Compiled by dealer Elizabeth Harvey-Lee, it features a wide selection of Blaker’s etchings as well as many from his collection.
The study in question depicts Diana de Vere Cole (b.1941), whom Blaker met and befriended while she was studying at Brighton Art School. She is shown here wearing a dress belonging to the first wife of artist Augustus John (1878-1961), whose illegitimate and last surviving son Diana married in 1962. The etching is offered in the catalogue for £300, while an aquatint she completed of an owl is available for £200.
Harvey-Lee was among Blaker’s other art world contacts, and he once wrote an introduction to one of her earlier catalogues. She visited the artist’s widow in Ramsgate two weeks before lockdown and spent the following months preparing the catalogue.
It is titled While there is copper there is hope after a saying of RT Cowern, one of Blaker’s teachers at Brighton School of Art when he studied there in the 1940s-50s. Available for order from the dealer’s website, it also includes works by Whistler, Eric Gill, Renoir and Vuillard.
