The farmer dentist

Edmund Blampied (1886-1966) was one of the most eminent artists to come from the Channel Islands, yet he received no formal training in art until he was 16 years old. He was noted mostly for his etchings and drypoints published at the height of the print boom in the 1920s during the etching revival, but was also a lithographer, caricaturist, cartoonist, book illustrator and artist in oils, watercolours, silhouettes and bronze.

Blampied is well represented in the large collection of prints (both etchings and drypoints) that Sir John Ilott presented to Te Papa's forerunner, the National Art Gallery.

Blampied's earliest etchings are dated December 1909 and his prints were first shown at an exhibition of students' work in March 1914, where his etching of an ox-cart was noted by The Times. Blampied later recorded his method of working on zinc for etching and copper for drypoint in Ernest Lumsden's definitive treatise The Art of Etching. Blampied wrote: "I generally chose from amongst my various drawings one which would tend to produce a successful plate. I do not trace on to the copper, but copy a few important lines on to the bare metal with litho-chalk. I then sketch over this with an ordinary sewing needle and rub in a little black oil-colour. . . From the first my efforts are to improve on the sketch until I consider the plate finished. . . In very few cases do I touch a plate after the first proof, so the majority have but one state. If I am dissatisfied with either the composition or details, I prefer to start afresh upon another plate rather than make radical alterations."

One of the highlights of Blampied's subsequent career came in 1925 when the Central School of Arts and Crafts submitted two of his lithographs with the work of other students to the Exposition Internationale des Arts Decoratifs et Industriels Modernes in Paris. The School won a Grand Prix for its works on paper and Blampied was one of 12 students who were awarded a Gold Medal as a collaborateur.

While developing his skills as an etcher and lithographer in the early 1920s, Blampied continued to work extensively for magazines and contributed hundreds of political cartoons and decorative drawings to The Bystander magazine between 1922 and 1926; he illustrated short stories by E.F. Benson and other authors in Hutchinson's Magazine, and designed book jackets for publishers including Hodder & Stoughton, Herbert Jenkins, T. Fisher Unwin, Eveleigh Nash, William Collins and Constable.

When the market for etchings collapsed during the great depression in the early 1930s, Blampied reinvented himself as a cartoonist and caricaturist at a 1931 exhibition called 'Blampied's Nonsense Show'. This brought out his love of the absurd and led to his only book, obscurely entitled Bottled Trout and Polo. In May 1938 Blampied was elected to the Royal Society of British Artists. Later that year he was asked to prepare some new illustrations for a lavish edition of Peter Pan, the rights to which had been bequeathed by J.M. Barrie to Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children. The Blampied Edition of Peter and Wendy was published in 1939 and is one of the finest illustrated editions of this book.

In 1938 he returned with his wife to his native Jersey, surviving the German occupation and spending the rest of his life there.

In an interview in 1964, shortly before his death, Blampied vividly recalled his Jersey childhood:

I was born in a Jersey surely two centuries behind the times. The men had side whiskers and fancy waistcoats and most women took snuff and wore too many petticoats. These folk were all so friendly, so amusing, so hardworking. Their happy chatter and laughter, the horses and the noise of cartwheels, the cackle of poultry, the bark of friendly dogs, potato-planting, the cider-making, and what else. The happy noise of it all! And I am forgetting the lighting which was mostly from candles or paraffin. To a youngster hungering to be some day an artist, this jungle of happy life was of great educational worth. When in London some years later and desperately homesick, my imagination was very pleasurably exercised in re-living those precious memories. I treasured and loved them. And it was during those very early years in Jersey that I taught myself to draw a horse in all its movements.

This drypoint would date from that London period. Although Blampied fondly recalls the 'happy noise' of it all, here the noise is anything but that - the agonised patient awaiting an extraction. It is easy to take for granted the surprisingly recent impact that modern dentistry has had on the quality of life. No such luck for Blampied's rural labourers, and the dentist himself, as implied in the title, is a farmer rather than a trained graduate! A definite element of cruel, earthy, rustic comedy emerges from this print; thematically it is remarkably similar to Jan Both's 17th century Dutch engraving The Five Sense: Touch (Te Papa 2015-0056-16), but stylistically Blampied's brilliantly sketchy drypoint could not be more different.

See:

'Edmund Blampied - an interview', in Annual Bulletin of La Societe Jersiaise, 1964, https://www.theislandwiki.org/index.php/Edmund_Blampied_-_an_interview

Wikipedia, 'Edmund Blampied', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_Blampied

Dr Mark Stocker  Curator, Historical International Art   February 2018