(Study of tropical fruit tree)

 

William Seltzer Rice

  1873 - 1963 (biography)

c. 1925  

white line color woodcut 

8 1/4 x 7 1/8" image size 

unsigned proof 

not stated; presumed under 15, each uniquely printed. 

 

 

soft cream laid 

 

 

22342 

$1,800.00 

A beautiful example of the white line (Provincetown) method of woodcut done around 1925, an unsigned, uniquely printed proof, printed from a single block. William S. Rice’s colleague Cora Boone had learned the single-block woodcut technique from Blanche Lazzell in Provincetown around 1920 and taught it to other artists and teachers at Arts & Crafts in Oakland, California, including William Seltzer Rice. Rice did a number of strong color woodcuts of floral subjects, many using the white-line method. Because of the process, each impression would vary. His editions were usually under 5 impressions, never more than 15. This proof was never signed and is from the collection of a close relative. William S. Rice was born in Manheim, Pennsylvania. After completing studies at the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art and the Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, a job offer brought him to California in 1900. At the age of twenty-seven, he accepted the position as Supervisor of Art in the Stockton Public Schools; a position he held until 1910. That same year, he moved to the Bay Area where, for the next thirty years, Rice taught in Alameda and Oakland, as well as at the University of California Extension and the California College of Arts and Crafts where he earned his BFA in 1929. During the 1915 Panama Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco, Rice had a chance to study and absorb the techniques of the Japanese woodcuts that he was to incorporate into his own working knowledge of the medium. In 1918, the first major exhibition of his color woodcuts hung at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. Though he gained national recognition for his printmaking, Rice embodied the Craftsman spirit, painting with watercolor and oil, and working in ceramics, hammered copper, and woodworking. He authored three books on the subject of block printing, including ‘Block Prints and How to Make Them’, and penned articles on naturalist subjects for Sunse