Blair Hughes-Stanton

1902-1981

Blair Hughes-Stanton, painter and engraver, was born in London, the son of Sir Herbert Hughes-Stanton, a distinguished painter. He turned to art only after he had been rejected for the Navy (which he joined as a cadet at 13), and studied at the Byam Shaw Art School London 1919-1922, before going on to the Royal College of Art 1923-1925 where he was taught wood engraving.  He later attended the Leon Underwood School of Painting and Sculpture where he met Henry Moore with whom he formed a group to form the English Wood Engravers Society.

In Paris as a student he was influenced by Cezanne but a move to Suffolk and parenthood inspired semi abstract figures with babies and landscapes in oils. He was also an engraver in wood and linoleum.  Before the war his painting became more abstract, influenced by Picasso but also by his own wood engravings and at this time he painted in a smooth pale tempera which he scored to a darker under-surface so that the image is, in effect, engraved.  Other colours were then superimposed.

For a time he was married to the artist Gertrude Hermes. Under the influence of Leon Underwood and T E Lawrence, many of whose works he illustrated including ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’, he became a brilliant engraver and a highly idiosyncratic artist.

He became best known as a designer and illustrator of fine books for the Golden Cockerel and Cresset presses, and for the wood engraved illustrations he made for the Gregnyog Press, 1930-1933 and for his own Gemini Press, 1933-1936. In the late 1930s he produced a set of outstanding large wood engravings which secured him a place in the history of modernist printmaking. He won an international prize at the Venice Biennale in 1938 for engraving.

A bullet wound through the face while he was a prisoner of war in 1941 so damaged his sight that the second half of his life was less productive. He taught at Westminster School of Art 1947-48 and from 1948 was a lecturer in printmaking and drawing at the Society of Wood Engravers, St Martins and the Central School of Art.  He lived in Manningtree, Essex before his death. His studio was converted into North House Gallery in 1999.