Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta

RARE BOOK. FIRST EDITION. Limited copies available.

This unique volume, the first book to be published by Seagull Books, offers a collection of early Calcutta woodprints covering a wide range—mythological, social scenes, book illustrations and advertising—with four essays by scholars and artists on different aspects of this popular urban art tradition, shortlived but intensely vital, and recording the evolution of a culture that was a mix of the Western and Eastern. The four essays cover the social and technological history of printmaking by woodblock in Bengal, the traditions that these urban folk artists drew on, the aesthetic values that they created and left behind for their successors, and the iconography of the woodprints. They often touch upon the connections that linked the woodcut prints and the better-known Kalighat pats, a parallel tradition.

In the prints reproduced, the popular imagination of a growing city takes a wide area of human experience in its stride on its own indigenous and uninhibitedly eclectic terms. They project an image of Calcutta never before revealed in such graphic candour and richness, with a whole history of manners, mores, traditional beliefs and conflicts, often with humour and invariably with a sense of down-to-earth realism.

With each existing copy a first edition, Woodcut Prints of Nineteenth Century Calcutta is a definite collector’s item among all of Seagull’s published items over the past four decades.