Another advantage of wood-engraving is that it forces upon the workman some respect for the thing in itself and makes it impossible for him to place a merely relative value upon the art of drawing. Mere likeness to nature is much more easily achieved by drawing, [pg 12] whether in line or wash, upon paper. The graver and the wood both of them make their own demands and make mere imitation of nature almost impossible. The workman is compelled to consider his work primarily as an engraving and only secondarily as a representation. This is a good thing, for a work of art is primarily a thing of Beauty in itself and not a representation of something else, however beautiful that other thing may be. This the public does not understand. Hence the absurdity of allowing the public to be supplied by persons who are not workmen and who have no knowledge of the implications of good workmanship but are simply men of business out to supply whatever is most profitable to themselves.
He who would be an engraver must therefore start with a clear understanding that there is “no money in it”; though if he be patient and devoted he may make a living or a part of a living by it. Further, he must be prepared to start with the wood and the graver and his sense of what is beautiful in itself and not strain after effects. He should take it for granted that a zig-zag pattern such as a child would engrave is better than the most expert imitation of a sunset. In fact he must be pre pared to begin at the beginning and to put the first things first.
E. G.
[pg 13]
WOOD-ENGRAVING PAST AND PRESENT
Although Mr. Eric Gill in his introduction has explained that this book is not a treatise on the art of wood-engraving, I feel constrained to add a chapter to the present edition of the work, chiefly on the past and modern styles of wood engraving; also to give some information to the younger craftsmen, some of whom, having lived only in an age of photo-mechanical reproduction, are quite unaware of the important part that wood engraving has had in the past for the purposes of book-illustration.
It is a very old craft, older than book-printing from type. It quickly became the chief means of decorating and illustrating books, and continued to be so until the invention of photographic processes, which, for general purposes have supplanted it. Some of the old blocks, cut in simple outline, fit the printed page in a most admirable manner; in their particular style they have not been surpassed. An example of this is the re-cut from The Decameron 1492 on page 47. These early blocks were all cut on the long grain of the wood, a method that continued until it was discovered that the [pg 14] end grain was a better medium for cutting of fine lines for shading or outline.
It is a disputed point whether artists like Dürer or Holbein engraved their own work. It was probably left to the expert to cut in faithful facsimile the drawings done by the artist on wood. With a few notable exceptions, this method of the division of labour, the artist being one person and the engraver another, continued until wood-engraving was supplanted by process. For reproductive purposes it was a natural division. After that a completely new style of engraving, that of the present day, came into being.