Lanterns of Sarras, 1932

F.L. Griggs RA (1876 - 1938)

RA Collection: Art

In 1922 F.L. Griggs became one of the few printmaker Associates of the Royal Academy, sponsored by Frank Short. Griggs was elected Royal Academician on 10 November 1931 and soon afterwards began work on the etching which he would submit as his Diploma Work upon completion.



Griggs returned to a subject he had first worked on in 1916, a collection of towers called the Lanterns of Sarras. By February 1932 he was hard at work on the print, which occupied him for much of the year, and whose solemn religious feeling was a profession of his Catholic faith. It was a difficult plate to execute, particularly because Griggs was reusing a nineteenth-century copper plate, erasing the Oxford scene engraved upon it before beginning his etching. There were many vicissitudes in the execution of the print and Griggs at times almost abandoned it, but with the guidance of fellow-academician Sir Frank Short Griggs overcame these difficulties.

Lanterns of Sarras went through four states, of which this impression is from the last (of which there are forty-one impressions), printed in August 1932, before the plate was cancelled. The plate has been reduced but the image is larger, the bridge having been extended downwards into the area occupied by the poem ‘The Gothic Rose’ by Wilfred Rowland Childe in the previous state.

Despite his difficulties in executing the print Griggs was aware of its worth, writing while in the midst of the work that ‘I have the present comfort of producing what I believe to be my best plate’. Jerrold Northrop Moore, in his recent monograph F. Griggs: The Architecture of Dreams, considered it the culmination of the artist's work: ’Lanterns of Sarras was etched in his art’s life-blood. He would never approach its searing insight again’.