Description

Soon the Vale Tye will be withdrawn from circulation, the Eragny Press will continue its publications. The type will be that employed for the first time in the present volume. Collectors will perhaps be interested in a brief account of the origin of the Press a bibliography of the Eragny books up to the present departure, since in future the books will not only be decorated and printed under the immediate supervision of Mr. Pissarro, but set up in a type of his design first learned to draw from his father, in the fields far from any art school. One day M. Lepkre, the well known engraver, showed him how his tools were held, finding him interested, gave him two gravers and a scorper. Thus furnished with the means he made a start and taught himself with the result that in 1886 F. G. Dumas, commissioned him to illustrate a story, Mait Liziard, by Octave Mirbeau. Four woodcuts appeared, but the subscribers to the Review expressed so much disapproval of these illustrations, conceived and executed in the uncompromising spirit of Charles Keenes work, which Mr. Pissarro greatly admired, that his collaboration was cut short there and then. He learnt later that this epistolary demonstrar tion against his work, which inundated Mr, Dumas office, was the work of some students in the atelier of a well known painter. Disappointed, and having heard that in England there was a group of young artists who were ardently engaged in the revival of wood, engraving, he crossed the Channel with the intention of joining the