Porta Capuana

The British artist Geoffrey Wedgwood (1900-1977) was born in Leek, Staffordshire, the son of Jane and Frank Wedgwood, an engineer. Brought up in Liverpool, Wedgwood attended the Liverpool Institute and then served with the British Army in the First World War. From 1919 to 1921 he studied at the Liverpool City School of Art. Winning a scholarship to the Royal College of Art, London, he studied engraving there under Sir Frank Short and from 1924 under his successor Malcolm Osborne. Both these senior artists are also represented in Te Papa's collection.

Wedgwood was a Rome scholar at the British School at Rome, having won the Engraving Prize in 1925, the same year that Edward Irvine Halliday (1902-1984), a fellow Liverpudlian and also a former student at the RCA, won the Painting Prize. According to the late curator Edward Morris, writing in the Connoisseur, Wedgwood "reverted to architectural subjects; his line became harder and more precise; his effects clearer and sharper; less of his work was etched, more engraved; some of the credit for these effects must go to the printer, David Strang", son of the major printmaker William Strang.

"In Wedgwood's architectural etchings", wrote Kenneth Guichard in British Etchers 1850-1940 (London, 1977/81), "verity of the formal harmonies of square and rectangle in the roofs and walls of old buildings is relieved by gentle caricature in the small local figures that inhabit the scenes and are sympathetically observed."

Wedgwood later taught at the Liverpool Institute from 1932 to 1935 and at the Liverpool City School of Art  from 1935 until his retirement in 1960. He also worked as an illustrator. His etchings for menus were shown at the L.N.E.R. (London and North Eastern Railway)  exhibition of poster art at Burlington Galleries in 1933. Among various projects for Martins Bank advertising in the early 1950s, he was commissioned together with J.C. Armitage (Ionicus) and F.G. Lodge to do drawings of English stately homes.

This engraving/drypoint shows Wedgwood's consummate skill in depicting architectural scenes and the sense of a keen personality behind every building emerges. Here he depicts the Porta Capuana and the nearby church of Santa Caterina a Formiello. Neapolitans, a dog and a donkey and a cat all people the foreground, imparting a little lightness and wit to the all-dominant architecture. It almost certainly dates from the very end of his stint as a British School of Rome scholar, and before his return to Liverpool, where he was to teach till the end of his working life. A reflection of the esteem in which Wedgwood was held was this prints selection as a presentation print, issued by the Print Collectors' Club, a real force to be reckoned with on the eve of the collapse of the print market. Even for as outstanding practitioner as Wedgwood, it has never quite recovered.

See: Wikipedia, 'Geoffrey Wedgwood', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Wedgwood

Dr Mark Stocker   Curator, Historical International Art    June 2018