The Production of a Baxter Colour Print – Fred W Seeley

Fred Seeley worked at J M Kronheim and Co and then Norbury Natio after their takeover of Kronheim in 1915 – (Please see the story of Kronheim & Co – Link 1 below). He wrote a number of articles in various magazines in the 1908 – 1920’s period including some contentious articles saying that Baxter prints COULD still be produced after a number of people had claimed it was a lost art.

In 1909 Kronheim, presumably supervised by Seeley, reproduced some of their early prints by the Baxter process, presumably to prove these people wrong. These can be found on Calendars for that year and in their book “Colour and Progressive Sheets - Baxter Colour Prints” showing the stages of adding the colours to a Baxter process print.

Seeley is said to have worked with people that knew Baxter and that printed by his process. We do not know his age but he was still working, so presumably under 65, for Norbury Natzio in 1923. So in theory, if he had worked for Kronheim for more than 45 years, he could have printed by Baxter’s process himself before 1878. Either way he must have been a skilled printer and proved that the knowledge and the skills were still available in 1909.

In a series of articles in the Baxter Times between September 1924 and March 1925 he wrote full details about how the prints were produced. These articles were reproduced in the New Baxter Society Newsletters between December 1987 and June 1991 and then reproduced into this 19 page booklet by the New Baxter Society in May 2000.

Greatly interesting but also quite heavy going although a practical printer would easily understand more. A man with excellent knowledge on the subject has commented that some aspects, like the alignment of the colour blocks which although fully explained in the articles, could possibly be only really understood by practical application.

A couple of images from the 1920’s articles are for some reason not reproduced in this booklet