LIZETTE AND PIERRE

Hankey was born in Chester and initially started to work as a designer before attending art evening classes at Chester School of Science and Art.  His exceptional abilities did not go unnoticed and he garnered numerous awards for his work.  In 1893 he moved to London and studied at the National Art Training School (later the Royal College of Art) and continued to win wide acclaim, exhibiting widely. A versatile artist, Hankey possessed a natural talent for drawing and excelled in the use of watercolours, skilfully maintaining their luminosity, a quality which is also evident in his oil paintings.

Hankey travelled to France and it was there that he really flourished, he loved to depict the landscape and the daily lives of the French peasants, following the example of the Naturalist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage.  

In 1904 he started etching, quickly discovering and mastering his favoured technique of intaglio drypoint.  He became so skilled that within a few years he was in charge of the etching classes at Goldsmiths University in London. His etchings display technical virtuosity and are always poignant without being sentimental.  They predominantly focus on figure studies of rural Breton women and children.  

Hankey returned to England during the First World War and served with the Artists’ Rifles from 1915, during this time he continued to work and produced one of his most famous etchings ‘The Refugees’, based on his observations behind the front line at Étaples, skilfully capturing  the fear and anxiety of a fleeing family.

Although Hankey settled in London after the war, and spent time in Cornwall in Newlyn and St. Ives, his inspiration was mainly drawn from France and he continued to produce etchings of a rapidly disappearing rural life.  In 1921 the London dealership L. H. Lefevre & Son published a volume of his work ‘The Etched Work of W. Lee-Hankey RE from 1904-1920’ with 187 etchings.

Medium: Drypoint etching

Signed: Signed in pencil with the artist’s blindstamp

Size: 27 × 18cm