Torr Antiques & Decorative Arts

Description

A beautiful original 1927 etching entitled “The New Pony” by George Soper. It is signed in pencil and numbered 7 from an edition of 75.
It is framed in a gilt frame which is in good condition, and mounted behind a plain cream mount. The title and date are in pencil on the reverse.

Dimensions:
Frame - 53 x 45.5 cm
Mount window - 30 x 20 cm ( the image size is slightly smaller)

Biography: George Soper RI (1870-1942) began his career as an illustrator at the turn of the twentieth century and established a reputation as a painter and, especially, a printmaker of a wide range of rural subjects.
The son of a horticultural sundriesman, George Soper was born on 2 May 1870 in South Hornsey, Middlesex and educated at a boarding school in Ramsgate. Resident in Stoke Newington from 1885, he became an apprentice to printer and stationer, George Sydney Waterlow, and worked alongside Charles Robinson. After a period of two years in the 20th Middlesex Artists' Volunteers (1894-6), he began work as a periodical illustrator with contributions to Robinson's Golden Sunbeams. After his marriage in 1897, he and his family moved first to Enfield and then to Harmer Green, near Welwyn in Hertfordshire, where he built the house that was later known as Wildings. His elder daughter, Eva, was born in 1901, four years before the younger prodigy, Eileen Soper.
In 1908, George Soper illustrated The Water Babies, the first of a number of classic gift books for Headley Brothers. His contributions to these volumes reveal his awareness of a wide range of illustrators from Randolph Caldecott to Arthur Rackham. In turning to work as a painter and printmaker, he continued to draw on his strengths as an illustrator in order to convey the maximum amount of information, especially that regarding the activities of the rural environment. He had exhibited paintings since 1890 (at the Royal Academy), and in 1913 showed his first print (at the Royal Scottish Academy). He studied printmaking under Sir Frank Short at the Royal College of Art (1916-20) and worked extensively as a printmaker during the print boom of the twenties. He was elected an associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers in 1918, and became a full member two years later. He died in August 1942.