The William Lee Hankey etchings, prints and pictures below represent a small selection of the many works available by William Lee Hankey. If there is anything in particular that you’re looking for, then please contact us on 07889 800857
William Lee Hankey
William Lee Hankey (1869–1952) was a British painter and book illustrator. He specialised in landscapes, character studies and portraits of pastoral life, particularly in studies of mothers with young children such as “We’ve Been in the Meadows All Day”. Read More
He was born in Chester and worked as a designer after leaving school. He studied art in the evenings at the Chester School of Art (now the Department of Art and Design at University of Chester), then at the Royal College of Art. Later in Paris he became influenced by the work of Jules Bastien-Lepage, who also favoured rustic scenes depicted in a realistic but sentimental style. He first exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1896 and was President of the London Sketch Club from 1902 to 1904. William Lee Hankey stayed in France in the early 1900’s, painting many of his works in Brittany and Normandy, where he depicted a peasant lifestyle which was already disappearing in England. From 1904 until well after World War I he maintained a studio at the Etaples art colony.
But it was William Lee Hankey’s black and white and coloured etchings of the people of Étaples, several developed from these paintings, which gained him a reputation as ‘one of the most gifted of the figurative printmakers working in original drypoint during the first thirty years of the 20th century’. One that is particularly striking for its stylistic presentation was “The Refugees”, his contribution to raising awareness of the consequences for ordinary people of the German invasion of France and Belgium in 1914. He went on to serve with the Artists’ Rifles from 1915 to 1918.
In Britain William Lee Hankey had been associated with the Newlyn School, a group of English artists based in the titular village in Cornwall who were themselves influenced by the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats.
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