to see Steven Hutchins at his stall as part of the exercise. Now, Steven was a dealer in Japanese woodblock but occasionally sold European woodblock artists. (I bought my treasured Paul Leschhorn from him). But on this occasion he had a woodcut by an artist none of us had ever come across: it was Steven Hutchins himself. And he had done something remarkable.

"We knew about the handbook called Woodblock Printing that Frank Morley Fletcher had first published in 1916 but neither us suspected that anyone had used the book to teach themselves how to make woodcuts in the Japanese manner as late as the 1980s. But Steven Hutchins had. You can judge for yourself how successful you think he was but for me he did a good job even though when he asked me if I knew this artist when he showed me a woodcut one day, I failed to buy. (No reason why they should have been cheap but they weren't). Anyway, I wanted readers to see these prints just to show what people can achieve with application. You may also note that Steven worked strictly within the British topographical tradition in these two prints at least. Eggleston Abbey is in Co Durham, Lynton on the rocky coast of north Devon. Incidentally, I haven't seen him since the eighties. It was a great time of shared rediscovery but unfortunately the print dealers with flair like Steven Hutchins all moved on. Hail, and farewell."

We had previously dated this piece at around 1940 due to the style, looking like the work of the British artists whose interest in Japanese printmaking led to the likes of Frank Morely Fletcher, et al. Instead we found ourselves with a remarkable work done by a more contemporary person who was simply fascinated by the technique and chose to emulate it - just for fun, it seems.