Title

The [Herbert S.] Gilkes collection of engravings.

Author

Lindsay, Lionel.

Source

Art in Australia (Sydney).

Details

3rd Series, number 10, December 1924, [no pagination]

Publication date

December 1924

Physical description

pages 2.

Type

Essay/article

Language

English

Country of context

Australia

Full text

The Gilkes Collection of Engravings

By LIONEL LINDSAY

Edmond de Goncourt willed his notable collection to the auctioneer’s hammer, preferring that the beauty he had gathered should be individually enjoyed, rather than suffer absorption by a democratic institution. That is the spirit in which Mr. Herbert S. Gilkes is selling his collection of engravings, the most remarkable yet seen in Australia.

Mr. Gilkes began to collect at the age of fifteen. For many years his occupation took him all over the United Kingdom, and abroad to Holland, Germany, France and Italy; and wherever he went he was a hunter of prints. Since the war, in which he served and suffered, necessity has compelled him to offer to the public what he once hoped might be kept intact, and his present desire is to stimulate collecting and the enjoyment of the “Print” in all its variety. As engraving was, from its beginnings, the method of illustration and reproduction of pictures, its numerical extent is almost immeasurable; so that works by the great masters of the burin lie within reach of the most modest purse.

The Gilkes collection comprises five thousand prints, and covers the field of engraving from the early German and Italian masters to the popular print of the Nineteenth Century. It includes such rare proofs as Durer’s “Great Fortune” and “The Shepherds visiting the Holy Family” (woodcut), Marco de Ravenna’s “Lady and Lion,” Marc Antonio’s “Olympia,” after Raphael, “The Three Pigs,” by K. du Jardin, and a number of early original drawings.

As we review the schools, we see Durer stands supreme for beauty of line, for austere power Mantegna, but for charm must go to the early Italians and to the French engravers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. We see the Flemish engravers dominated by the rhetoric of Rubens, and turn for household charm to Holland and the greatest school of etching. We linger over the English school’s rich contribution of mezzotint, its characteristic sporting prints, once the pride of noble innkeepers, and humble coloured prints of Bunbury, whose quaintness and vivid colouring has been echoed by one of the most modernist movements.

The collector of engravings has the widest of all art fields to range: he may specialise in a particular school or century, or carry his taste across them all. It is astonishing how quickly a collection grows, if you posses the right enthusiasm and taste. I remember, when I was keen on the Japanese woodcut, how hopeless seemed the possibility of acquiring any in Sydney, and yet within a year I had accumulated a hundred, including a few that are rare and beautiful. The Gilkes collection offers an easy opportunity to the print collector, for the prices asked are moderate, and the range of styles and periods astonishingly wide. [Art in Australia. 3rd Series, number 10, December 1924]