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FLOWER POWER: Lyons Ltd. Showcased in the Palo Alto Weekly
November 10, 2006
Prints of the Past
by Rebecca Wallace
The woman in the 17th century Belgian etching may be monied, but she’s hardly enviable. Her high, starched ruff must have made it hard to turn her head, and her hat has side panels that look like horse’s blinders. Call it fashion, call it restraints.
”This shows the restriction of a woman’s world,” Leila Lyons, co-founder of Lyons Ltd. Antique Prints, says, holding the Wenzel Hollar etching in her Palo Alto gallery. “Even the noblest of women were restricted in their vision of the world.”
But the current exhibit at Lyons, “500 Years of Women in Art,” doesn’t just focus on the grim checks and balances of long-ago life. Besides showing images of women, it also includes many prints made by pioneering women: groundbreaking artists, often with a scientific bent.
Interestingly, contrasting images often come from the same era. While Hollar’s noblewomen was sweltering in her ruff, the botanic artist Maria Sibylla Merian was forging ahead in her art and adventures. The German-born Merian published many engravings of plants and was also captivated by insects, especially their stages of life: larva, pupa, butterfly. Her fascination with metamorphosis was itself ground-breaking. According to an article about Merian on Wikipedia.org: “In her time, it was very unusual that someone would be genuinely interested in insects, which… were colloquially called ‘beasts of the devil.’ As a consequence of their reputation, the metamorphosis of these animals was largely unknown.”
Part of Merian’s work was a 1699 voyage from Amsterdam to Suriname in South America, where she drew hundreds of insects and plants. The Lyons exhibit includes prints rooted in this trip, combining insects with botanical studies. Caterpillars and butterflies crawl and alight on passion flower, papaya and other plants. The engravings are rich with detail, hand-colored by Merian and her sister with vegetable dyes, said Dana Conley Lyons, the gallery’s director and Leila Lyons’ daughter-in-law.
Overall, the prints on display range from 15th-century illuminated manuscripts to a World War I lithograph urging women to join the war effort. Printing methods include Japanese woodblock prints, early American stone lithography, and pochoir – a technique of applying color by hand to prints, using cutout stencils.
Many of the early works were done by men. Women artists were typically anonymous until after the Industrial Revolution, although many refugees from the French Revolution supported themselves by coloring prints, Leila Lyons said.
In the 1800s, more women began working in printing, many of them initially helping their husbands. Botanical artist Jane Webb Loudon, for instance, worked with her landscape designer/publisher husband, John, but became accepted as a horticulturalist in her own right.
She’s an interesting example because she combines science with a so-called “women’s touch,” Dana Conley Lyons says, pointing out the Loudon hand-colored lithographic prints in the gallery walls. The images of flowers are done with painstaking accuracy, their scientific names included. But Loudon also arranged several types of flowers into bouquets that were popular with women at the time, Lyons says.
Departing from science, the exhibit also includes fashion prints from the Art Deco movement during the early 20th century. These were often done by men and show women in roles they were expected to play: languidly reading or gazing into a mirror. Georges Barbier’s pochoir work “Fumée, Robe du Soir de Beer” shows the woman as a passionate romantic: She’s burning her memoirs with the help of a delicate candle. All throughout, the women are in stylish dress and make-up.
Images of people are part of why Leila Lyons enjoys antique prints so much. “It’s like stepping back in time and seeing what was important at that time,” she said.
Lyons co-founded the gallery in 1968 with her late husband, Charles R. Lyons. Inspiration came from the Piranesi engraving of Roman ruins they received as a wedding present. “We fell in love with prints, and as we traveled, we expanded our interest in subjects and time periods,” she said.
Lyons Ltd. was based in San Francisco for 22 years. It then moved to the Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, and then came to Town & Country. Lyons estimates it now has 600,000 prints in its inventory, with clients spread across the country. The gallery team holds regular lectures on collecting, often trying to show younger clients how to work antique prints into a home with contemporary design. Lyons also recently published a book, “Collecting Prints,” as part of House of Collectibles’ “Instant Expert” series.
The current show’s focus on women is close to Lyons’ heart because she and Dana Conley Lyons work to give young women opportunities in their business. Several female Stanford students have been interns at Lyons. One, Amanda Rinder, is now a full-time gallery associate.
While Dana notes that the majority of art-history students at Stanford are women, Leila believes that women – even nowadays – are still not taken as seriously in the business of running a gallery as men are.
“Women seem to be ‘dabbling’ in art,” she said. “People would say to me at dinner parties, ‘My dear, do you still have that cute little business?’”
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