A History of Wood-Engraving

by George Edward Woodberry

In England, where the art had not been really practised until Holbein’s day, and had not reached any degree of excellence, some improvement was made during the sixteenth century in designs for titlepages, portraits, and separate cuts, particularly in the publications of John Day. In the next century, during the civil wars, woodcuts of extreme rudeness were inserted in the pamphlets of the hour, and in the latter half of the century some interest was still felt in the art. In the eighteenth century two engravers, Edward Kirkall (c. 1690-1750) and John Baptist Jackson (1701-1754?), worked both in the ordinary manner and in chiaroscuro, but both were forced to seek support on the Continent, where, although the practice of wood-engraving as a fine art had long been extinct, the tradition of it as a mechanical process by which cheap ornaments for books were produced was still preserved. In France the engravers Pierre Le Sueur (1636-1710) and Jean Papillon (1660-1710) executed cuts of this sort which are without intrinsic value, and in the next generation their sons produced works which remained at the same low level of excellence. In Italy an artist, named Lucchesini, engraved some cuts in the latter part of the century, but they are without merit. In Germany the art was equally neglected, and the woodcuts in German books of the eighteenth century are entirely worthless.

The explanation of this rapid and universal decline of wood-engraving is to be found in general causes. The great artistic movement, which both in the North and the South had sprung out of mediæval religious life, and had gathered force and spirit as the minds of men grew in strength and independence, and as the compass of their interests expanded, which had been so transformed by the study of antiquity that in the South it seemed to be almost wholly due to that single influence, and in the North to have suffered an essential change in its spirit and standards, had at last spent itself. The intellectual movement which had gone along with it side by side, gaining vigor from the spread of literature, the debates of the Reformation, and the exercise of the mind upon the various and novel objects of interest in that age of great discoveries and inventions, had resulted in a century of religious warfare, aggravated by the violence of dynastic quarrels which arose in consequence of the new political organization of Europe. In this conflict the arts were lost; they all became feeble, and wood-engraving under the most favorable conditions would have shared in this general degradation. But for its utter extinction as a fine art there were more special causes. The popular literature with which it had flourished had been brought into contempt by Cervantes and Ariosto; the use of wood-engraving for coarse caricature also reflected discredit upon it; but the principal cause of its decadence lay in the taste of the age, which had ceased to prize art as a means of simple and beautiful design, but valued it rather as a means of complicated and delicate ornament, so that excessive attention was given to form divorced from meaning, and, as always happens in such a case, artificiality resulted. The wood-engravers attempted to satisfy this taste by seeking the refinement which copperplate-engraving obtained with greater ease and success, and they failed in the effort; in other words, wood-engraving yielded to copperplate-engraving because the taste of the age forced it to abandon its own province, and to contend with its rival on ground where its peculiar powers were ineffective.

Here the history of wood-engraving in the old manner, as a means of reproducing pen-and-ink sketches in fac-simile, came to an end. It has been seen how valuable it had proved both as an agent of civilization and as a mode of art; how serviceable it had been in the popularization of literature and of art, and what influence it had exerted in the practical questions of the day as a weapon of satire; how faithfully it had reflected the characteristics of successive periods of civilization, and how perfectly, in response to the touch of the artist, it had embodied his imagination and expressed his thought. It had run a great career; its career seemed to have closed; but, when at the end of the eighteenth century the movement toward the civilization of the people again began with vigor and spirit, a new life was opened to it, because it is essentially a democratic art—a career in which it has already reached a scope of influence that makes its usefulness far greater than in the earlier time, and has given promise of a degree of excellence which, though in design it may not equal Holbein’s power, may yet result in valuable artistic work.

VIII.
MODERN WOOD-ENGRAVING.

The use of white line not only affected the art by making it more easy to practise, but also involved a change in the mode of drawing. Formerly the effects were given by the designers’ lines, now they were given by the engravers’ lines; in other words, the old workman followed the designer’s drawing, the modern workman draws himself with his graver. By the old method the design was reproduced by keeping the same line-arrangement that the artist employed; by the new method the design is not thus reproduced, but is interpreted by a line-arrangement first conceived by the engraver. In the earlier period the design had to be a drawing in line for the engraver to cut out and reproduce by leaving the original lines in relief; now the design may be a washed sketch, the tints of which the engraver reproduces by cutting lines of his own in intaglio. The change required the modern engraver to understand how to arrange white lines so as to obtain artistic effects; he thus becomes an artist in proportion to his knowledge and skill in such arrangement. It is clear that, no matter how much mechanical skill, firmness, justness and delicacy of touch were requisite in the older manner of following carefully and precisely the lines already drawn upon the block, still the engraver was precluded from exercising any original artistic power he might have; he could appreciate the artistic value of the design before him, and, like Hans Lützelburger, show his appreciation by his fidelity in rendering it, but the lines were not his own. The new method of reproducing artists’ work by means of lines first conceived and arranged by the engraver requires, besides skill of hand, qualities of mind—perception and origination, and the judgment that results from cultivated taste. This is what is meant when it is said that the true art of wood-engraving is not a hundred years old, for it is only within that time that the value of a print has been due to the engraver’s capacity for thought and his artistic skill in line-arrangement, as well as to the designer’s genius. The use of white line as a mechanical mode of obtaining color was not unknown in the sixteenth century, and the artistic value of white line was definitely felt in early French and Italian wood-engraving; but the possibilities of development were not seen, and no such development took place. The step in advance was taken by Bewick, who thus disclosed the opportunities which wood-engraving offers its craftsmen for the exhibition of high artistic qualities. The white line revolutionized the art, and this is the essential meaning there is in calling Bewick the father of wood-engraving.

Of course the older method has not ceased to be practised; artists have drawn upon the block, and their lines have been reproduced; sometimes a part of the lines are thus drawn, particularly the leading lines, and the minor portions of the sketch have been indicated by the designer by washes and left to be rendered by the engraver in his own lines. Old or modern wood-engraving as a mode of reproducing designs in fac-simile is valuable, but none of the artistic merit they may possess is due to the engraver; while the artistic merit shown in the new style of wood-engraving, as an art of design in white line, belongs wholly to the engraver. It results from this that white line is the peculiar province of wood-engraving, considered as an art; but that does not exclude it from being practised in its old manner as a mode of copying and multiplying ordinary design which it is able to reproduce.

Thomas Bewick, the founder of the modern art, was born near Newcastle 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.