Nowhere were the conditions of illustration more deplorable than in England when Bewick, and Stothard, and Blake appeared upon the scene. There was a decided revolution when Gay's "Fables," the "General History of Quadrupeds," "British Land and Water Birds," all illustrated by Bewick's wood-engravings, were issued. Bewick, as has been said before, and cannot be repeated too often, was an artist who happened to engrave his designs on wood, instead of drawing them on paper or painting them on canvas; he was not a mere wood-engraver, interpreting other men's work which he only half understood or appreciated; and this is a distinction to be borne in mind. Bewick, virtually, did for himself what the new mechanical processes almost succeed in doing for contemporary illustrators. For him were none of the difficulties and miseries of the draughtsman who made his designs on the block, saw them ruthlessly ruined by an incompetent, or unscrupulous engraver, and then had but the print, which could not prove the reproduction to be the wretched caricature of the original that it really was. This was the chief reason for Bewick's success. He invented wood-engraving; he showed what good work ought to be; in a word, he revolutionized the art of illustration in England.[6]
Whatever may have brought about this sudden activity and revival of excellence, Bewick's books were far from being its sole outcome. "The Songs of Innocence and Experience," the "Inventions to the Book of Job," Blair's "Grave," Mary Wollstonecraft's stories, with Blake's illustrations, belong to the same period, though this was but a chance. The illustrations were mostly done on metal, and Blake had his own peculiar methods. He belongs to no special time or group.
BY STOTHARD. FROM AN ORIGINAL DRAWING IN THE POSSESSION OF THE AUTHOR.
FROM A PAINTING BY WILSON.
Wood-engraving by the Linnells.
FROM A PAINTING BY RUBENS.
Wood-engraving by the Linnells.
Book after book with Stothard's illustrations, the "Pilgrim's Progress," Richardson's novels, tales now forgotten, above all, Rogers' "Poems," with the engravings by Clennell, helped to prove the possibilities of good illustration, and emphasize, by force of contrast, the inappropriateness of work done by some of the most popular Academicians of the day for Boydell's "Shakespeare," immortalized by Thackeray as that "black and ghastly gallery of murky Opies, glum Northcotes, straddling Fuselis."
