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Charles Holroyd R.E.
Potternewton, Leeds 1861 – 1917 Weybridge
Borrowdale Yews
Borrowdale Yews
Dodgson 166 (Holroyd 171)
227 x 355 mm
Original etching, 1903.
Signed in pencil and entitled Wordsworth Yews. The fraternal Four and annotated 1st state.
Printed in brown-black ink on cream laid paper watermarked O.W.P&A.C.L.
A couple of vertical fold lines, mainly visible on the reverse.
Also another impression, printed with less ink, and with the sky and four trees hand-coloured by the artist. (Dodgson specifically mentions owning an etching hand-coloured by Holroyd – an unusual practice at that time - a practice which he occasionally adopted with happy results, of tinting some proofs of his etchings with watercolour … [to] charming effect.)
On cream laid paper, foxed, mainly in the margins.
A tiny failed printing defect.
For both impressions: £350
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Additional
Information about the Print
Exhibited at the R.E. 1903
Etched one hundred years after Wordsworth had visited the Seathwaite grove and was inspired to write his poem Yew-Trees, in which he describes the Borrowdale Yews as the “fraternal Four” (though later one was uprooted in a storm). The trees appear to be separate, but all come from one tree – and that apparently is a female tree, so now a sororal three. They are at least 1500 years old.
His poem made the yews famous.
There is a yew-tree, pride of Lorton Vale,
Which to this day stands single ….
This solitary tree ! – a living thing
Produced too slowly ever to decay:
Of form and aspect too magnificent
To be destroyed. But worthier still of note
Are those fraternal Four of Borrowdale,
Joined in one solemn and capacious grove;
Huge trunks ! - and each particular trunk a growth
Of intertwisted fibres serpentine
Up-coiling and inveterately convolved -
Nor uninformed with Fantasy, and looks
That threaten the profane; a pillared shade,
Upon whose grassless floor of red-brown hue,
By sheddings from the pining umbrage tinged
Perennially – beneath whose sable roof
Of boughs, as if for festal purposes decked
With un-rejoicing berries – ghostly Shapes
May meet at noontide: … there to celebrate
As in a natural temple scattered o’er
With altars undisturbed of mossy stone,
United worship; or in mute repose
To lie, and listen to the mountain flood
Murmuring from Glaramara’s inmost caves.
Provenance: by descent from the artist to his widow Lady Holroyd; to their son Michael; to Michael’s godson. |
