31. Edward Julius Detmold
(1883-1957)

The Cock

(click on image to print)
Detmold, The Cock

The Cock

Etching and foul biting on zinc, 1900, 214 x 277 mm., Dodgson 56. Superb impression in brown-black on simili-japon with large margins, signed in pencil. This is an early work by Detmold (he was seventeen) done well before the suicide of his twin brother and collaborator. It has the strength and straightforwardness of the work done then by both brothers, individually and together, rather than the attractive, but rather wispy, Orientalist style that Edward developed later in his life. The Detmolds were a unique phenomenon in British etching: highly precocious (they exhibited at the Royal Academy at the age of thirteen), essentially self taught and self directed, totally preoccupied with natural history and strongly influenced by Japonisme. Their early – but totally mature -- prints look like those of no other British artist, and if this one shows a passing resemblance to Bracquemond’s Vieux Coq, that is more a matter of subject and coincidence than direct influence. The edition size here is unknown, but almost all early prints by the Detmolds are rare and almost unobtainable today.