Walter Hoyle Cambridge Postcard

In 1965–66, Hoyle produced The Cambridge Series: ten linocuts depicting the colleges of Cambridge, complete with a title page and a contents page hand-cut from cork lettering.  

This title page shows a view of King’s College – Hoyle noted in 1999 that  he ‘dropped turps on it’. The series was published by Editions Alecto, a young Cambridge-based firm founded in 1960 by two students, Michael Deakin and Paul Cornwall-Jones, who had originally hoped simply to earn extra money selling college prints to alumni. By the time Hoyle joined the project, Alecto had grown into a successful publisher, working alongside David Hockney, John Piper, Julian Trevelyan and Hoyle's friend Michael Rothenstein. 

Each print was hand-printed by Hoyle himself, in an edition of seventy-five, on his 1885 Harrild Albion press in the studio he had built at Great Saling. Sold individually and as a boxed set, the series proved hugely popular. Large in scale and confident in execution, the prints show the influence of Edward Bawden and John Piper but are above all a showcase for Hoyle's technical experimentation. In particular, Hoyle built dramatic skies from dense layering of roulette and knife marks, giving the print an unusually rich, worked surface.