Coltsfoot
Can I see it?
Not on view at present
Where is “Coltsfoot” now? Collection: Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minneapolis. Not on view at present. Checked September 29, 2026.
Minneapolis, United States
It belongs to the collection, but is not on display at present.
- Checked
- In this state since
- Source
- The museum
About the work
Ivy Anne Ellis was born in Birmingham, England, an excellent place for a woodcut artist. Among English cities, it most fully embraced William Morris’s Arts and Crafts Movement, which, starting in the 1860s, called for a return to traditional handcraft to counter the alienating effects of the Industrial Revolution. Locally, the place to learn craft skills was the Birmingham School of Art, where Ellis went to school.
Her mastery of handcraft is evident in the sparkling woodcut Coltsfoot (the flower gets its name from its leaves, which look like a colt’s foot). To capture this native plant, Ellis first had to separate each element by color, then carve and ink a wooden block for each color. Then she printed the blocks together to form the image, like a puzzle. The white area is the plain paper showing through.
Read on
The very fine lines show the influence of Bernard Sleigh (1872-1954), her wood engraving teacher. He had chosen Ellis, then age 16, as his assistant when he fell during a blackout during World War I and injured his hand. Thus began a long collaboration that sometimes involved his passion, fairies. Sleigh believed in them fervently. In 1917 Ellis and Sleigh produced their famous 6-foot-long map of fairyland (an impression is at the Library of Congress). A fairy calendar followed. Looking at Coltsfoot, one can almost imagine fairies on this early-spring day knocking about this patch of flowers and watching the seeds float away.
Minneapolis Institute of Art
Details
- Accession number
- 2018.43.11
In the catalog
Sources
- Minneapolis Institute of Art
- Image: Minneapolis Institute of Art — © Minneapolis Institute of Art
