Eric Slater was an artist who produced more than 30 colour woodcuts between 1926 and the outbreak of the Second World War.  Many depict scenes near his home in Seaford, East Sussex, where he lived for most of his adult life.

A frail, only child, Eric Slater was born in 1896 and spent his early years with his parents, grandmother and two servants in a large house in Hampstead, London.  His father, Thomas, a successful silversmith and partner in the firm Aldwinkle and Slater, died when Eric was eight.

Eric moved with his mother and grandmother to Sussex where he studied at The Hastings School of Art.  He was probably taught how to make woodcuts by a neighbour called Arthur Rigden Read (1879-1955) who had been to Japan to study oriental woodcut techniques used by European printmakers from the 1890s.
 

A new book about the artist Eric Slater, who made woodcut prints of Sussex landscapes, has been produced in a collaboration between a writer and a local gallery.

Robin Gibson spoke to James Trollope, author of Slater's Sussex - The Colour Woodcuts of Eric Slater, and Julie Brown of the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne, where the book was launched.

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From his studio at his house in Seaford, Slater established an international reputation exhibiting in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Austria and South Africa, but the death of his mother in 1938, the outbreak of war and changing fashions ended his career.

Eric Slater died in obscurity in 1963.  A solicitor’s notice in the Sussex Gazette made no mention of his art.  He is buried in a shared grave at Seaford. 

2013 is the 50th anniversary of Slater's death.