Tulips

William Seltzer Rice

Tulips is illustrated on page 177 in William S. Rice: Art & Life by Ellen Treseder Sexauer. Rice was an avid naturalist and captured the splendors of California in photography, etching, watercolor, pastel, and woodcut. He created a stunning body of floral still life woodcuts of which Tulips is one.

As an amateur botanist Rice wrote a column as such for Sunset magazine. He did a number of strong color woodcuts of floral subjects, many using the white-line method developed in Provincetown, Mass. His editions were usually under 5 impressions, never more than 15 and examples of the colors will vary from impression to impression.

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 San Francisco 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: How to Make Them, and penned articles on naturalist subjects for Sunset Magazine.