Sissinghurst Castle Broadside

Medium: Polymer photogravure and letterpress
Paper Size: 9.25 x 13″
Paper: Somerset
Printed: 2018
Signed: Signed and numbered recto
Edition: 25

This broadside was entirely designed and hand printed by Keith Taylor. The image was printed in polymer photogravure in my studio and the letterpress text set in Garamond and Colonna typefaces and printed at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design on a Vandercook 219AB cylinder press.

The image was made in the orchard at Sissinghurst Castle and the text is an excerpt from the poem Sissinghurst by the English poet Vita Sackville-West. It was written about her beloved home in Kent, where she lived with her husband Harold Nicholson, the British politician and writer.

The history of the castle goes back to the middle ages and where, in 1305, King Edward I spent a night and in 1573 Queen Elizabeth I stayed for three days. Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicholson bought the run down Elizabethan mansion in 1930 and immediately began planting what was to become one of the most famous gardens in Britain.

They were both part of the Bloomsbury Group, a group of writers, poets, painters and artists that included Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (both post-impressionist painters) and the writers E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey as well as many others.

For shipping, prints are carefully and securely packed using recyclable materials and shipped with tracking.