Albany E. Howarth

Albany E. Howarth (1872 to 1936) was one of the busiest architectural etchers of the great British print boom, the years before and after the First World War when an etched cathedral front or college gateway hung in thousands of English and American homes. He was born in Durham, trained in an engineering drawing office, and taught himself the craft of the copper plate. Over three decades he etched the doorways, choirs, towers and old streets of England, France, Italy and Spain, and his prints are now held by the Yale Center for British Art, Te Papa in Wellington, the Delaware Art Museum and the Akron Art Museum among others. Our picture shows the carved doorway of the Hospital of Santa Cruz in Toledo. It is not one of his pulled impressions but a period reproduction of the plate, and the story of how his images travelled in that form is part of his story too.

A Draughtsman from Durham

Howarth was born in Durham in 1872, in a city whose cathedral is one of the great Norman buildings of Europe, and it is hard not to see the beginning of a career in that. His first job, though, was not artistic at all. He went into the drawing offices of Armstrong Mitchell at Newcastle upon Tyne, the armaments and engineering firm that merged with Whitworth in 1897 to become Armstrong Whitworth. He stayed four years and left, by his own account, because he found the work too mechanical. What the drawing office gave him was a precise and patient line, and an engineer's sense of how a structure stands up.

He turned instead to illustration, drawing for newspapers and periodicals in the north of England, and he taught himself several methods of printing along the way. In 1905 he moved to London and the following year to Essex, where he lived and worked until 1920. The local paper caught him there in December 1907, at a fundraising concert in the schoolrooms at Wickford: Mr. Albany E. Howarth sang and gave recitations, among them Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad, with Mrs. Albany E. Howarth at the piano.

The First Plates

His first published etching, Stirling Castle, appeared in 1907. For the next several years, until at least 1912, he printed most of his plates himself, and he went for advice to Frederick Goulding, the master printer whose press had pulled impressions for Whistler and Seymour Haden. Some of his sheets carry the pencilled note del et imp, Latin for drew it and printed it, a printmaker's way of saying that one pair of hands made the whole thing.

Oxford, Cambridge and the Society

Success came quickly. In 1909 he produced a set of twelve etchings of the Oxford colleges, among them the Hawksmoor towers of All Souls, the Canterbury Gate of Christ Church and the archway of St John's Canterbury Quad, and in 1910 a set of seven Cambridge colleges. The same year he was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, the body that set the standard for the art in Britain, and he exhibited with it regularly until 1923. He also showed at the Royal Academy, the Fine Art Society and Colnaghi.

The Doorway as a Stage

Run through the surviving titles and one subject keeps returning: the doorway. Prior's Doorway, Ely. Chapter House Door, Rochester. Rochester Cathedral, West Door of 1912. The Doorway, Vézelay of 1915. The Door of the Old Ashmolean. A Norman doorway in Kent. Howarth understood that a carved portal is a building in miniature, a whole program of sculpture and shadow compressed into a frame, and that it gave an etcher everything at once: deep black in the recess, bright stone in the jambs, and small human figures at the threshold to give the scale.

Venice and the Continent

In 1912 he spent more than six months in Venice, and Italian subjects followed, among them a view of Asolo dated 1913 and the valley of the Tiber. France gave him Rouen, with its cathedral and its Grosse Horloge, the streets of Montreuil and the Romanesque portal at Vézelay. After 1920 he settled at Watford in Hertfordshire, where he stayed for the rest of his life.

Among the Masters in America

By the early 1920s his plates were crossing the Atlantic in the company of the most famous etchers alive. In June 1921 the Springfield Republican reviewed a public exhibition of etchings in Springfield, Massachusetts, built around cabinets of Whistler, Rembrandt, Meryon, Seymour Haden, Zorn and D. Y. Cameron, and named among the other fine etchings Albany Howarth's Westminster. The same show included a Doorway of Santa Cruz, Toledo by the Scottish etcher Andrew Affleck, the very building of our picture. In January 1922 the St. Louis Post-Dispatch described an exhibition of 107 contemporary British etchings at the City Art Museum and listed the prominent masters of true line etching on view: D. Y. Cameron, James McBey, Frank Brangwyn, Muirhead Bone, William Strang, Albany Howarth and E. S. Lumsden. That is the first rank of the British etching revival, and Howarth was hung in it.

Spain

His Spanish plates are among his largest. The Great Screen and Choir, Burgos Cathedral, in the Akron Art Museum, measures more than two feet high, and auction records add Street in Toledo, The Street of the Aqueduct, Segovia and the subject of our picture, Ancient Doorway, Santa Cruz, Toledo. The building is the Hospital of Santa Cruz, founded under the will of Cardinal Pedro González de Mendoza and built in the first years of the sixteenth century, and its entrance is one of the landmarks of the Plateresque, the Spanish style that hangs Renaissance ornament on a late Gothic frame. Howarth was not the only British etcher drawn to it: William Strang etched the same doorway in 1913, and Andrew Affleck's version hung in Springfield in 1921. Howarth gives it to us head on, the arches stacked like a reliquary, the great studded doors in shadow and a handful of townspeople gathered at the foot of the steps.

By the 1920s much of his work was issued through printer publishers who bought a plate, printed a limited edition and then destroyed the copper, which is why so many of his later subjects survive in a fixed number of impressions.

After the Edition

When the etching boom collapsed after 1929, the images did not disappear. In the middle of the century firms reissued popular architectural etchings as photomechanical reproductions, printed from a photograph of an impression, often with the signature and title reproduced in the margin and sold ready framed. Howarth's Toledo doorway was one of them; a reproduction sold under the trade name Talio-Chrome is recorded at auction. Our picture belongs to that family, and the section below explains how to tell it from a pulled impression.

Albany Howarth died at Watford on 14 November 1936.

Why Howarth Matters

Howarth is a fine example of a kind of artist the twentieth century has mostly forgotten: the trained, prolific, commercially successful etcher who taught a whole generation of collectors to look closely at old buildings. His plates are records as well as pictures, drawn with an engineer's accuracy at a time when many of the streets he chose were already disappearing. Even in reproduction, his Toledo doorway carries that patience: every niche, every saint and every iron stud is there.