A couple months back I met up with fellow Searle fan Pete Western for a visit to the Prints & Drawings dept. at the British Museum in London. They hold all the original drawings for Searle's
'The Rakes Progress'. There are several boxes of drawings & we only had time to look through a couple. The museum allowed us to photograph the drawings for personal use only as the copyright resides with the artist. Mr Searle granted me permission to publish the photos so I hope the British Museum is OK with this post.
It was enlightening to see the original artwork. The printed pages tend to lose a lot of the nuance of Searle's drawings. But in the photographs you can see the various media & techniques he used.
Here's a scan of a page from the printed book.
Click on the image to see the enlarged detail.
I was surprised to see that this one was drawn without ink at all but in crayon.
Thanks to Pete for the excellent photographs. More to come soon . . .
Part 1 of
'The Rake's Progress' here.
Above we can observe in the crowd on the left Searle's technique of scratching into the ink work. He would often do this to hair to give an extra feeling of depth when reproduced smaller in magazines. We can see it too in the next image to define the raindrops.
A couple months back I met up with fellow Searle fan Pete Western for a visit to the Prints & Drawings dept. at the British Museum in London. They hold all the original drawings for Searle's 'The Rakes Progress'. There are several boxes of drawings & we only had time to look through a couple. The museum allowed us to photograph the drawings for personal use only as the copyright resides with the artist. Mr Searle granted me permission to publish the photos so I hope the British Museum is OK with this post.
It was enlightening to see the original artwork. The printed pages tend to lose a lot of the nuance of Searle's drawings. But in the photographs you can see the various media & techniques he used.
Here's a scan of a page from the printed book.
Click on the image to see the enlarged detail.
I was surprised to see that this one was drawn without ink at all but in crayon.
Thanks to Pete for the excellent photographs. More to come soon . . .
Part 1 of 'The Rake's Progress' here.
