CHAPTER XII
THOMAS BEWICK AND HIS PUPILS
In the year 1775, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts offered a series of small money premiums for the best engravings on wood. These prizes were won by Thomas Hodgson, William Coleman, both then living in London, and Thomas Bewick, of Newcastle, who sent up for competition five engravings intended to illustrate a new edition of 'Gay's Fables.' It is of the last of these three—who received an award of seven guineas, which he immediately gave over to his mother—that we have now to write. He was born at Cherryburn, a farmhouse on the south bank of the Tyne, in the parish of Ovingham, about twelve miles from Newcastle, in August 1753. This we learn from an inscription now over the door of the 'byre,' or cowshed, which is still standing. His father was a farmer, who also rented a small coal-pit at Mickley, close by. After having received a fair education at local schools and at Ovingham parsonage, young Thomas, who had shown a great love of drawing, was in October 1767 apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, a general engraver, in St. Nicholas' Churchyard, Newcastle. Here the boy learned to cut diagrams in wood, engrave copper-plates for books, tradesmen's cards, etch ornament on sword-blades, and other work of the kind, much as Hogarth had done some fifty years before him; and, as luck would have it, his master received an
order to engrave a series of wood-blocks to illustrate a 'Treatise on Mensuration' written by Mr. Charles Hutton, a schoolmaster in Newcastle—afterwards Dr. Hutton, a Fellow of the Royal Society. This work was issued in fifty sixpenny numbers, and published in a quarto volume in 1770. It was on this book that Thomas Bewick trained his 'prentice hand in the art in which he was afterwards to become so famous.
At the end of his apprenticeship in 1774, he worked with his old master for a short time at a guinea a week; then he went to live for a time at Cherryburn, and in 1776, with three guineas sewed in his waist-band, he walked to Edinburgh, Glasgow, and northwards to the Highlands, always staying at farm-houses on the road. He returned to Newcastle in a Leith sloop, and, after working till he had earned sufficient money, took a berth in a collier for London, where he arrived in October and soon found several Newcastle friends. But London life did not suit this child of the country-side. 'I would rather be herding sheep on Mickley bank top,' he writes to a friend, 'than remain in London, although for so doing I was to be made Premier of England.'
Soon after his return to Newcastle he joined his old master in partnership, and took his younger brother, John, as an apprentice, and for eight years the brothers made a weekly visit to Cherryburn, often fishing by the way. In the year 1785, their mother, father, and eldest sister all died, and in the following year Thomas Bewick married Isabella Elliot, of Ovingham, one of the companions of his childhood. He was at that time living in the 'fine, low, old-fashioned house'—with a long garden behind it, in which he cultivated roses—formerly occupied by Dr. Hutton; and going daily to work in the old house overlooking St. Nicholas' Churchyard.
We have previously said that the early wood-engravings were cut with a knife, held like a pen and drawn towards the craftsman, on 'planks' of the soft wood of the pear or
apple-tree, or some similar tree. It is believed that Bewick was the first who used the wood of the box-tree, which is very hard, and who made his drawings on the butt-ends of the blocks, and cut his lines with the graver pushed from him. He brought into practice what is known as the 'white line' in wood-engraving; that is, he produced his effects more by means of many white lines wide apart to give an appearance of lightness, and by giving closer lines to produce a grey effect, as in our cut of 'The Yellowhammer.' He gave up the old method of obtaining 'colour,' as it is termed, by means of cross-hatching, and used a much simpler and more expeditious way of giving depth of shadow by leaving solid masses of the block, which of course printed black—and he constantly adopted the plan of lowering the wood in the background, and such parts of the block as were required to be printed lightly.
