Black Stallion

Paul Hambleton Landacre

The new Jake Wien catalogue raisonné of Landacre's work lists "Black Stallion" as entry #278. Black Stallion is one of four wood-engravings Landacre created in 1940. With this image, Landacre idealizes the raw strength and beauty of both the horse and the female body. Movement is suggested by the rearing of the stallion which lifts the woman off the ground and by the flowing manes of both. In writing a recommendation for Landacre for a Guggenheim Foundation grant, Merle Armitage declared: "It is my considered opinion that he is the greatest technician of his type who is working today. He is a complete master of the intricacies of wood-engraving, and his work from a technical side is impeccable."

Jake Wien comments on page 432 of the raisonné: "Black Stallion evokes a passage from the Robinson Jeffers poem 'Roan Stallion'. In the poem, a woman of Native American descent named 'California' longs for mystical union with a wild horse: "catching mane / and withers with all contracture / And the strength of her lithe body, leaped, clung hard, and was / mounted" on the back of a black stallion her husband won gambling...

Paul Landacre was born in July 1893 in Columbus, Ohio and attended Ohio State University until he was suddenly crippled by a debilitating illness. In 1916, he moved to Chula Vista, California to convalesce and he found solace in drawing the landscape and purchased his first linoleum blocks. He moved to Los Angeles in 1922 to attend classes at the Otis Art Institute. Woodengraving was not part of the curriculum so he was self-taught. He worked as a commercial illustrator, married Margaret McCreery in 1925, and devoted himself to woodengraving in 1926.

Landacre had his first solo exhibition at the Blanding Sloan Workshop Gallery in San Francisco in 1929 and an exhibition the following year at Zeitlin's bookshop in Los Angeles was the genesis of a long and rewarding relationship between the artist and Jake Zeitlin.

He taught at the University of Southern California, the Otis Art Institute and the Kahn Institute and was a member of and exhibited with the California Society of Etchers, the California Print Makers Society, the American Society of Wood Engravers, and the American Society of Etchers. Landacre became the pre-eminent American woodengraver, an honor bestowed on Rockwell Kent and Carl Zigrosser. His mastery of the medium led to his election to the National Academy of Design in 1946. Landacre illustrated award winning books of poems for Ward Ritchie and Alexander Dumas, A Gil Blas in California and his first solo book, California Hills and other Woodengravings of 1931 won Fifty Books of the Year.

Paul Landacre died in Los Angeles, California on June 1, 1963, soon after—and emotionally resulting from—the death of his wife who had been an essential working companion for 38 years, even helping the artist late in his life pull impressions from the formidable Washington Hand Press. In March 2006, with the growing appreciation of Landacre's artistic significance, their hillside home was declared a City of Los Angeles landmark (Historic Cultural Monument No. 839).