KING ERIC MENVED AND QUEEN INGEBORG OF DENMARK (RINGSTEAD, 1319). FROM CREENY'S "MONUMENTAL BRASSES."
In simple draughtsmanship and purely graphic design, too, it is noticeable that, with the introduction of the copper-plate and the attempt to get in book illustrations something like pictorial values and chiaroscuro, how, by degrees, vigour of design and feeling for good line work was lost.
The revival of the woodcut even under Bewick did little to help line design—its former close companion. Bewick and his school developed the woodcut from the pictorial point of view, and with the object of demonstrating the capacity of the wood for rendering certain fine textures and tones as against steel and copper. Their great principle was the use of white line, not unheard of even in the early printing days, as a frontispiece to a German book ("Pomerium de Tempore," Augsburg, 1502) of the early sixteenth century testifies.
Bewick's birds, which are remarkable for the delicate, truthful way in which the plumage is rendered, are as much the work of a naturalist as of an artist, and they show but little design or feeling apart from this.
Although William Blake and Edward Calvert made notable use of the woodcut, it was not really until about the middle of the century that any serious attempt was made in the direction of the revival of line and pen drawing for the sake of its expressive vigour, ornamental possibilities, and autographic value. Probably it really began with German artists like Schnorr (who did a series of Bible pictures more or less after the manner of Holbein), Alfred Rethel, and Moritz Schwind. Rethel's two large woodcuts, "Death the Friend" and "Death the Enemy," are tolerably well known and show strong draughtsmanship and tragic force, recalling in their intensity and vigour the work of Dürer and the old German masters.
CHARLES KEENE. REDUCED FROM A HALF-PAGE DESIGN IN "PUNCH."
In England the revival of line design arose out of the Pre-Raphaelite movement (a movement certainly influenced by the study of early Italian as well as German and Flemish art), and was illustrated by the work of some of the leaders of that movement themselves.
The drawings (engraved on wood by the brothers Dalziel) by D. G. Rossetti, Holman Hunt, and Millais, which illustrate the edition of Tennyson's poems published in 1857, show perhaps the first definite experiments in this direction.
The pages of the journal "Once a Week," started in 1859, were the means of the introduction of new and powerful designers in line, such as Frederick Sandys, Charles Keene, E. J. Poynter, and Frederick Walker.