Leighton, Clare (1898-1989)
I: Cutting, from the Lumber Camp Series. 1931.Wood engraving on off-white Japanese paper, copy number sixteen from the English edition of thirty, signed lower right, numbered and titled lower left, matted, the sheet 15 1/2 x 10 in."Cutting is the first in Leighton's series of six wood engravings illustrating different aspects of the work involved in timber harvesting. The series grew out of her observations at the Canadian International Paper Company's lumber camp in the Laurentian Mountains of Quebec, which she visited in the winter of 1930-31 during one of a series of lecture tours she undertook in America before emigrating there permanently in 1939. Leighton engraved her designs on wood blocks from sketches made on site. Notwithstanding the remote setting that inspired the series, its theme of bodily toil is consistent with Leighton's many prints of English rural life. Her series echoes the concerns of many American artists during the 1930s, when the poverty and unemployment of the Great Depression inspired glorification of the ordinary worker, as in the prints of James Edward Allen, Gifford Beal, and Benton Murdoch Spruance, who, like Leighton, used a serial format to portray work in a narrative fashion." (cf. The Terra Foundation for American Art's online description: http://collection.terraamericanart.org/view/objects/asitem/Objects$0040422/1;jsessionid=F37B56C81C47AFFC26A1BE9A529D016A?t:state:flow=e2e00196-f09e-4a17-a14d-45a5c541b185)