Low Status of the Woodcut
Bewick's training could not have been less promising. Apprenticed to Ralph Beilby at the age of fourteen, he says of his master:[7]
... The work-place was filled with the coarsest kind of steel-stamps, pipe moulds, bottle moulds, brass clock faces, door plates, coffin plates, bookbinders letters and stamps, steel, silver and gold seals, mourning rings, &c. He also undertook the engraving of arms, crests and cyphers, on silver, and every kind of job from the silversmiths; also engraving bills of exchange, bank notes, invoices, account heads, and cards.... The higher department of engraving, such as landscapes or historical plates, I dare say, was hardly thought of by my master....
A little engraving on wood was also done, but Bewick tells us that his master was uncomfortable in this field and almost always turned it over to him. His training, obviously, was of a rough and ready sort, based upon serviceable but routine engraving on metal. There was no study of drawing, composition, or any of the refinements that could be learned from a master who had a knowledge of art. Whatever Bewick had of the finer points of drawing and design he must have picked up by himself.
[6] William Chatto, and John Jackson, A treatise on wood engraving, London, 1861 (1st ed. 1839), pp. 496-498.
[7] Thomas Bewick, Memoir of Thomas Bewick, New York, 1925 (1st ed. London, 1862), pp. 50, 51.
When he completed his apprenticeship in 1774 at the age of twenty-one, the art of engraving and cutting on wood was just beginning to show signs of life after more than a century and a half of occupying the lowest position in the graphic arts. Since it could not produce a full gamut of tones in the gray register, which could be managed brilliantly by the copper plate media—line engraving, etching, mezzotint and aquatint—it was confined to ruder and less exacting uses, such as ornamental headbands and tailpieces for printers and as illustrations for cheap popular broadsides. When good illustrations were needed in books and periodicals, copper plate work was almost invariably used, despite the fact that it was more costly, was much slower in execution and printing, and had to be bound in with text in a separate operation. But while the Society of Arts had begun to offer prizes for engraving or cutting on wood (Bewick received such a prize in 1775) the medium was still moribund. Dobson[8] described its status as follows:
During the earlier part of the eighteenth century engraving on wood can scarcely be said to have flourished in England. It existed—so much may be admitted—but it existed without recognition or importance. In the useful little État des Arts en Angleterre, published in 1755 by Roquet the enameller,—a treatise so catholic in its scope that it included both cookery and medicine,—there is no reference to the art of wood-engraving. In the Artist's Assistant, to take another book which might be expected to afford some information, even in the fifth edition of 1788, the subject finds no record, even though engraving on metal, etching, mezzotinto-scraping—to say nothing of "painting on silks, sattins, etc." are treated with sufficient detail. Turning from these authorities to the actual woodcuts of the period, it must be admitted that the survey is not encouraging.
