Bewick worked on an entirely different principle to that of any of his predecessors. He gave up imitating the black line of the metal engraver and used the white line to gain his effects. No doubt this is the true theory of wood engraving. Bewick took several apprentices, many of whom afterwards became famous, but, curiously enough, none of them kept long to their master’s style. In modern days Timothy Cole has revived the use of the white line; his work is most excellent and learned in every way. I have never found a wrong line in it, and if Bewick had not shown the way, and therefore put Mr. Cole in the position of a follower, the latter would have ranked as the greatest master who has ever worked on wood on the white line principle.
William Harvey was one of Bewick’s apprentices; he did an immense quantity of work, which is always excellent. He soon gave up Bewick’s “white line,” and most of his wood engravings are like line engravings on copper. The engraving of the Death of Dentatus, after B. R. Haydon, is Harvey’s most celebrated piece of work. It shows every appearance and characteristic of a line engraving, but the black marks are in intaglio. It is a tour de force, and cannot but be considered as a waste of energy. It was engraved upon several blocks clamped together by an iron band, and prints of it can now and then be picked up at printsellers for two or three shillings, as it is seldom recognised as a wood engraving.
Luke Clennell also worked with and helped Bewick, and much of his early work is like that of his master. But, like Harvey, Clennell soon evolved a style of his own. He cut some of the beautiful little cuts, after Stothard, in Rogers’ “Pleasures of Memory.” No doubt the Bewick training had much influence for good over Clennell’s manner.
Charlton Nesbit followed Bewick closely for a time, and then, like his fellow apprentices, he worked out his own style. His work is very good and true, and he was particularly successful in his illustrations to Northcote’s Fables and Rinaldo and Armida.
John Thompson was quite one of our greatest wood engravers. He worked well into the nineteenth century, and did an immense quantity of work. He engraved a celebrated set of illustrations to the Vicar of Wakefield, after Mulready, and was also very successful with those to Tasso’s La Gerusalemme Liberata in 1826. His work is quite different from that of Bewick.
The nineteenth century in England was rich in numbers of excellent wood engravers, and a list of their names alone would be a long one. A proof of the high estimation in which the work of many of these artists was held is to be found in the fact that their services as engravers were freely sought by continental publishers of finely illustrated books.
J. B. Jackson, who introduced tone colour-printing, actually worked with J. M. Papillon in France in the eighteenth century. Then there were the Landells, Gray, Whimper, Wright, Folkard, and Green, and, quite late in the century, J. W. Whymper, Horace Harral, James Cooper, W. J. Linton, the Dalziels, and Swain. These two last have signed an immense quantity of excellent work, but they were large firms, and the greater part of their work was done by their workmen. Many of the artists of this time did most excellent work as designers for wood engravings, especially Sir John Millais, D. G. Rossetti, Fred. Walker, Fred. Sandys, Lord Leighton, Birket Foster, Sir E. Burne-Jones, G. du Maurier, and Cecil Lawson.
Fig. 69.—Knife for engraving on soft wood.
J. M. Papillon, who worked during the earlier half of the eighteenth century, belonged to a French family of wood engravers, and wrote a treatise about wood-cutting with the knife, which is of great interest. His work is small and excellent. Papillon makes mention of a foreigner who worked with him and used the end of the wood to work upon, and that he used a graver. This foreigner is supposed to have been the English artist J. B. Jackson, who was eminent here not only as an engraver, but also as the pioneer in the matter of colour-printing from wood blocks.