J.J.Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia

J.J. Lankes (1884–1960) captured the spirit of agrarian America through his woodcuts. Active between the World Wars, he collaborated with poet Robert Frost and other writers to express an American vision of rural life centered on self-sufficiency and manual labor, apart from industrialization. His prints of barns, fields, and workers stand as a quiet record of a changing era.

As a documentary filmmaker, I was moved by Lankes’s vision and by his friendship with Robert Frost and Sherwood Anderson. With J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia, I aimed to explore how his art and his dialogue with Frost, Anderson and others framed an American understanding of work, place, and purpose.

J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia

Early Life and Artistic Awakening

Born on August 31, 1884, in Buffalo, New York, to a German-American working-class family, Lankes grew up in a city energized by the Erie Canal’s promise. After graduating as a junior engineer from the Buffalo Commercial and Electromechanical Institute in 1902, he worked as a draftsman, producing technical drawings for patents. A 1,000-mile canoe trip down the Mississippi in his early 20s sparked his artistic ambitions. By 1910, he was studying at the Art Students League of Buffalo under Canadian artist Ernest Fosbery. To support himself, he engraved designs on custom rifle stocks at a Buffalo firm.

In 1917, Lankes borrowed an engraving tool and carved his first woodcut on apple wood, launching a career inspired by Renaissance German engravers and a global woodcut revival. His early works explored the tension between rural traditions and encroaching industrial progress.

Championing the Agrarian Ideal

Lankes’s art was shaped by the radical ideas of the 1910s. Influenced by progressive voices advocating for a freer America, he briefly contributed to left-wing publications, some tied to the Communist Party, though his son later suggested this was overstated, emphasizing Lankes’s shift toward individualism. His woodcuts became a manifesto for the Agrarian Republic, celebrating rural workers and landscapes. His reinterpretation of Jean-François Millet’s Man with a Hoe transformed the socialist icon into a dignified symbol of American agrarian resilience.

The Enduring Dialogue with Robert Frost

In 1923, a woodcut in The Liberator captivated Robert Frost, sparking a lifelong friendship grounded in their shared vision of rural America. Frost saw Lankes’s prints—depicting rolling hills, rustic farms, and stoic laborers—as visual echoes of his poetry. Lankes often sketched at Frost’s South Shaftsbury, Vermont, farm while the poet spoke. Of his estimated 1,300 woodcuts, 125 were directly inspired by or created for Frost’s works, forming a seamless dialogue between text and image. Key collaborations include illustrations for Frost’s New Hampshire (1923).

J.J.Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia

Throughout the 1920s, Lankes forged creative partnerships with a vibrant circle of artists and writers, each amplifying his vision of a pre-industrial America. His collaboration with painter Charles Burchfield began in 1922 and deepened when they became neighbors in Gardenville, New York, by 1925. Burchfield sketched designs that Lankes meticulously carved into woodcuts, capturing the quiet beauty of small-town life or cosmic, nature-inspired themes—works like Carolina Village (1923) among their eleven joint creations—despite both men’s disinterest in organized religion. With writer Sherwood Anderson, Lankes found another kindred spirit. His illustrations for Anderson’s Perhaps Women (1931) brought to life the author’s belief that women could preserve human qualities lost to mechanization, most vividly in a woodcut of a woman on horseback leading a man on a mule. Visits to Anderson’s Appalachian cottage fueled Lankes’s imagination, yielding evocative prints of the Blue Ridge Mountains, later celebrated by Anderson in a 1931 Virginia Quarterly Review essay. In 1929, artist Rockwell Kent commissioned Lankes to carve 25 designs for an advertising campaign honoring traditional industries like logging. Sharing Lankes’s anti-industrial ethos, Kent provided sketches for the Doremus Series, now preserved at Plattsburgh State University, paying Lankes a flat fee for his skilled carving. Lankes also illustrated a novel by Rock Bradford, delving into racial tensions and the displacement of manual labor by industry—a recurring theme that resonated deeply with his agrarian ideals.

 J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker

In 1925, Lankes journeyed to Europe—Germany, Italy, France, and the Netherlands—to sketch scenes tied to his German heritage. Returning to America, he settled in Hilton Village, Virginia, a coastal town largely untouched by heavy industrialization. This move immersed him in a pre-industrial South, inspiring woodcuts that documented rustic landscapes and laborers. His Virginia Woodcuts (1930), a limited edition of 24 prints, crystallized this vision, capturing the region’s unspoiled essence.

The Final Blows of Progress

As magazines shifted away from illustration, commercial demand for woodcuts waned, dimming the revival Lankes had helped spark. His A Woodcut Manual (1932) became the first comprehensive guide to woodcutting in North America. In 1932, Robert Frost secured him a position as an art professor at Wells College in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he taught until 1940. Lankes found academic life uninspiring but completed works like Booklet of Woodcut Bookplate Designs (1940).

In 1943, he joined the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the precursor to NASA, as head of technical illustrating in Langley, Virginia, returning to his draftsman roots until 1950. During this time, he advanced his Pennsylvania Dutch Barn series (41 woodcuts, published in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects), which he considered his crowning achievement—though a planned book never materialized.

The Cold War’s anti-communist fervor led to Lankes’s dismissal from NACA, possibly due to his earlier left-leaning affiliations. In 1951, he retired to Durham, North Carolina. A stroke in 1959 impaired his movement and speech. In 1960, shortly before his death on April 22, Robert Frost visited him in a Chapel Hill nursing home. Their final exchange—“goddamn it all,” said Frost, echoed by Lankes—captured their shared frustration with a changing world.

Legacy

J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia

J.J. Lankes’s woodcuts preserve the soul of the Agrarian Republic, a vision of America rooted in simplicity and resilience. His art invites us to reflect: What can these stark, timeless images teach us about balancing progress with humanity? Explore Lankes’s work in collections like the Carnegie Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, or the newly donated Welford D. Taylor Collection at the University of Maryland Libraries (2025). For a cinematic deep dive, watch the 2019 documentary J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia by Eduardo Montes-Bradley. Share your thoughts in the comments.

Key Publications and Illustrations

• Virginia Woodcuts (1930) – Limited edition of rural scenes.

• A Woodcut Manual (1932) – First North American guide to woodcutting.

• Illustrations for Robert Frost’s New Hampshire (1923) and other poetry collections.

• Perhaps Women by Sherwood Anderson (1931).

• Booklet of Woodcut Bookplate Designs (1940).

• Wag-by-Wall by Beatrix Potter (1944).

Timeline of Key Events

Year	Event
1884	Born in Buffalo, NY (August 31).
1902	Graduates from Buffalo Commercial and Electromechanical Institute; begins as draftsman.
1910	Studies at Art Students League of Buffalo under Ernest Fosbery.
1914	Marries Edee Maria Bartlett.
1917	Creates first woodcut.
1923	Friendship with Robert Frost begins; illustrates New Hampshire.
1925	Moves to Hilton Village, Virginia; European sketching trip.
1930	Publishes Virginia Woodcuts.
1932	Publishes A Woodcut Manual; Frost helps secure Wells College position.
1933–1940	Teaches at Wells College.
1943–1950	Head of technical illustrating at NACA (Langley, VA).
1951	Retires to Durham, NC.
1959	Suffers debilitating stroke.
1960	Dies in Durham, NC (April 22).
2019	J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker in Virginia documentary premieres.
2025	Welford D. Taylor Collection donated to University of Maryland Libraries.

Further Reading:

•  Eduardo Montes-Bradley. J.J. Lankes: Yankee Printmaker, 30 min., 2019

• Taylor, Welford Dunaway. The Woodcut Art of J.J. Lankes (1994).

• Osburn, Burl N. A Descriptive Checklist of the Woodcut Bookplates of J.J. Lankes (1937).