Philip Hamerton and Marion Spielmann

“ As for light-and-shade, he shaded only when he wanted to give relief, but never worked out anything like a studied and balanced effect of light-and-shade, nor did he feel any responsibility about the matter. What he really cared for, and generally attained, was a firm, clear, simple kind of drawing, conventional in its indifference to the mystery of nature and to the poetic sentiment which comes to us from that mystery, but by no means indifferent to fact of a decided and tangible kind. The wood engraving of the 16th century was a singularly positive art, as positive as carving ”

“ In Germany the artistic standard is lower than in France. It is true that few outside Germany could model a head as finely as M. Klinkicht in his own style of a judicious mingling of the black line and the white line; but, as a rule, German engraving is far more precise, more mechanical, more according to formula, and heavier and more old-fashioned than that of either France or America. The art has been injured by the great “studios” or factories designed to flourish on strictly business principles, workshops which, in the education of the craftsman, to some extent annihilated the artist. ”

“ Whatever be the art which the wood engraver imitates, a practised eye sees at the first glance that the result is nothing but a woodcut. Therefore, although we may admire the suppleness of an art which can assume so many transformations, it is certain that these transformations give little satisfaction to severe judges. At the same time, as the ultimate object was not only reproduction, but reduplication by the printing-press, the drawbacks mentioned are far outweighed by the practical advantages. In manual skill and in variety of resource modern wood engravers far excel their predecessors. ”

“ Nothing is more striking in this valuable series than the remarkable closeness with which the artist observed everything in the nature of a hard fact, such as the shape of a hatchet or a spade; but he sees no mystery anywhere—he can draw leaves but not foliage, feathers but not plumage, locks but not hair, a hill but not a landscape. ”

“ Wood engraving in the first three quarters of the 19th century had no special character of its own, nothing like Bewick's work, which had a character derived from the nature of the process; but on the other hand, the modern art is set to imitate every kind of engraving and every kind of drawing. Thus we have woodcuts that imitate line engraving, others that copy etching and even mezzotint, whilst others try to imitate the crumbling touch of charcoal or of chalk, or the wash of water-colour, the grcyness of pencil, or even the wash and the pen-line together. ”

“ In course of time, as wood engravers became more expert, they were not so careful to spare themselves trouble and pains, and then cross-hatchings were introduced, but at first more as a variety to relieve the eye than as a common method of shading. In the 16th century a simple kind of wood engraving reached such a high degree of perfection that the best work of that time has never been surpassed in its own way. ”

“ The main elements of a Chinese or a Japanese woodcut, uninfluenced by European example, are dashing or delicate outlines and markings of various thickness, exactly such as a clever writer with the brush would make with his Indian ink or vermilion. Often we get a perfectly black blot, exquisitely shaped and full of careful purpose, and these broad vigorous blacks are quite in harmony with the kind of printing for which wood engraving is intended. ”

“ Again, the sky itself is false in its shading, for it is without gradation, but the shading upon it has a purpose, which is to prevent the upper part of the composition from looking too empty, and the conventionalism of wood engraving was so accepted in those days that the artist could have recourse to this expedient in defiance alike of pictorial harmony and of natural truth. ”

“ Modern wood engraving is quite a distinct art, being based on different principles, but between the two stands the work of an original genius, Thomas Bewick (1753–1828) . Although apprenticed to an engraver in 1767, he was never taught to draw, and got into ways and habits of his own which add to the originality of his work, though his defective training is always evident. His work is the more genuine from his frequent habit of engraving his own designs, which left him perfect freedom of interpretation ”

“ It is natural that wood engraving should have occurred first to the primitive mind, because the manner in which woodcuts are printed is the most obvious of all the kinds of printing. If a block of wood is inked with a greasy ink and then pressed on a piece of paper, the ink from the block will be transferred at once to the paper, on which we shall have a black patch exactly the size and shape of the inked surface. ”

“ The apparent superiority of truthfulness claimed by the photograph over the artist's drawing is a factor in the case—the public forgetting that a photographic print shows us what a thing or a scene looks like to the undiscriminating lens, rather than what it looks like to the two eyes of the spectator, who unconsciously selects that part of the scene which he specially wishes to see. ”

“ In America, where the power of resuscitation is great, the miraculous technical perfection brought about by Timothy Cole and Frederick Juengling, as leaders of the school, has promptly given way to a greater feeling for art and a lesser worship of mechanical achievement, and, within strict limits, wood engraving is saved. ”

“ The process employed for wood engraving may be briefly described as follows. The surface of the block is lightly whitened with Chinese white so as to produce a light yellowish-grey tint, and on this the artist draws, either with a pen if the work is intended to be in line, or with a hard-pointed pencil and a brush if it is intended to be in shade. If it is to be a line woodcut the cutter simply digs out the whites with a sharp graver or scalpel (he has these tools of various shapes and sizes) , and that is all he has to do ”

“ In England, in spite of the International Society of Wood Engravers, of which little is now heard, there are no signs of a general revival, and it seems as if the art must be born again, so long as the public interest in photographs continues. ”

“ The earlier workmen turned their attention to woodcut in simple black lines, including outline and shading. In early work the outline is firm and very distinct, being thicker in line than the shading, and in the shading the lines are simple, without cross-hatchings, as the workmen found it easier and more natural to take out a white line-like space between two parallel or nearly parallel black lines than to cut out the twenty or thirty small white lozenges into which the same space would have been divided by cross-hatchings. ”

“ The modern art, as exhibited in these publications, may be broadly divided into two sections, one depending upon line, in which case the black line of a pen or pencil sketch is carefully preserved, and the other depending upon tone, when the tones of a sketch with the brush are translated by the wood engraver into shades obtained in his own way by the burin. ”

“ The reader may at once realize for himself the tediousness of the process by comparing the ease with which one writes a page of manuscript with the labour which would be involved in cutting away, with perfect accuracy, every space, however minute, which the pen had not blackened with ink. ”

“ A precise parallel to this treatment is to be found in a Japanese woodcut of the “Wild Boar and Hare,” given by Aimé Humbert in his book on Japan, in which the boar has a cap which is a perfectly black patch though all other local colour is omitted. The similarity of method between Wohlgemuth and the Japanese artist is close: they both take pleasure in drawing thin black lines at a little distance from the patch and following its shape like a border. ”

“ The net comes dark against the light surface of the river, and Amman took the trouble to cut a white lozenge for every mesh. Bewick, in one of his vignettes, represents a fisherman mending his nets by the side of a stream. A long net is hung to dry on four upright sticks, but to avoid the trouble of cutting out the lozenges, Bewick artfully contrives his arrangement of light and shade so that the net shall be in light against a space of black shade under some bushes. ”

“ During the 17th and 18th centuries it still remained a comparatively severe and conventional form of art, because the workmen shaded as much as possible either with straight lines or simple curves, so that there was never much appearance of freedom. ”