Edmund Blampied
Edmund Blampied (30 March 1886 – 26 August 1966) was one of the most eminent artists to come from the Channel Islands, yet he received no formal training in art until he was 15 years old. He was noted mostly for his etchings and drypoints published at the height of the print boom in the 1920s during the etching revival, but was also a lithographer, caricaturist, cartoonist, book illustrator and artist in oils, watercolours, silhouettes and bronze. Early years Edmund Blampied (in Jèrriais Edmond Bliampid) was born on a farm in the Parish of Saint Martin, Jersey in the Channel Islands on 30 March 1886, five days after the death of his father, John Blampied. He was the last of four boys and was brought up by his mother, Elizabeth, a dressmaker and shopkeeper mostly in the Parish of Trinity, Jersey. His first language was Jèrriais. He finished parochial school at the age of 14 and went to work in the office of the town architect in Saint Helier, the capital of the island. Some of his pen and ink sketches of an agricultural show in 1901 were noticed by Mlle Marie Josephine Klintz, a woman who ran a local private art school. She gave the young Blampied his first formal lessons in art and introduced him to watercolours. His caricatures of politicians such as the Constable of St. Helier, Philippe Baudains, during a local election brought Blampied to the attention of a businessman named Saumerez James Nicolle who offered to sponsor him at art school in London, provided he tried to get a scholarship. Art school In January 1903, aged 16 years old and barely able to speak English, Blampied left Jersey to study at the Lambeth School of Art, where he was taught by Philip Connard R.A. and Thomas McKeggie. After taking a test and submitting some drawings, in May 1904 Blampied won a £20 London County Council (LCC) Scholarship for two years to continue his studies at any LCC art school. Later that year he was selected by the head of the Art School to work part-time on the staff of a national newspaper, The Daily Chronicle, which enabled him to earn some extra money. His first published illustrations appeared in The Daily Chronicle on 13 January 1905. In September 1905 Blampied transferred from the Lambeth School of Art to the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography at Bolt Court for the final year of his scholarship. There he became friends with the artists and illustrators Salomon van Abbe, John Nicolson and Robert Charles Peter. It is believed that, after finishing full-time studies at Bolt Court in the summer of 1906, he continued to work at The Daily Chronicle and then perhaps at other newspapers while studying in the evenings at Bolt Court, though very little is known about this period in his life. Etching Blampied’s earliest etchings are dated December 1909, suggesting that he did not begin to learn this technique until the academic