Biographies

Timothy Cole (1852-1931) The information below comes from . . TIMOTHY COLE LoveToKnow 1911 Online Encyclopedia He was born in London, England, in 1852, his family emigrating to the United States in 1858. He established himself in Chicago, where in the great fire of 1871 he lost everything he possessed. In 1875 he removed to New York, finding work on the Century (then Scribners) magazine. He immediately attracted attention by his unusual facility and his sympathetic interpretation of illustrations and pictures, and his publishers sent him abroad in 1883 to engrave a set of blocks after the old masters in the European galleries. These achieved for him a brilliant success. His reproductions of Italian, Dutch, Flemish and English pictures were published in book form with appreciative notes by the engraver himself. Though the advent of new mechanical processes had rendered wood engraving almost a lost art and left practically no demand for the work of such craftsmen, Mr Cole was thus enabled to continue his work, and became one of the foremost contemporary masters of wood engraving. He received a medal of the first class at the Paris Exhibition of 1900, and the only grand prize given for wood engraving at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St Louis, Missouri, in 1904. In for April 4, 1918 (), Ezra Pound had this to say about Cole: The New Age NA 22.23:456 Timothy Cole’s wood-cuts (Greatorex Galleries, Grafton Street) are an amazing display of technique. Why a man should spend a lifetime copying paintings by a process which should perhaps be called wood engraving, rather than wood-cutting, I do not know. It is as if he had early become entoiled in an argument, and never stopped demonstrating the capacities of his medium for interpreting pigment colour in terms of black dot and line. At this game he is proficient, wonderfully and marvellously proficient, whether he take or for a subject. Artists in other sorts of black and white could learn a great deal from Cole, if they chose to study his variety and invention in conveying so many colour qualities with a means apparently so little varied. Blacks whites, greys are here in every temper and for every colour equivalent. Hogarth Constable