The Sunderers
Blair Hughes-Stanton
Life Story
Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton (22 February 1902 – 6 June 1981) was a major figure in the English wood-engraving revival of the twentieth century. William McCance who worked with Hughes-Stanton said of him, ‘He was an expressionist…but to find an expressionist who is able to take an intractable medium like wood engraving and make it a flexible instrument for his fancy and sensuous flights is unique.’ [1]
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. Hughes-Stanton’s wood engravings have only been known to a narrow public, largely because the majority appeared in private press books of limited circulation. Similarly, the few dozen of his personal independent engravings were printed in small editions.
Hughes-Stanton was taught by Leon Underwood at Byam Shaw School of Art. Underwood’s influence on him and several of his contemporaries was to be considerable. In 1921 Hughes-Stanton was among the first students (that also included Henry Moore) at the Leon Underwood School of Painting and Sculpture. He was also officially attending the Royal Academy Schools, along with Gertrude Hermes (his future wife). The American Marion Mitchell started the students wood-engraving. Underwood encouraged and joined his students in the new activity. His woodcuts probably inspired and influenced the students technically and emotionally.
In the early 1930s Robert Sainsbury was a collector of private press books and he was keen to offer Hughes-Stanton the financial and moral support to set up his own Gemini Press in 1933. Robert Sainsbury was originally a friend of Ida Graves, the artist’s second wife. It was she who in fact introduced Sainsbury to Jacob Epstein, and Hughes-Stanton who introduced Robert Sainsbury to Henry Moore and to the contemporary art world in general, which allowed him to amass the amazing collection now housed at the Sainsbury Centre. [2]
Hughes-Stanton became strongly influenced by D.H. Lawrence. The two met through Frieda Lawrence’s daughter, Barbara Weekley Barr, who also attended the Underwood school. He worked with Lawrence on a folio volume of poetry, Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1930), published just after Lawrence’s death. The two men were similar in temperament and got on well. Hughes-Stanton was excited and inspired by the liberating philosophy of the older man. Lawrence seems to have taken an encouraging interest in Hughes-Stanton’s work too. [3]
Hughes-Stanton grieved Lawrence’s death in 1930 and started an affair with Ida Graves, poetess, reader for the Stage Society and later novelist, the same year. For the next three years, the affair would cloud his family life, and his professional relationships at the renowned Gregynog Press. However, the relationship energised an output of work for Gregynog, and later his own and other presses, which lasted until the outbreak of the Second World War, nine years later, and which was to prove the best of his career.
This wood engraving is the fifth of thirteen illustrations made by Blair Hughes-Stanton for The Ship of Death and Other Poems, a selection of D. H. Lawrence’s Last Poems, put together by Hughes Stanton and Ida Graves at the Gregynog Press, upon the writer’s death in 1930. The thin, bearded figure which appears throughout the poems is patently Lawrence himself.
Entitled The Sunderers, this full-page illustration accompanies the poem Walk Warily, (on page 34) and includes the verses,
‘Walk warily, walk warily, be careful what you say:
because now the Sunderers are hovering round,
the Dividers are close upon us, dogging our every breath
and watching our every step.
and beating their great wings in our panting faces.
The angels are standing back, the angels of the Kiss.
they wait, they give way now
to the Sunderers, to the swift ones
the ones with the sharp black wings
and the shudder of electric anger
and the drumming of pinions of thunder…
…Lo, we are in the midst of the sunderers
the cleavers, that cleave us forever apart from one another,
and separate heart from heart, and cut away all caresses
with the white triumphance of lightning and electric delight,
the Dividers, the Thunderers, the Swift Ones, blind with speed
who put salt in our mouths and currents of excitement in our limbs
and hotness and then more crusted brine in our hearts.’
To ‘sunder’ is to break apart, with the general message being about those who would separate lovers. The words and tone were particularly fitting to the artist’s life in terms of his love affair with Ida Graves at the time, and having spent over a year being vilified for ‘living in sin’. [4]
A central male figure is starkly lit from one side, closely surrounded by two larger, muscular, male ‘sunderers’ either side, as one grasps at the protagonist’s upper leg. All three figures are very long-limbed, as was Hughes-Stanton’s usual style of figural depiction, and the sunderers have particularly large feet.
The ‘angels’ of the poem apparently appear at the top left-hand side of the image. There is a mere suggestion of their having wings, by the delicate wisps of fine white lines engraved across the dark body of the sunderer to the right, as negative space. By contrast the wings of the sunderer to the left appear to be highlighted by fine relief lines picked up by the black ink, which combine with the figure’s flowing hair, appearing like flames of hair. There is no female figure present, being separated from the male figure – the scene is dominated solely by the male figure’s mental anguish of the sunderers.
Inspired as he was by Lawrence’s views on death and by his death itself, Hughes-Stanton was even more impressed by his utterances on morality and life. The artist was permanently affected by Lawrence’s belief in the vital importance and indeed rightness of responding to one’s basic animal instincts, rather than any superficial, taught morality, and by his new and frighteningly frank, if ultimately unresolved, examination of relations between the sexes. Hughes-Stanton’s approach to his work was always unashamedly personal rather than attempting to be completely objective. As a result, the engravings carry a highly emotional charge. [5]
Katharine Malcolm, June 2023
[1] Penelope Hughes-Stanton, The Wood-Engravings of Blair Hughes-Stanton (Private
Libraries Association, 1991), ix
[2] Hughes-Stanton, p.66
[3] Hughes-Stanton, p. 35
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
