Ramsgate Art cheating a bit of a ramble about local art.

What with Ramsgate’s Summer Squall arts festival being on this weekend, Tissot’s blue plaque being unveiled on Pizza Express and the Turner Contemporary shortening its hours – I believe they are soon to ban photography too – although this may be temporary and to do Rodin’s or Emin’s rude bits, I though I should do some sort of art post.

As some of you may remember I did a certain amount of research about where Tissot did his Ramsgate paintings, mainly to make sure the blue plaque went in the right place, see http://thanetonline.blogspot.com/search/label/James%20Tissot

What with it being unveiled on Sunday and all of the art experts being about for the art festival I thought I ought to go over my work and check it for errors, bunging Tissot and Ramsgate into Google and clicking on the image tab the picture above came up, if you click on it and enlarge it you will see that looking out of the window the lighthouse is on the wrong pier.

This is a mirror image of the print

Looking at the other pictures, that Tissot did of Ramsgate this raises some interesting questions, the source of the top image is The British Museum and I am wondering if the print they bought, they say about 100 years ago is a fake.

It isn’t unusual for prints to come out as mirror images as essentially what the artist is doing is scratching a sketch onto the printing plate, however a lot of artists overcome this mirror image problem drawing the picture on paper first and then transferring the image, with soap or something onto the plate before scratching it on. This means that the eventual printed image is the right way out.

 As you can see from this print and painting, this is how it was normally done.

The British Museum bought this print in 1923 and it is supposed to be a drypoint engraved by Tissot however it doesn’t look quite right to me. But I keep coming back to the picture being back to front. Presumably a lot of people who knew Ramsgate would have bought the print and noticed it was a mirror image, Tissot was very professional all rather strange.   


I will ramble on about this if I get a chance.