Edgar Holloway

When Edgar Holloway began to etch, the once flourishing market for contemporary fine art prints was already in decline. The etching in particular had enjoyed enormous popularity in Britain during the 1920s; it had become a symbol of good taste; an affordable and original work of art. The unprecedented demand for prints led to their increased market value. It was a time when many young artists as well as established painters turned to printmaking, seduced by the popularity of etching and the large sums of money to be made. Edgar Holloway’s finely wrought etchings were readily accepted in a market that praised and rewarded good craftsmanship – etchings and watercolours became his primary source of income. Holloway was producing eighteen to twenty plates a year in the early ‘thirties, compared to, for example, Graham Sutherland’s four a year at the height of the print boom. He earned his living with picturesque views of popular landmarks, cathedrals, ruins and, when obtainable, commissioned portraits.

Edgar Holloway, born in Doncaster in 1914 the son of a miner-turned-picture-framer, was making linocuts by the age of ten and drypoints at thirteen. He left school at fourteen, declining an offer to go to art school full time in favour of travelling the Yorkshire countryside in pursuit of suitable subjects for watercolours and drypoints to sell through his father’s picture-framing shop. The Holloway family moved to London in June 1931 when Edgar was seventeen. His reputation was established when he was given his first solo exhibition at the Twenty One Gallery off Regent Street, to critical acclaim. At the same time his work entered public collections like the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

At eighteen Holloway’s list of sitters for portraits included T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender and Herbert Read. The genre for which Holloway is most widely acclaimed is portraiture, and for his self-portraits especially. No other British artist made so many etched self-portraits, twenty-seven between 1931 and 1996 creating what has now become a visual autobiography.

Holloway’s marriage in 1943 to Daisy Monica Hawkins, a former model to Eric Gill, was inspiring not only in his developing interest in the work of Gill and particularly his attitude towards fine art and craft, but also in his fascination with Monica as a model during the early years of their marriage. At first Holloway lived with his young family in Yorkshire, then in Capel-y-ffin in the Black Mountains, and from 1949 on Ditchling Common, accepting an invitation to join the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic, he shared a studio with Philip Hargreen, and worked as a letterer, cartographer and designer of book jackets for major British publishers. Holloway did not return to printmaking until he gave up commercial art in 1969. The romantic, plein-air responses to the Yorkshire landscape of Holloway’s early drypoints, and his exact recording of architectural subjects, eventually gave way to a more sophisticated and expressive visual language.

Throughout his career Holloway has remained firmly outside mainstream concerns in contemporary art and his reputation has fluctuated as a consequence. Now Holloway is once more finding his work in demand, rising on the tide of renewed interest in the printmaking of the inter-war years. At ninety four, Holloway is fortunate to have witnessed the prevailing taste turn full cycle and he can once again enjoy the interest shown in his work.