Forbidden Fruit

William Seltzer Rice

Rice did a number of strong color woodcuts of floral and faunal subjects, some 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 added hand coloring to brighten the composition of this large color woodcut, which was done around 1925. A dynamic, color-saturated piece that injects elegance to the lively subjects.

The white Sulfer Crested Cockatoo and colorful Scarlet Macaw were neighbors of the artist, William S. Rice. His daughter, Roberta Treseder, recalled that the macaw was named Lolita and she lived next door while the cockatoo lived around the block. Rice would frequently visit the birds to make sketches of each of them, and for this piece he combined his two feathered friends in one image. Lolita sits on her ring perch as the cockatoo watches on from the other side of a bowl filled with pears, oranges, and grapes. Both birds eye the "forbidden fruit" on the table as Lolita prepares to enjoy some grapes - or perhaps she is offering some to her visitor in a humorous reference to the tale of Adam and Eve.

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.