“Originality, Simplicity, Freedom of Expression, and above all Sincerity, with a clean-cut block, are characteristics of a good wood block print.”
—Blanche LazzellThough many of her fellow Provincetown Printers eventually left the area for other artistic pursuits, Blanche Lazzell remained a stronghold of the village’s printmaking community, spending almost every summer and many winters in Provincetown for more than forty years, during which she carved over 138 blocks and created over 550 white-line woodcut impressions, between 1916 and 1956.1 In her quaint wharf studio, decorated with flowers and vines, she continued to entertain visitors, display her work, and demonstrate the techniques of the white-line woodcut process. Her private lessons on the method would attract numerous students, many of whom would work in the medium throughout their careers. Through Lazzell, the white-line woodcut continued to be passed down from generation to generation as artists and tourists alike passed through Provincetown. It was in her little seaside studio, overlooking scenes such as this, that almost singlehandedly Lazzell championed the white-line woodcut technique past the glory days of the Provincetown Printers, aiding in its legacy as an inventive form of American modernism.
