Heartsease

Few American color woodcut pioneers could wrest soft petals from hard woodblocks as well as Margaret Patterson. She came of age in the very early years of the medium and made a specialty of garden flowers. Unusual for color woodcuts at the time, she did not outline her images, instead defining shapes by color alone. When inking this print, she rubbed the paper over her hand-cut wooden blocks so forcefully, she made indentations on the sheet, giving these pansies a three-dimensional quality.

Patterson was in the lineage of Arthur Wesley Dow, who introduced Japanese woodblock printing to America in the 1890s. She studied briefly with him in New York, but it was an artistic sisterhood that led her to color woodcut. She likely learned the technique from the American artist Ethel Mars, who in turn learned it from Dow’s student Edna Boies Hopkins.