Raoul Dufy: "The Band" 1949, Original Lithograph for "School Prints"

The School Prints Project seems like a modern fairy tale: in 1948, the smart and adventurous school director Brenda Rawnsley from London hired a small plane and flew to France. First she met Georges Braque there, then Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Fernand Léger and Raoul Dufy. The reason was that she wanted to win over some important painters from the École de Paris for her project of getting children in British schools interested in art by showing them original works of printmaking. She offered 100 British pounds to each artist for providing one lithographic work. Although some of these artists were already quite famous at the time, Brenda’s plan succeeded. In 1949, a total of six lithographs was created, of which 3000 prints were made each and given to schools in England. There, most of them were often tacked directly to the walls with drawing pins and thus unfortunately destroyed over the years.