Southwold, Suffolk

A largely self-taught artist, whose work received more praise in France than in his own country during his lifetime, Edwards was a pioneer of plein-air painting in Britain. After initially studying and working in the law, in his late thirties Edwin Edwards realised that his calling lay elsewhere. Encouraged by his wife Ruth, Edwards undertook a sketching trip in the Austrian Tyrol in 1859, which cemented his commitment to become an artist. In a drawing class, around 1860, he met the painter Mathew White Ridley who had studied in Paris and in turn introduced him to artists Alphonse Legros and James Abbott McNeill Whistler. Legros, a French painter and etcher, who moved permanently to England in 1863, executed a number of etchings on copper plates while staying at the Edwardses’ home in Sunbury-on-Thames in early 1861. Fascinated by this medium, Edwards made his first etching, Under the chestnuts (also known as Burgate chestnuts), 1861.

In 1863, Edwards also took up the study of landscape painting and from that year until his death in 1879, he exhibited at least one painting annually at the Royal Academy, London.¹Algernon Graves, The Royal Academy of Arts. A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their work from its foundation in 1769 to 1904. Vol. III. Eadie to Harraden, Henry Graves and Co. and George Bell and Sons, London, 1905, pp. 24–5. In 1866 the French critic and friend of Edwards, Philippe Burty, complained of how

Mr. Edwards, who has only been painting for a few years … enjoys the privilege of having his paintings so badly hung that one can hardly appreciate them.²‘M. Edwards, qui ne peint que depuis peu d’années … jouit du privilège d’être si mal accroché qu’on ne peut guère juger de ses toiles’, in Philippe Burty, ‘L’Exhibition de la Royal-Academy’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, year 8, vol. 21, 1 Jul. 1866, p. 85.

Disappointment with the RA’s treatment of his work may have led Edwards to become a founding member of the Hogarth Club in London in the 1870s, which was an ‘alternate, semi-private exhibition space for those dissatisfied with how their works were hung at the Royal Academy’.³The Met, ‘William Harcourt Hooper, An Artists’ Soirée – A Sketch at the Hogarth Club from “The Graphic”, p. 489’, <www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/777712>; accessed 29 Jan. 2019.

Edwards was most active in the 1860s and 1870s, however, as a printmaker. In 1868, the publisher Holloway issued a portfolio of fifty of Edwards’s views of the English countryside and coast. The Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1868) praised the manner in which

All these etching plates have been made directly from nature, and the artist has sometimes put so much care, so much consciousness, in the reproduction of the smallest details, that it almost seems that he worked from a photograph.⁴‘Toutes ces planches sont faites d’après nature, et l’artiste a parfois mis tant de soin, tant de conscience, dans la reproduction des moindres détails, qu’il semblerait presque qu’il a travaillé d’après une photographie’, A. W., ‘Les Eaux-fortes de M. Edwin Edwards’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, year 10, vol. 25, 1 Sep. 1868, pp. 275–6.

Edwards’s Inns and Outs: Old Inns of England, 1873–81, was a picturesque portfolio of 135 etchings that remained incomplete on his death in 1879. Altogether, Edwards created some 370 etchings. He was also active in organising the ‘Black and White’ exhibitions held at London’s Dudley Gallery from 1872 to 1881.⁵Martin Hopkinson, ‘The Dudley Gallery’s “Black and White” exhibitions 1872–1881’, Print Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 4, Dec. 2012, pp. 379–95.

Edwards’s reputation suffered, though, from his status as a largely self-taught artist. The French critic Edmond Duranty observed, however, in a memorial article in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts (1879) that Edwards was ‘one of those fervent devotees of that art which has modern life as its objective’, and that he wanted his own art practice to raise ‘a kind of geographic and ethnographic monument to England’. His studies of the English coast are indeed not just topographical recordings, but examinations of the way his fellow Britons lived in and with their geography. Suffolk was a favoured location for the artist, Duranty noting that ‘he would have finished a complete and amazing monograph on Suffolk County, had death not interrupted him’.⁶‘Edwards fut un des chauds partisans de l’art dont l’objectif est la vie moderne … il voulait élever une sorte de monument géographique et ethnographique à l’Angleterre … il aurait terminé une complète et étonnante monographie du comté de Suffolk, si la mort ne l’avait interrompu’, in Edmond Duranty, ‘Edwin Edwards. Peintre et Aquafortiste’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, year 21, vol. 20, 1 Nov. 1879, pp. 440–1.

Art writer Philippe Burty, recalled how when documenting the Cornish coastline Edwards worked from

a solid armchair, tied with ropes, lowered with a hoist half-way down the cliff. There, for long hours, kissed by the wind, touched by the wings of sea birds … lulled by the multiple singing of these great waves that come from several thousand leagues to collide against the insensitive granite, cooked by the sun, intoxicated by his dream, merry with the drunkenness of work as dreadful for the brain as all the other drunkenness, Edwards painted and drew.⁷‘Il s’asseyait dans un fauteuil solide, qu’on nouait avec des cordes et qu’on dérapait à l’aide d’un palan à mi-hauteur de la falaise. Là, pendant de longues heures, baisé par le vent, effleuré par les ailes des oiseaux de mer … bercé par le chant multiple de ces grandes vagues qui viennent de plusieurs milliers de lieues se heurter contre le granit insensible, cuit par le soleil, enivré par son rêve, grisé par l’ivresse du travail aussi redoutable pour le cerveau que toutes les autres ivresses, Edwards peignait et surtout établissait des dessins à la plume’, in Philippe Burty, ‘Edwin Edwards. Peintre de paysages et aquafortiste’, L’Art, vol. 19, 1879, pp. 174–5.

The freshness and vividness – what was described at the time as the virtually photographic realism – of Edwards’s etched and painted landscapes owed much to a special glasshouse that he had constructed. Working within this glass box, he was able to paint ‘outdoors’ all year round, even in the snowy depths of winter (rugged up like a polar explorer, according to Duranty), while Mrs Edwards constantly wiped the condensation from the transparent walls.⁸Duranty, p. 441.

Southwold is a small town in Suffolk on the south-east coast of Britain, some 150 kilometres north-east of London. Edwards’s painting shows the North Cliff at Southwold, but does not feature the prominent lighthouse that still graces the site, which was not constructed until 1889.⁹Southwold Museum and Historical Society, ‘The sea’, <www.southwoldmuseum.org/thesea_lighthouse.htm>, accessed 25 Jan. 2019.

Ted Gott, Senior Curator, International Art, National Gallery of Victoria