Baldridge, Cyrus LeRoy (1889 - 1977 )
Cyrus Leroy Baldridge was an illustrator, artist, author and adventurer. At the age of 10, he became the youngest student at Frank Holme’s Chicago School of Illustration. In 1907, he was accepted to University of Chicago, where he continued his art education and graduated in 1911. Following graduation Baldridge worked as an illustrator and war correspondent. He settled in upstate New York around 1920, where worked as an illustrator and writer. Yet, his life was never short on adventure. Baldridge and his wife traveled the world – from Africa to India, and to Japan in the 1920s. Though Japanese artwork had a profound influence on his style as an illustrator, Baldridge also began to explore the woodblock print medium. During his time in Japan, he met the famed Shin Hanga print publisher Watanabe Shozaburo in Tokyo. Baldridge produced a number of woodblock prints for Watanabe during the 1920s and 1930s. In 1952, he and his wife retired to Santa Fe, where he fed his taste for adventure hiking the mountains of New Mexico.
Japonisme | Impressionist and Post-impressionist Prints
Arriving in Europe as early as the 1830s, Japanese woodblock prints reverberated throughout the West. The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle set a fire in the hearts of European art collectors. By the 1870s, ukiyo-e prints reached the height of fashion, inciting a mania amongst art enthusiasts and inspiring the brightest minds in Western art. From Monet to Degas, Van Gogh to Toulouse-Lautrec, Western artists were forever changed by the compositional daring and unfaltering beauty of ukiyo-e. Such artistic fervor for all things Japanese gave rise to Japonisme, an artistic movement that provided a fresh visual language for a changing world.
