William Lee Hankey

154, Jan. 1906) A. L. Baldry commented that "He is in his water-colours an absolute purist; he paints entirely with transparent pigments, and never has recourse to opaque colours; his brushwork is broad and confident – free, on the one hand, from affectation of showy cleverness, and, on the other, from niggling minuteness or over-elaboration; and he does not insist, as is the fashion with many present-day painters, upon lowness of tone."

His French paintings include land- and seascapes such as "The Harbour at Étaples"[6] and the distant view of the town in Auckland Art Gallery[7] and figure studies like "Mother and Child"[8] and "The Goose Girl".

[9] But it was Hankey's black and white and coloured etchings of the people of Étaples, several developed from these paintings,[10] which gained him a reputation as 'one of the most gifted of the figurative printmakers working in original drypoint during the first thirty years of the 20th century'.

[11] One that is particularly striking for its stylistic presentation was "The Refugees", his contribution to raising awareness of the consequences for ordinary people of the German invasion of France and Belgium in 1914.

In Britain he had been associated with the Newlyn School, a group of English artists based in the titular village in Cornwall who were themselves influenced by the romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Keats.