Wood engraving

“ Old or modern wood-engraving as a mode of reproducing designs in facsimile is valuable, but none of the artistic merit they may possess is due to the engraver; while the artistic merit shown in the new style of wood-engraving, as an art of design in white line, belongs wholly to the engraver. It results from this that white line is the peculiar province of wood-engraving, considered as an art ”

“ Therefore, it seems to me that the strictures which have been applied to process are far more applicable to wood-engraving. Now that wood-engraving has become a medium for the reproduction of any and every sort of design, it has stepped quite outside its proper province. Almost anything can be done with a block of wood and a graver, but it must be evident to people of average intelligence that a very great gulf separates those things which possibly can be done, from those which rationally should be attempted. ”

“ If the fundamental grounds on which the foregoing criticism rests be true, these engravers have won success in so far as they have attended to form and texture as the main business of their art, and they have failed in so far as they have destroyed these. From its peculiar and original powers in the interpretation of form and texture by line-work, either black or white, wood-engraving has derived its value and earned the respect due it as an art, both through its great works in the past and, so far as yet appears, through its best works in the present. ”

“ If this were the case, metal-engraving preceded wood-engraving, but only by a brief space of time, because, as soon as the idea of the new art was fully grasped, wood must have been almost immediately employed in preference to metal, on account of the greater ease and speed of working in wood, and of the less injury done to the paper in printing from it. ”

“ In metal engraving, it is easier to lay a fine line than a thick one; and however fine the line may be, it lasts;—but in wood engraving it requires extreme precision and skill to leave a thin dark line, and when left, it will be quickly beaten down by a careless printer. Therefore, the virtue of wood engraving is to exhibit the qualities and power of thick lines ”

“ The art really came into existence in the first quarter of that famous fifteenth century. There were scores of men at that time who could carve excellently well in stone or wood, or who could design and make beautiful jewels, and some of these men, probably monks in their monasteries, as well as secular craftsmen, drew and cut the first wood-engraving. No one knows who they were.
Up to the year 1475 the original method of wood-cutting changed very little; nearly every print was in outline with a thick and a thin line. ”

“ Linton says they are from engraved blocks of metal; and every practical man will, we are sure, agree with the great living Master of Wood-engraving.
Our first illustration is from a 'Book of Hours,' or Missal, published by Simon Vostre in 1488. It represents 'The Death of the Virgin,' a subject that was always chosen by the illustrator of religious books in those days; in our account of wood-engraving in the next two centuries we shall frequently meet with it among the works of the great artists. ”

“ At present the objection to the use of cross-hatching in wood-engraving is as serious as ever, but the employment of fine lines for some purposes, as in the rendering of delicate textures and tones, has been justified, mainly in consequence of innovations in the modes of printing. The charm of this new and surprising beauty in fine-line woodcuts, however, has not at all deprived the old broad and bold line of its force and vigor, nor made less valuable the strong contrasts in which the art won its earlier success. ”

“ Specialized histories of wood engraving, written mainly by 19th-century practitioners and bibliophiles, have tended to emphasize literal rendition rather than artistic vision. The writers favored wood engraving executed with the burin on the end grain of hard dense wood, such as box or maple, because it could produce 9 finer details than the old woodcut, which made use of knife and horizontally grained wood. They judged by narrow craft standards concerned with exact imitation of surface textures. ”

“ 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 metal engraving, you cut ditches, fill them with ink, and press your paper into them. In wood engraving, you leave ridges, rub the tops of them with ink, and stamp them on your paper.
The instrument with which the substance, whether of the wood or steel, is cut away, is the same. It is a solid plowshare, which, instead of throwing the earth aside, throws it up and out, producing at first a simple ravine, or furrow, in the wood or metal, which you can widen by another cut, or extend by successive cuts. ”

“ Owing to the invention of various mechanical processes, and the perfection to which photography has attained, the art of wood-engraving would seem to be in danger of becoming extinct. This is by no means the real case, for the brilliant band of wood-engravers which has arisen in America, of whom we have just spoken, still continue to give us excellent examples of their skill ”

“ The history of wood-engraving in America, until recent years, is comparatively insignificant. In art, as in literature, the first generation of the Republic followed the English tradition almost slavishly ”

“ The modern revival of wood-engraving, which came just after the war, is quite different in style from any that preceded it. The artist and engraver are now one, as they should be where original work is to be done, and every exponent of the craft expresses his or her own individuality. ”

“ At the end of the seventeenth century the art of wood-engraving reached its lowest ebb. There were a few tolerably good mechanical engravers on the Continent, who were chiefly employed in the manufacture of ornaments for cards, and head and tail pieces for books and ballads, but nearly all the woodcuts we meet with in English books are of the most childish character. ”

“ Some support for this view, that the art of printing from engraved metal plates was discovered by the goldsmiths, and preceded and suggested wood-engraving, is derived from the peculiar prints in the manière criblée, or the dotted style, of which over three hundred are known. They were produced by a mixed process of engraving in relief and in intaglio, usually upon a metal plate, but sometimes upon wood. The effects are given by dots and lines relieved in white upon a black ground, assisted by dots and lines relieved in black upon a white ground. ”

“ Amongst the mass of process reproduction is the Wood-engraver, engraving his own designs, thereby expressing an originality which will most certainly mark the present age of book-production as something well worth examination. It is therefore essential that the modern engraver design his own engravings and he will select the kind of tools which will best express his own individuality, for it is this individuality of the artist which alone amongst all its competitors will keep alive Wood-engraving as a vital craft. ”

“ Why is it, then, that we find the art of wood-engraving, when it was flourishing in all the chief countries on the Continent, almost at its earliest state of infancy in England? This is a question very difficult to answer. Certainly our great printers, William Caxton, and his successors, Wynkyn de Worde and Richard Pynson, did not follow the example of the great typographers of Venice or the yet more-to-be-praised booksellers of Paris, who devoted so much energy and taste in the decoration of their books. ”

“ Although his spirit was romantic and uncontrolled, and his imagination dealt with forms not in themselves beautiful, he possessed the greatest energy of genius of all the masters who have intrusted their works to wood-engraving, and with him it was a favorite art.
The first of the four famous series of designs by which his skill in wood-engraving is best known was published in 1498, but it was probably finished before that time. It consisted of fifteen large cuts in illustration of the Apocalypse of St. John, to which a vignette (Fig. 40) of wonderful nobility and simplicity was prefixed. ”

“ They all agree in recognising that the methods of relief engraving were practised with a view to printing earlier than the method of intaglio. What interval, however, separates the two discoveries? At what epoch are we to place the invention of wood engraving? or if the process, as has been often alleged, is of Asiatic origin, when was it brought into Europe? To pretend to give a decisive answer to these questions would be, at least, imprudent. Conjectures of every sort, and even the most dogmatic assertions, are not wanting. ”

“ Wood-engraving was at once the product of the desire for this change and of the effort toward it, a mirror of the movement the more valuable because the art was more intimately connected with the popular life than any other art of the Renaissance, and a power feeding the impulse from which it derived its own vitality. In this fact lies the historic interest of the art to the student of civilization. ”

“ Some preliminary training in book-illustration of the rude sort then in vogue was necessary to reveal his powers to himself; he received a premium from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, which had shown some interest in wood-engraving; and after farther minor work he began, in 1785, to engrave the first block for his British Quadrupeds, which, with his British Birds, although his other cuts are numbered by thousands, is the principal monument of his genius. When he took the graver in his hand he found the art extinct as a fine art; at most only large coarse prints were manufactured. ”

“ I have enlarged Bewick's orator-frog for you, Plate I. c., and I think you will feel that he is entirely expressed in those essential particulars.
This being perfectly good wood-cutting, notice especially its deliberation. No scrawling or scratching, or cross-hatching, or 'free' work of any sort. Most deliberate laying down of solid lines and dots, of which you cannot change one. The real difficulty of wood engraving is to cut every one of these black lines or spaces of the exactly right shape, and not at all to cross-hatch them cleanly. ”

“ In our endeavour to prove the relative antiquity of wood engraving in the Low Countries, we have intentionally rather deferred the purely archæological question, and have sought the first signs of talent instead of the bold beginnings of the art. The origin of wood engraving, materially considered, cannot be said to be confined to the time and country of the pupils of Van Eyck. ”

“ It has been replaced by aquatint, which itself, as we mentioned in a former chapter, is only used for purely commercial requirements, except by engravers of real talent in combination with the needle and the graver.
Wood engraving has made, in certain respects, considerable progress in the course of the last few years. In France and England it is producing results that not only confirm its advances, but are as the prophecy of still better things. Amongst recent prints, those of Robert, for instance, do more than promise; they realise the hopes which others only hold out. ”

“ Otley, in his general History of Engraving, says, "The greatest difficulty in wood engraving occurs in clearing out the minute quadrangular lights;" and in any modern woodcut you will see that where the lines of the drawing cross each other to produce shade, the white interstices are cut out so neatly that there is no appearance of any jag or break in the lines; they look exactly as if they had been drawn with a pen. It is chiefly difficult to cut the pieces clearly out when the lines cross at right angles; easier when they form oblique or diamond-shaped interstices ”

“ 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. ”

“ Thus the block, when inked and printed, produced facsimile impressions of the drawing in black lines on white paper. Usually an accomplished artist made the drawing, whereas only a skilled craftsman was needed to do the cutting; very few cutters were also capable of making their own drawings.
The wood engraving, on the other hand, started with a section of dense wood of a uniform texture, usually box or maple, and with the end-grain rather than the plank as surface. ”

“ The manner in which they are executed is so coarse that they might have been cut by any person who could handle a graver. Looking at them merely as specimens of wood-engraving, they are not generally superior to the practice-blocks cut by a modern wood-engraver's apprentice within the first month of his novitiate.'
Soon there were other printers in London. Richard Pynson began to publish books from his own press in Fleet Street. His first book illustrated with woodcuts appears to have been 'The Canterbury Tales,' printed before 1493. ”