William Walcot -Orig. Pencil Signed Etching w/Aquatint

William Walcot RE

(1874-1943)

Newcastle, 1921

Original Pencil Signed Drypoint Etching and Aquatint

This fabulous original drypoint etching and aquatint with full margins titled Newcastle was executed by the British artist William Walcot, and is signed in pencil on the lower right by the artist.  It is printed on thin wove paper. The platemark measures 3 7/8 X 5 7/8 inches, with the paper measuring 8 ½ X 10 ¾ inches. It is matted in a silk mat. It is a superb impression, in near fine condition, aside from faint toning at the mat. It is not laid down, nor has any foxing, creases, or tears. Estimate $550-650. NO RESERVE.

The son of an English father and a Russian mother, William Walcot was born at Lustdorf, near Odessa on 10 March 1874. During his childhood, he travelled through Europe with his parents, returning to Russia at the age of seventeen, to study architecture under Benois at the Imperial Academy of Art, St Petersburg. He also studied in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Atelier Redon. He practised architecture in Moscow for five years, designing the city’s Hotel Metropole (1898), and subsequently visiting Rome and London. Settling in London in 1907, he was first employed as a draughtsman to South-African born architect Eustace Frere. He soon became a freelance draughtsman, producing presentation drawings for architects to show their clients and to exhibit at the Royal Academy. Those architects included Herbert Baker, Aston Webb and Edwin Lutyens (for whom he made drawings of the Viceroy’s House, New Delhi). His treatment of the presentation drawings as works of art rather than technical plans led to commissions from the Fine Art Society to visit Rome and Venice, and he held a total of eight solo shows with that dealer (1908-28). He also showed watercolours and etchings with leading exhibiting societies, and was elected to the membership of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers (ARE 1918, RE 1920) and the Royal Society of British Artists (1913). He was additionally a Fellow of Royal Institute of British Architects (1922) and an associate of the British School in Rome. The most celebrated architectural draughtsman in England through the nineteen-twenties and thirties, he worked from studios in London, Oxford and Rome at the height of his career. However, when his practice collapsed, on the outbreak of the Second World War, he committed suicide at Hurstpierpoint, in Sussex, on 21 May 1943.