Original woodblock print, by listed Scottish artist and printmaker Angela Lemaire, created in 2008 in an edition of just 8 prints.

Titled "The Shepherds Leave" conceived as an illustration for "A Christmas Sequence" by Benjamin Britten (see full details below).

Signed and dated in pencil lower right margin, numbered 3/8 lower left, with titles lower centre. 

Woodblock printed in black ink with hand colouring in watercolours on handmade wove paper. The full sheet framed in a classic 'ebonised' finish print frame with conservation mount and backing. 

Print in excellent original condition, the sheet very clean (see photos). The frame with a couple of slight scratches, mount clean (see photos).

Block size 25.5cm x 38cm, frame size 46cm x 58.5cm. 

Come with our Certificate of Authenticity, guaranteed authentic and original.

Delivered ready to hang.

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Angela Lemaire is a printmaker, painter and writer who lives and works in Scotland. She was born in Buckinghamshire and went to the Lyçée Français de Londres and Wispers School in Sussex, then to PLC Pymble in Sydney Australia. Returning to Britain in 1962, she trained at Chelsea and Camberwell Schools of Art in London where she was taught relief printmaking by Michael Rothenstein. Lemaire is self-taught as a wood-engraver - the wood-engraver Frank Martin, who taught at Camberwell, gave her a box of wood-engraving tools which had belonged to a colleague of his who had died - with these tools she taught herself wood-engraving. She was by then already friends with the wood-engraver and letterer Michael Renton and had watched him at work. She decided she would work principally as a printmaker with both text and image.

Much of her printmaking has been applied to fine press books, her own artist books and projects, and commissions. She has exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions in both the UK and abroad. Her graphic work, prints, paintings, drawings and books can be found in both private and public collections internationally. Commissions have included engravings for Ian Hamilton Finlay, The Folio Society, and many others. There have been seven fine press books produced in collaboration with The Old Stile Press. These have included texts of her choosing, all with relief images. Her books and much of her artwork, writing and correspondences are archived in the National Library of Scotland.

A Christmas Sequence by Benjamin Britten, Chester Mystery Cycle, images by Angela Lemaire

Fifty years ago Benjamin Britten wrote Noye’s Fludde – an opera-for-all telling the story of Noah’s Ark with the main characters taken by adult opera singers alongside children playing animals, involving instrumentalists at all levels of ability and including hymns for all present to join in with. It was a tremendously popular work and is still widely performed.

In 1974 the head of Pimlico School in London, Kathleen Mitchell, asked Britten to write another such opera for performance at the school. The composer went to the same source, the Chester Mystery Cycle and selected scenes for a Christmas Sequence which would again afford opportunities for collaboration between professional musicians and schoolchildren.

Sadly, the second draft of this libretto has remained only as a typescript in the Britten-Pears Library because the composer died before any music had been written.

Dr Andrew Plant, until recently in charge of the Library, warmed to our idea of the work coming to life as a book filled with images as evocative as the music would have been. He writes an introduction to establish the story and then Angela Lemaire has cut magnificent woodblocks which capture a splendid sense of the medieval play, its presentation by contemporary children and a mystical rendering of the events surrounding the birth of Jesus. The scenes included involve the Salutation – which introduces Gabriel, Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and midwives who arrive for the birth; The Shepherds; the Magi; Herod and the Innocents and the knights who carry out the orders to kill. The language is wonderfully down to earth and designed to entertain in the market places of medieval Chester and the surrounding towns and retains that power. The woodcuts dance through every page.