Samuel Bryant Lang
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Samuel Bryant Lang was an early twentieth-century woodblock printmaker whose exact biography remains only partially documented. Born in London, England, there is scant information on the life of Sam Lang whose full name may be Samuel Lancaster Bryant and who was known to have lived in Medford, Oregon and Santa Barbara, California. According to an article published in 1929 in a local paper in Medford where he lived from ca. 1926, Lang was educated at English and French colleges, and he was highly influenced by Japanese woodblock prints which he studied for thirty years.
His deep engagement with the Japanese ukiyo-e tradition places him among a small circle of Western artists who adapted the multi-block, hand-printed woodcut technique to Western subject matter, often depicting lush foliage, coastal scenes, and gardens rendered with the flattened perspective and bold color blocks characteristic of that school. It seems plausible that Lang was an associate and possibly former student of the highly influential English woodblock printmaker and teacher, Frank Morley Fletcher, who he may have known in London and who was the director of the Santa Barbara School of Art from 1924 to 1930, situating Lang within an important lineage of Western color-woodblock practitioners active on the American West Coast in the 1920s and 1930s.
Lang's career was cut short by his death; he died following a stroke in Santa Barbara on November 21, 1937, a notice of his passing in the Medford paper citing another variation on his full name, Samuel Lankinshire Bryant. Because so few biographical records survive and his output appears to have been limited, surviving impressions of his work are scarce, making signed and dated examples of his prints notable finds for collectors of early American Japanese-influenced woodblock art.
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