in 1753. He passed his boyhood in rude country life and received scanty
schooling. At fourteen he was bound apprentice to the Newcastle
engraver, Ralph Beilby; nine years later he went to seek his fortune in
London, where he impatiently endured city life for less than a year; in
the summer of 1777 he returned to his old master, with whom he went into
partnership. Some preliminary training in book-illustration of the rude
sort then in vogue was necessary to reveal his powers to himself; he
received a premium from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, which
had shown some interest in wood-engraving; and after farther minor work
he began, in 1785, to engrave the first block for his British
Quadrupeds, which, with his British Birds, although his other cuts are
numbered by thousands, is the principal monument of his genius. When he
took the graver in his hand he found the art extinct as a fine art; at
most only large coarse prints were manufactured. Besides his great
service to the art in introducing the white line he substituted boxwood
for the pear or other soft wood of the earlier blocks, and he engraved
across the grain instead of with it, or “the plank way of the wood,” as
he called it; he also began the practice of lowering the surface of the
block in places where less color was desired, so that less pressure
would come upon those parts in printing (a device which Aldegrever is
believed to have resorted to in some of his works), and he used the
dabber instead of the inking-roller.
[Illustration: Fig. 61.--The Peacock. From Bewick’s “British Birds.”]
[Illustration: FIG. 62.--The Frightened Mother. From Bewick’s “British
Quadrupeds.”]
[Illustration: FIG. 63.--The Solitary Cormorant. From Bewick’s “British
Birds.”]
[Illustration: FIG. 64.--The Snow Cottage.]
[Illustration: FIG. 65.--Birth-place of Bewick. His last vignette,
portraying his own funeral.]
By such means he was truly, as Ruskin says, “a reformer”--Ruskin adds,
“as stout as Holbein, or Botticelli, or Luther, or Savonarola,” and this
is also true within limits. But if in relation to his art, and in answer
to the tests required of him, his reforming spirit proved itself
vigorous, independent, persistent in conviction, and faithful in
practice, his natural endowment in other ways was so far inferior to
those of the great Reformers named as to place him in a different order
of men. He had not a spark of the philosophic spirit of Holbein, and but
a faint glimmer of Holbein’s dramatic insight. He was not endowed with
the romantic imagination, the deep reflective power, the broad
intellectual and moral sympathy of Dürer. There is no need to magnify
his genius, for it was great and valuable by its own right. He was,
primarily, an observer of nature, and he copied natural facts with
straightforward veracity; he delineated animal life with marvellous
spirit; he knew the value of the texture of a bird’s feather (Fig. 61)
as no one before ever realized it. He was open also to the influence
which nature exerts over the emotions, and he rendered the sentiment of
the landscape as few engravers have been able to do. His hearty spirit
responded to country sights (Fig. 62), and he portrayed the humorous
with zest and pleasure, as well as the cheerful and the melancholy with
truth and feeling; his humor is sometimes indelicate, but it is
faithful; usually it is the humor of a situation which strikes him,
seldom the higher humor which appears in such cuts as the superstitious
dog. He is open to pathos, too, but here it is not the higher order of
pathos far-reaching into the bases of life and emotion--in this cut
(Fig. 64), for example, one fancies his heart is nearly altogether with
the uncared-for animal, and takes not much thought of the deserted
hearth. With this veracity, sensitiveness, heartiness, there is also an
unbending virtue--a little like preaching sometimes, with its gallows in
the background--but sturdy and homely; not rising into any eloquent
homily, but with indignation for the boys drowning a cat or the man
beating his overdriven horse.
As an artist he knows, like Holbein, the method of great art. His
economy of labor, his simplicity, justness, and sureness of stroke show
the master’s hand. There was no waste in his work, no ineffective effort
after impossible results, no meaningless lines. For these excellences of
method and of character he has been often praised, especially because he
developed his talents under very unfavorable conditions; but perhaps no
words would have been sweeter to him than those which Charlotte Brontë
wrote, sincerely out of her own experience without doubt, for he himself
said he was led to his task by “the hope of administering to the
pleasure and amusement of youth.” Charlotte Brontë, speaking through the
lips of Jane Eyre of the pleasure she took as a child in looking through
Bewick’s books, writes thus:
“I returned to my book--Bewick’s History of British Birds, the
letterpress whereof I cared little for, generally speaking; and yet
there were certain introductory pages that, child as I was, I could not
pass quite as a blank: they were those which treat of the haunts of
sea-fowl; of ‘the solitary rocks and promontories’ by them only
inhabited; of the coast of Norway, studded with isles from its southern
extremity, the Lindeness, or Naze, to the North Cape--
‘Where the Northern Ocean, in vast whirls,
Boils round the naked, melancholy isles
Of farthest Thule, and the Atlantic surge
Pours in among the stormy Hebrides.’
[Illustration: FIG. 66.--The Broken Boat. From Bewick’s “British
Birds.“]
[Illustration: FIG. 67.--The Church-yard. From Bewick’s “British
Birds.“]
Nor could I pass unnoticed the suggestion of the black shores of
Lapland, Siberia, Spitzbergen, Nova Zembla, Iceland, Greenland. * * * Of
these death-white realms I formed an idea of my own--shadowy, like all
the half-comprehended notions that float dim through children’s brains,
but strangely impressive. The words in these introductory pages
connected themselves with the succeeding vignettes, and gave
significance to the rock standing up alone in a sea of billow and spray;
to the broken boat (Fig. 66) stranded on a desolate coast; to the cold
and ghastly moon glancing through bars of cloud at a wreck just sinking.
I cannot tell what sentiment haunted the quiet, solitary church-yard
(Fig. 67), with its inscribed head-stone, its gate, its two trees, its
low horizon, girdled by a broken wall, and its newly risen crescent
attesting the hour of even-tide. The two ships becalmed on a torpid sea
I believed to be marine phantoms. The fiend pinning down the thief’s
pack behind him I passed over quickly: it was an object of terror. So
was the black, horned thing, seated aloof on a rock, surveying a distant
crowd surrounding a gallows. Each picture told a story--mysterious often
to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever
profoundly interesting. * * * With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy;
happy at least in my way.”
Bewick published the first edition of the British Quadrupeds in 1790,
the first edition of the first volume of the British Birds in 1797, and
of the second volume in 1804; all these became popular, and were several
times republished with additional cuts. His other works were very
numerous, but, as a whole, they are of inferior value. Both in the
volumes which have been mentioned and in his later work he received much
aid from his pupils, who designed and engraved, subject to his
correction and approval, many illustrations which are ascribed to him.
In his own work, notwithstanding his great excellence, he was by no
means perfect. In delineating rocks and the bark of trees, especially,
he fails; in drawing he sometimes makes errors, particularly when what
he represents was not subject to direct and frequent observation; in the
knowledge of line-arrangement, too, he is less masterly than some of his
successors, and, in this respect, his work is characterized by
effectiveness and spirit rather than by finish. Yet, when these
deductions have been made from his merit, so much remains as to render
him, without doubt, the most distinguished modern engraver in wood.
[Illustration: FIG. 68.--The Sheep-fold. By Blake. From Virgil’s
Pastorals.]
[Illustration: FIG. 69.--The Mark of Storm. By Blake. From Virgil’s
Pastorals.]
Before Bewick’s death, in 1828, another English genius, William Blake
(1758-1827), greater as an artist than as an engraver, produced a series
of woodcuts (Fig. 68) which is remarkable for vigor and originality.
They were published in a reprint of Ambrose Philips’s Imitation of
Virgil’s First Eclogue, in Dr. Thornton’s curious edition of Virgil’s
Pastorals which appeared in 1820. One of them (Fig. 69) represents a
landscape swept by violent wind. The idea of autumnal tempest has seldom
been so strikingly and forcibly embodied as in the old gnarled oak
straining with laboring limbs, the hedge-rows blown like
indistinguishable glimmering dust, the keen light of the crescent moon
shining through the driving storm upon the rows of laid corn and over
the verge of the distant hill. Contemporary engravers said the series
was inartistic and worthless, and an uneducated eye can easily discover
faults in it; imaginative genius of the highest order is expressed in
it, nevertheless, and from this the series derives its value. Blake
never made a new trial of the art.
The revival of wood-engraving was not confined to England. At the end of
the eighteenth century Prussia founded a chair at Berlin for teaching
the art, and made the Ungers, father and son, professors of it; but,
although they contributed to the progress of wood-engraving in Germany,
no real success was obtained until the time of their successor, Gubitz.
In France, too, the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry
began to offer prizes for the best wood-engraving as early as 1805; but
some years passed before any contestants, who practised the true art,
appeared. The publisher Didot deserves much of the credit for reviving
French wood-engraving, because he employed Gubitz, and called to Paris
the English engravers who really founded the modern French school. The
efforts of societies or individuals, however, do not explain the rise of
the art in our time. Wood-engraving merely shared in the renewal of life
which took place at the end of the last century, and so profoundly
affected literature, art, and politics. The barren classical taste
disappeared in what is known as the return to nature, the intellectual
life of the people was stimulated to extraordinary activity,
civilization suffered rapid and important modifications, and every human
pursuit and interest received an impulse or a blow. Wood-engraving felt
the influence of the change, and came into demand with the other cheap
pictorial arts to satisfy popular needs; the interest of the publishers,
the improvements in the processes of printing, and the example of
Bewick and his pupils especially contributed to bring the old art again
into use, and it continued to be practised because its value in
democratic civilization was immediately recognized.
[Illustration: FIG. 70.--The Cave of Despair. By Branston. From Savage’s
“Hints on Decorative Printing.”]
England was naturally the country where wood-engraving most flourished.
The pupils of Bewick, particularly Charlton Nesbit and Luke Clennell,
practised it with great merit, the former with a better knowledge of
line-arrangement than Bewick, and the latter with extraordinary artistic
feeling. The field, however, was not left wholly to those who had
learned the art from Bewick. Robert Branston was, like Bewick, a
self-taught wood-engraver; unlike Bewick, who was never trammelled by
traditions, and was thus able to work out his own methods in his own way
by the light of his own genius, Branston (Fig. 70), who had served an
apprenticeship in engraving on copperplate, and had mastered the art of
incising and arranging lines proper to that material, came to
wood-engraving with all the traditions of copperplate-engraving firmly
fixed in his mind and hand, and he founded a school which began where
the art had left off at the time of its decline--in the imitation of the
methods of engraving on copper. It is true that Branston sometimes
admitted white line where he thought it would be effective, but he
relied on black line for the most part. The wrong step thus taken led to
the next. Engravers on copper began to draw designs on the block for
wood-engravers to cut out. John Thurston, the most distinguished of
these, drew thus for John Thompson, who, however, did not follow the
lines with the servility of the engravers of the sixteenth century, but
modified them as he engraved, changed the direction and character of the
lines, and occasionally introduced white line. In the same way
Clennell, who also engraved after John Thurston’s drawing, modified it,
particularly in the disposal of the lights and shadows, and thus
improved it by his own artistic powers. Merely in engraving simple lines
Clennell’s artistic feeling placed him in a higher rank than even an
engraver of the power of John Thompson, as may be seen in the cuts which
these two men made after Stothard’s drawings in an edition of Rogers’s
Poems (Fig. 71, 72); in this volume Clennell has given an effect which
Thompson could not give. Branston’s engraving, in the same way, shows
the craftsman’s skill and knowledge, but it lacks the artistic quality
of the rival school of Nesbit and Clennell. The imitation of the manner
of copperplate, which Branston introduced, became common, and was
developed in the work of Orrin Smith and William Harvey, in which
wood-engraving lost its distinctive virtues. This school, nevertheless,
was popular, and its engravings were used to illustrate important works
to which for a long time copperplate-engraving alone had been considered
equal; thus wood-engraving once more encroached upon its rival’s ground.
[Illustration: FIG. 71.--Vignette from “Rogers’s Poems.” London, 1827.]
[Illustration: FIG. 72.--Vignette from “Rogers’s Poems.” London, 1827.]
Meanwhile the great illustrated magazines and papers, to which
wood-engraving owes so much of its encouragement, sprang up, and with
them the necessity for rapid work, and the temptation to be satisfied
with what satisfied the public taste. Cruikshank and Seymour prepared
the way for the designers, Leech, Gilbert, Tenniel, and the Dalziels,
the latter engravers themselves, and carelessness in engraving
accompanied carelessness in drawing; but from the latter charge
Tenniel’s designs must be excepted. These artists were inferior in
natural endowment to even the lesser artists of the sixteenth century,
and their work was made worse by the negligent rendering of their
engravers, who were not characterized either by the fidelity of the old
craftsmen, or the skill and knowledge of Thompson, or the artistic sense
of Clennell, but were merely inefficient workmen employed to cut lines
drawn for them as rapidly as possible. Mr. Linton made an attempt to
introduce the practice of rendering artists’ drawings by lines conceived
and arranged by the engraver himself; but the current was too strongly
set in another direction, and the engraver kept his old position of
mechanic employed to clear out the designers’ lines. The work which was
produced by this method in great quantities was in the mass not valuable
either for the art shown in the design or for the skill of the engraver,
but derived its interest and popularity from qualities which have little
connection with fine art. No great works were produced; and it is only
here and there that separate prints of value are to be found, among
which those by Edmund Evans in Birket Foster’s edition of Cowper’s Task
deserve to be mentioned.
[Illustration: FIG. 73.--Death as a Friend.]
Upon the Continent the development of wood-engraving was by no means so
great as in England, but some excellent work has been done by the pupils
of Thompson, who went to Paris by Didot’s invitation; these men, of
whom MM. Best and Leloir were the most distinguished, together with MM.
Brevière, Porret, and Lavoignat, produced some cuts of considerable
value both in book-illustration and in the art magazines. In Germany,
too, wood-engraving counts some good workmen among its following, but
the German woodcuts, of which the two (Figs. 73, 74) here given are
favorable examples, remain inferior for the most part to either the
English or French.
[Illustration: FIG. 74.--Death as a Throttler.]
Wood-engraving, however, has been practised in our time less as a fine
art than as a useful art; and if little that is valuable for artistic
worth has been executed by engravers since the days of Nesbit, Clennell,
and Thompson, the application of wood-engraving for merely useful
purposes has been of the greatest service. It has become a most
powerful instrument of popular education; it imparts the largest share
of the visual knowledge which the people have of the things they have
not directly seen; its utility as a means of instruction by its
representation of the objects with which science deals, and the
mechanical contrivances and processes which science employs, and also as
a means of influence in caricature and of simple popular amusement, is
incalculable; and, notwithstanding its low level in art, there can be no
doubt that it frequently assists the exercise of the popular
imagination, and sometimes generates in the better-endowed minds among
the people a real sympathy with the higher products of art and an
appreciation of them. These utilities, indeed, so overbalance its value
simply as a fine art as to give it a distinctive character, when its
practice now is compared with that of any previous time; as, formerly,
it reflected the aspects of changing civilization, now it reflects the
peculiar character of our time, and shows how great has been the gain in
the popular hold upon the material comforts of life and upon
intelligence, and how great has been the loss in the community’s
appreciation of purely artistic results. This is especially true of the
earlier American practice of the art, which seldom resulted in any work
of artistic value.
[Illustration: FIG. 75.--The Creation. Engraved by J. F. Adams.]
[Illustration: FIG. 76.--The Deluge. Engraved by J. F. Adams.]
The history of wood-engraving in America, until recent years, is
comparatively insignificant. In art, as in literature, the first
generation of the Republic followed the English tradition almost
slavishly; the engravers, indeed, showed hardly any individuality, and
left no work of permanent value. During Colonial times some very rude
apprentice-work on metal had been produced; but the first certain
engraving in wood bears date of 1794, and was from the hand of Dr.
Alexander Anderson (1775-1870), a physician by profession, but with a
natural bent toward the art, which he had played at from boyhood, and
finally made the principal business of his life. The sight of some of
Bewick’s early work had determined him to employ wood as a material in
place of the type-metal on which he had previously engraved in relief,
and the example of Bewick taught him to use white line. At that time,
and for many years afterward, the art was applied mainly to the
production of cuts for advertisements, labels, and the like, as a
servant of trade; its use for illustration simply was confined almost
wholly to juvenile books. The engravers who at the beginning of the
century introduced the art in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore,
and New Haven were few, and, for the most part, self-taught; usually
they merely copied English cuts, and thus they reflected in their
poorer work the manner of successive English schools; but at least they
kept the art alive, and handed it on through their pupils. Dr. Anderson
was the best of them; yet, although he was free and bold in his handling
of white line, and once or twice attained an excellence that proved him
a worthy pupil of Bewick, he left nothing of enduring interest, and the
work of his fellows met with even swifter forgetfulness. Woodcuts of
really high value were not produced in America until Joseph Alexander
Adams (b. 1803), one of the young engravers encouraged by Dr. Anderson,
began to do his best work (Figs. 75, 76), about 1834, and applied his
talents to the illustration of the Bible, published by the Harper
Brothers in 1843, with which wood-engraving may be properly said to have
begun its great career in this country. This volume was embellished by
sixteen hundred cuts, executed under the supervision of Mr. Adams, and
plainly exhibits the capacities and limitations of the art at that time.
Other illustrated books followed this from the same press, and from that
of the Putnams; the cuts in the papers and magazines, established during
the second quarter of the century, became more numerous, and the
attention paid by the American Tract Society to the engravings in its
various publications had great influence in encouraging and improving
the art. The work of this first half-century, however, as a whole, does
not deserve any great praise; in judging it, the inexperience of the
engravers and the difficulties of printing must be remembered; but in
its inferior portions it is marked by feebleness and coarseness, and in
its better portion by a hardness and stiffness of line, a lack of
variety and gradation in tone and tint, and a defect in vivacity and
finish. There are here and there exceptional cuts to which these
strictures would not apply, but the body of the work is vitiated either
through an incomplete control of his materials by the engraver, or
through an evil imitation of copperplate-drawing by the designer. Where
the engraver was also the designer the work is usually of higher value.
[Illustration: FIG. 77.--Butterflies. Engraved by F. S. King.]
With the second half of the century began that expansion of the press,
that increase in the volume and improvement in the quality of the
reading provided for the public through newspapers and magazines, which
has been one of the most striking and important results of democratic
institutions. The Harpers’ Monthly Magazine was established in 1850, and
it was followed within a decade by several illustrated periodicals;
during the civil war there was naturally a slackening in this
development, but, upon its close, numerous new illustrated weekly or
monthly publications began their longer or shorter career, among them
those issued by the Scribners, which were to have so important a bearing
on the history of wood-engraving. The art naturally received a great
impetus from this demand upon its resources; it rapidly advanced; and
being encouraged farther by the popularity of the new and beautifully
illustrated gift-books of the Boston and New York publishers, it has
taken the leading place in the artistic interests of the country.
[Illustration: FIG. 78.--Engraved by F. S. King.]