Audley End, Essex, Antique Morris Woodblock Print, circa 1870

Late afternoon light falls across this antique print of Audley End, Essex, a color woodblock country house view from Morris's Picturesque Views of Seats, printed by Benjamin Fawcett circa 1870. The house is taken from well back across its park, so that the long Jacobean garden front reads as a pale silhouette of gables, turrets, cupolas and clustered chimneys against the sky.

A three-arched stone bridge with a balustraded parapet crosses a stretch of water in the middle distance, a mature tree fills the left edge, and a pale gravel path curves away to the right past shrubs and further trees. The sky is the most worked passage on the sheet, built from overlapping tones of soft gold, gray and pale blue, with low hills in blue-gray along the horizon behind the house. The water is darker olive-brown under the bridge and lighter and broken further out, reflecting sky and bank, and the layered color gives the distant house its atmospheric softness.

William Mackenzie of London published A Series of Picturesque Views of Seats of the Noblemen and Gentlemen of Great Britain and Ireland from the 1860s to the 1880s, edited by the Reverend Francis Orpen Morris (1810 to 1893), the clergyman and naturalist of History of British Birds fame; this plate is from an issue of circa 1870. Benjamin Fawcett (1808 to 1893) of Driffield, among the finest color woodblock printers of the Victorian period, printed each color from its own block in register; the color is printed rather than applied by hand.

This antique print of Audley End, Essex, is an original Victorian plate removed from the book, ready for framing, and a fine choice for owners and admirers of the house or collectors of English country house views. Margins are wide and untrimmed, with the title Audley End set in spaced capitals beneath the image.

This antique print is in good condition for its age. The paper shows light toning consistent with age, together with a few small spots in the margins, a faint mark near the lower left edge and a line of binding holes along the lower edge, where the plate was once bound into the book. Please review the images for further condition details.

This is an original antique print, not a modern reproduction. This item is sold unframed.