Woodcut

“ Rapid sketches are made on the block with the pen, and the modern wood-engraver set himself patiently to cut out all the spaces of white, in which case the engraver is in reality less free than his predecessor in the 16th century, though the result has a false appearance of liberty. The woodcut is like a polyglot who has learned to speak many other languages at the risk of forgetting his own. And, wonderful as may be its powers of imitation, it can only approximate to the arts which it imitates; it can never rival each of them on its own ground. ”

“ As we have already said, the charm of the woodcut pictures in incunabula lies in their simplicity, in their rude story-telling power, often very forcible and direct, in the valiant effort, sometimes curiously successful in cuts otherwise contemptibly poor, to give character and expression to the human face, and as regards form in the harmony between the woodcuts and the paper and type of the books in which they appear. ”

“ The only known copy of this battle picture, made from about seven blocks, is in the Print Room of the British Museum. It is a magnificent piece. Probably nothing with this breadth of handling had ever been done in woodcut before. The color is grave and beautifully harmonized, although the paper has deteriorated and the colors have darkened somewhat. The blocks were cut with ardor, almost fury; everything is brought to life with masterly assurance. ”

“ The development of the woodcut, in the earliest specimens of which we recognise the Gothic style of about 1390-1410, out of the printed pattern was followed before very long by the development of line engraving out of ornament engraved by the goldsmith upon vessels of silver, and that of etching out of the armourer's practice of decorating plates of steel by designs bitten in with acid. Of these two processes, the first came into use about 1430-40, and the second quite early in the sixteenth century. Every century contributes its process: the seventeenth, mezzotint ”

“ Native design had little artistic significance, and English wood-engraving was still in the crudest state,{3} even at a time when in Germany Dürer, Burgkmair, Lucas Cranach, and Holbein were using the woodcut for imperishable illustration—imperishable because of its intrinsic artistic qualities. ”

“ Under the woodcut are the following lines:—
81
‘Cornucopia, or Room for a Ram head, wherein is described the dignity of the Ram head above the Roundhead or Rattlehead,’ is another tract, with a woodcut caricature representing a woman attempting to saw the horns from a man’s head. The letterpress consists of a dialogue between a man and his wife, wherein the man humorously praises horns. It was a favourite joke to represent the Puritan as a ‘cuckoldy Roundhead.’
Another satirical pamphlet has a woodcut representing Cavaliers and Roundheads exciting their dogs to fight. ”

“ The woodcut on the preceding page, which is from the MS. Royal 14, E. IV., contains several figures taken from one of the large illuminations that adorn the MS.; it affords another curious illustration of the simultaneous use of various forms of projectiles. On the right side is an archer, with his sheaf at his belt and his sword by his side. On the left is a man-at-arms in a very picturesque suit of complete armour, firing a hand-gun of much more modern form than those in the former woodcut. ”

“ FROM THE NAPLES EDITION OF THE 'ARTE DE ASTROLOGIA' OR 'LUNARE' OF GRANOLLACHS, FOR THE YEAR 1485. (REDUCED.)
Passing now from the purchase of woodcuts to their imitation, we may look, first of all, at the simplest and easiest form in which a design could be reproduced. The impression from a woodcut is, of course, a reversal of the design as it appears on the block, and an artist not very confident of his own skill would naturally shrink from the rather difficult task of copying the printed cut in reverse in order that his own sketch might print in the same way as its original. ”

“ One in the subsellæ seems to have his furred amys thrown over the arm of his stall; his right-hand neighbour seems to have his hanging over his shoulder. He, and one in the upper stalls, have round skull caps (birettas) ; others have the hood on their heads, where it assumes a horned shape, which may be seen in other pictures of canons. The woodcut is part of a full-page illumination of the interior of a church, in the Book of Hours of Richard II., in the British Museum (Domit. xvii.) .
These powerful ecclesiastical establishments continued to flourish throughout the Middle Ages ”

“ In a recent catalogue of thirty-seven works published by him, no woodcut initials occur in any.
In 1489 a book was published, generally attributed to G. Stuchs, which is interesting in many ways. [18] The title, which is xylographic, runs as follows:
‘Versehung leib sel er unnd gut,’
anglicé: ‘The way to preserve body, soul, honour, and means,’ and on the verso is a remarkable engraving of a sick person in bed surrounded by attendants, which evidently suggested the cut representing the sick fool in Brandt’s celebrated Navis Fatuorum. ”

“ The accompanying woodcut, from folio 105, is Dns. Ricardus de Threton, sacerdos,—Sir Richard de Threton, priest,—who was executor of Sir Robert de Thorp, knight, formerly chancellor of the king, and who gave twenty marks to the convent. Our woodcut gives only the outlines of the full-length portrait. In the original the robe and hood are of full bright blue, lined with white; the under sleeves, [Pg 245] which appear at the wrists, are of the same colour; and the shoes are red. ”

“ A contemporary woodcut (in Calmour's 'Fact and Fiction about Shakespeare') of William Kemp, one of Shakespeare's fellow-actors, dancing the Morris, to tabor and pipe, makes the pipe as long as from mouth to waist—viz., about 18 inches, which agrees with Mersennus. A similar woodcut in 'Orchésographie' makes the pipe even longer. Both represent pipe as conical, like oboe. The length of the tabor, in these two woodcuts, seems to be about 1 ft. 9 in., and the breadth, across the head, 9 or 10 in. No snare in the English woodcut, but the French one has a snare. ”

“ In the second half of the century at Paris excellent woodcut portraits, mostly in an oval frame, are sometimes found on titlepages, and in other cases decoration is supplied by a neatly cut device. Where illustrations are needed for the explanation of works on hunting or any other subjects they are mostly well drawn and cut. But 202 the use of woodcuts in books of imaginative literature became more and more rare.
At Lyon, as at Paris, at the beginning of the century the store of fifteenth century cuts was freely drawn on for popular editions. ”

“ We must call attention to the right-hand figure in the foreground, who is clad in a pourpoint, one of the quilted armours which we have formerly described, because it is the best illustration of this species of armour we have met with. But the special point for which we give the woodcut here, is to illustrate the use of the mantelet. It will be seen—though somewhat imperfectly, from the fragment of the engraving introduced—that these defences have been brought up to the front of the attacking party in such numbers as to form an almost continuous wall, behind which the men-at-arms are sheltered ”

“ Some of the pleasantness of the effect of lines printed from a woodcut is due to the fact that they print a more clearly cut line. The line eaten in by "process" when examined under a very strong magnifying glass proves to be a slightly jagged one. ”

“ About the practice in the Latin countries at this period we are less well informed, Italian and French woodcuts being much more rarely signed than the German, Swiss and Dutch. We seldom know the names of the artists who designed the book illustrations; but in Italy, at least, we know that it was a very general practice for drawings and, later on, even pictures, to be reproduced by professional woodcutters.
That was the case also in the seventeenth century, when wood-engraving enjoyed more favour in the Low Countries than elsewhere. ”

“ The female, which is shown in the accompanying woodcut, is generally larger than the male, and is further distinguished by the very pale yellow spots that break the black border of both pairs of wings. ”

“ This process, it is clear, is almost exactly parallel with that of wood-cutting—i.e., the "whites" are taken out, and the sweep of the tool can be guided by the worker in an absolutely untrammelled way. Those who love the qualities of a woodcut, and have not time to master the technique of wood-cutting or engraving, might do worse than experiment with Mr. de Morgan's process. A quantity of proofs of designs he executed—but never published—show that it has many possibilities worth developing. ”

“ Nothing could be better in its way than the sketch in Fig. 6. Here are the flowing line of the artist's brush, the free and vivid rendering of action, and the
Fig. 6.—From an engraving after Hishigawa Moronobu (c. 1680) . (Author's Collection.)
decorative use of masses of black that have recently inspired a new school of imitators in our own country. The woodcut was for the first time made representative of the art it reproduced. ”

“ 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 artists of this older generation, the original wood engravers of the "nineties" and the first decade of this century, are not represented in this volume of Contemporary English Woodcuts, though some of them have continued their work to the present day. The selection is intended, rather, to convey an idea of the variety of talent and accomplishment possessed by a younger generation, which shares in that impulse to use the wood-block with knife or burin, as the means of expression, which has spread all over Europe in the last few years, and especially during and since the War. ”

“ As I was then living in a very out of the way place, far from railroads and public conveyances of all kinds, modern improvements seldom reached our locality, and not being likely to have my curiosity satisfied otherwise, I set to work to see what I could learn from the woodcut, which was not accompanied by any description. ”

“ A woodcut is given opposite. It is completely covered with carvings in relief, within circular cusped medallions, with figures in the centres representing different subjects: men seated, hawking, or struggling with wild beasts, and numerous single figures of lions, stags, and other animals. The intermediate spaces contain an ornamentation of leaves and flowers which is accommodated to the geometrical style of Saracenic art. Round the upper part of this box appears an Arabic inscription in fine Cufic characters. ”

“ In his collection the Robin Hood block, perforated with worm holes, realized quite a fancy price.
Among the relics of ancient woodcutting, are some so early and crude in their execution—quaint as the period they illustrate—as to really entitle them to the literal name and meaning of woodcuts, rather than wood-engravings, which they really became in the hands of the two Bewicks and their numerous school of pupils. ”

“ England was far behind the other nations of Europe in its appreciation of art, and wood-engraving throve there as feebly as did the other arts of design. The first English book with woodcuts was Caxton’s Game and Playe of the Chesse, published about 1476, the first edition of which was issued two years earlier, without illustrations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In a third on either side of the shield in the footpiece boys are tilting at each other mounted on boars. In a fourth are shown saints and some of the emblems of the Passion, supported by angels. But as a rule, while nearly all Florentine woodcuts have borders these are only from an eighth to three-sixteenths of an inch in depth, and the pattern on them is a leaf or flower or some conventional design of the simplest possible kind. A very few cuts have only a rule round them, one of the largest a triple rule. ”

“ WHEN loaves are lacking it seems natural to attach a high value to crumbs, and perhaps this may be accepted as an excuse for printing the following rough notes on the few woodcuts which I have been able to find in editions of English plays printed before 1660. An excuse is needed, because, while the artistic value of the cuts is distinctly low, the plays in which they are found, with the exception of Marlowe's 'Dr. Faustus,' are not of the first interest. On the other hand, as I hope to show, the woodcuts, as a rule, are not merely fancy pictures used only because they looked pretty. ”