Mary Evans Collection of the Week
Art from the CLM Archive
Chris and Lesley Mees have been contributors to Mary Evans for a number of years with their fantastic March of the Women collection covering the history of women’s suffrage. But we recently took delivery of a new set of images from them which covers another, more artistic, aspect of their collection.
Chris has amassed an unparalleled archive of art magazines from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which have been digitised and are available to research via the excellent ArtHistoryResearch.net. The collection includes prestigious and often very rare journals, most of which were printed to an extremely high standard. ‘Colour’ magazine ran from 1914 to 1922 and contained an eclectic mixture of short stories, poetry and articles about art. Each issue is bulging with etchings, linocuts, lithography and other media alongside oil and watercolour pictures, and what makes it particularly interesting is its numerous reproductions (mainly in colour) of work by contemporary British painters, notably by members of the Camden Town Group and the London Group, such as Robert Bevan, Walter Sickert, Harold Gilman and Charles Ginner. It also includes many examples of work by First World War artists. We have now made available a range of pictures – landscapes, portraiture, still lives and genre subjects – taken from ‘Colour’ all by artists that are now out of copyright.
‘Art in Australia’ was the first significant art journal to be published in Australia and is very scarce. In addition to the images from ‘Colour’ we also now have available pictures taken from the first decade of this journal (1916-1925) including many views of rural and urban Australia, as well as numerous advertisements for well-known Australian brands.
This new selection of arty images numbers over 1200 – perfect for all kinds of licensing from book covers to greeting cards. We’ve pulled together an edit of some of the best here and look forward to bringing you more images from the CLM Archive’s extensive art magazine database in due course.
If you would like a picture search, a quote or have any other questions about using our library, please get in touch by emailing pictures@maryevans.com or calling 020 8318 0034.
Image credit © Mary Evans Picture Library