Harbour of Flushing

From 1914-1920 Wadsworth was the leading printmaker of the Vorticist movement, the first consciously revolutionary movement in British art reflecting the Futurist and Cubist revolutions on the Continent. This print relates to the Gallery's Wyndham Lewis watercolour 'Figure composition (Man and woman with two bulldogs)' 1912-1913 and looks forward to the experimental linocuts of the Grosvenor School, represented in the collection by Claude Flight and Sybil Andrews, and their Australian derivations.

Most of Wadsworth's woodcuts are undated and unsigned and he never published them in editions. They exist in small numbers and it seems that he never printed more than 20 impressions of any woodcut. The present impression is the one reproduced in the recent catalogue raisonné by Jeremy Greenwood. It represents the harbour of Vlissinghen (known as Flushing) which Wadsworth visited during a tour of the Netherlands with his wife in 1914. Flushing is on the Dutch bank of the Westerschelde, the channel that leads from Antwerp to the North Sea.