Wiston River

The stillness of this very English scene belies the difficulty required to make it. Frank Morley Fletcher almost single-handedly popularized the color woodcut in Britain early in the last century by working out and then sharing how Japanese artists had made color woodblock prints since the 1760s. In Japan one person designed the image, one carved separate blocks for the various colors, and one inked and printed the image, but Fletcher believed in doing every step himself. Mixing watercolors with rice-flour paste to give the colors body, he achieved a wonderfully muted palette in Wiston River, capturing just the right shades of earlymorning green. A bit of redness added along the horizon line suggests the impending sun. The perfectly positioned reflections in the water—a nod to the Japanese penchant for simplified shapes—show how meticulous and painstaking Fletcher was as a printer. He made up to 100 impressions of each design, and produced only fourteen different color woodcuts in his lifetime.