A Brief History of Wood-engraving from Its Invention Part 7

Most of the greater Dutch towns had wood-engravers, and the work of these artists appears in many of the books printed in the Low Countries. As in France, many of the printers' marks are very good.

It was in this century that publishers began to ill.u.s.trate their books with copperplate engravings, which soon came into general use, and these plates for many years, to a very great extent, superseded engraving on wood.

Etchings by the artist's own hands are also frequently met with, and to these causes we may in a great measure attribute the decay of the Formschneider's art for at least two centuries.

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CHAPTER XI

_IN THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES IN GERMANY, ITALY AND ENGLAND_

In the portfolios of collectors of works of art of the sixteenth century we frequently meet with very interesting examples of printing in _chiaro-oscuro_, as it was called, by means of successive impressions of engraved wood-blocks. Sometimes two or three blocks were used, sometimes six or eight, in all cases with the intention of reproducing the appearance of a tinted water-colour drawing or an oil-painting. Those prints which were the least ambitious were the most successful, They were generally printed in various shades of grey and brown--from light sepia to deep umber--and sometimes the effects are admirable. A well-known designer and engraver on wood, Ugo da Carpi (c. 1520), introduced this new style of printing into Venice, and other artists, Antonio da Trento, Andrea Andreani, Bartolomeo Coriolano, and others made many successful efforts in a similar direction; their best works are much prized.

At the same time a group of Venetian artists, who were also engravers on wood, distinguished themselves by copying the works of t.i.tian and other Italian painters. The most celebrated of these engravers were Nicolo Boldrini, Francesco da Nanto, Giovanni Battista del Porto, and Giuseppe Scolari, who all flourished between the years 1530 and 1580. Their {100} productions, which are on a large scale, are greatly valued by artists.

Near the end of the century a book of costume ent.i.tled _Habiti Antichi e Moderni di tutto il Mondo_ was designed and published at Venice by Cesare Vecellio, who is said to have been a nephew of the great t.i.tian. This work contains nearly six hundred figures in the costume of every age and country, admirably drawn and engraved; indeed, they are the best examples of the art of wood-engraving in Italy at the time. This excellent work was reproduced in their well-known style by Messrs. Firmin, Didot & Cie in two volumes (Paris, 1860).

An edition of 'Dante' published by the brothers Sessa at Venice in 1578 is well ill.u.s.trated with good woodcuts.

German artists were also bitten at this time with a mania for reproducing pictures by means of colour blocks. The results, however, were much more curious than beautiful. We have before us a copy of a painting designed by Altdorfer, one of the 'Little Masters,' of 'The Virgin with the Holy Infant on her Lap,' set in an elaborate architectural frame. In this print at least eight different colour-blocks were used, among them a deep red and a vivid green. The printer's register has been fairly well kept, and the mechanical part of the work is worthy of all praise; but we fear the effect on most of our readers would be to produce anything but admiration. A Saint Christopher, designed and probably engraved by Lucas Cranach, printed in black and deep umber, only with the high lights carefully cut out of the latter block, is much more satisfactory.

In the middle and towards the end of the sixteenth century there were several excellent wood-engravings published in London in ill.u.s.tration of Foxe's 'Book of Martyrs' (1562), Holinshed's 'Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland' (1577), 'A Booke of Christian Prayers' (1569), and other works, chiefly from the press of the celebrated John Daye. {101}

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF JOHN DAYE, THE CELEBRATED PRINTER OF FOXE'S 'BOOK OF MARTYRS,' A.D. 1562]

{102} As an example we give one of the ill.u.s.trations of Holinshed's Chronicles as a frontispiece. There can be no doubt that Holbein designed it; the ornamentation alone would almost prove it to be from his hand. The t.i.tle-page of the 'Bishops' Bible,' printed about the same time, has a finely engraved border, representing the King handing the volume to the Bishops, who in turn present it to the people. There are many woodcuts in the text, but they are of very low merit.

We give an ill.u.s.tration of 'A Booke of Christian Prayers,' known as Queen Elizabeth's Prayer-book, from a fine portrait of Her Majesty kneeling on a handsome cushion, with clasped hands before a kind of altar. The Queen's dress is magnificent, and the ornamentation of the whole design is of a similar character. It is an excellent piece of engraving, and we are able to give a facsimile of it, cut about sixty years ago by George Bonner. Mr.

Linton thinks the original was on metal; who engraved it is at present unknown. We fear there was no one in England who could produce such work, nor can anyone tell who made the design. It is printed on the back of the t.i.tle-page, which is decorated with a border of a 'Jesse-tree,' with a figure of Jesse at the foot and the Virgin with the Holy Infant on her lap at the head. There are woodcut borders to each of the 274 pages, all betraying German origin, and evidently by different hands. A few floral designs and single figures of 'Temperance,' 'Charity,' and the like are the best. Among the rest is a series of 'Dance of Death' pictures, but _not_ by Holbein. Another edition of this work was printed in 1590 at London, 'By Richard Yardley and Peter Short for the a.s.signes of Richard Day dwelling in Bred-street hill at the signe of the Starre.' [Doubtless this was on the site of the present printing office of Richard Clay & Sons.] Richard Day was a son of John Day or Daye, as we often find the name printed.

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[Ill.u.s.tration: ELIZABETHA REGINA (_From 'A Booke of Christian Prayers.' Printed by John Daye, London, 1569._)]

{104} Another ill.u.s.trated book, 'The Cosmographical Gla.s.se, conteinyng the pleasant Principles of Cosmographie, Geographie, Hydrographie or Navigation. Compiled by William Cuningham, Doctor in Physicke' (of Norwich), was printed by John Day in 1559, with many cuts. In the ornamental t.i.tle-page there is a large bird's-eye view of the city of Norwich, with a mark of the engraver, I. B. There is also a large and well-engraved portrait of the author, 'aetatis 28,' a rather sad-looking young man; and many initial letters, some of which have a small I. D. at the foot, which probably tell us that John Day himself engraved them.

Others have a small I inside a larger C, and this monogram appears frequently on the small cuts in the border of Queen Elizabeth's Book of Prayers. John Day tells us in a work published in 1567 that the Saxon type in which it is printed was _cut_ by himself.

John Day was a great friend of John Foxe, and a.s.sisted him in producing his celebrated 'Acts and Monuments of the Church,' generally known as his 'Booke of Martyrs.' In the 'Acts and Monuments,' printed in 1576, there is a large initial C, evidently drawn and engraved by the artists who produced the Queen's portrait. In this initial, Elizabetha Regina is seen seated in state, with her feet resting on the same cushion that appears in the larger print, attended by three of her Privy Councillors standing at her right hand. A figure of the Pope with two _broken_ keys in his hands forms part of the decoration of the base; an immense cornucopia reaches over the top.

Early in the seventeenth century we meet with the name of an excellent wood-engraver at Antwerp, Christoph Jegher, who worked for many years with Peter Paul Rubens, and produced many large woodcuts. We are enabled to give a much-reduced copy of a 'Flight into Egypt,' which in the original is nearly twenty-four inches in length. Underneath appears the inscription, _P. P. Rub. delin. & excud._, from which we learn that Rubens himself superintended the {105} printing, for _C. Jegher sculp._ appears on the other side. Some of this series of cuts were printed with a tint of sepia over them in imitation of the Italian chiaro-oscuro prints of the previous century. Christoph Jegher was born in Germany in 1590 (?) and died at Antwerp in 1670. He lived through many tempestuous years and did much good work. A contemporary wood-engraver named Cornelius van Sichem, living at Amsterdam, produced a few excellent cuts from drawings by Heinrich Goltzius (d. 1617), who copied the Italian school.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT. BY RUBENS _Reduced copy of the engraving by C. Jegher_]

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 {106} 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. The rage for copper-plate engravings had set in with so much vigour among all the printers and publishers that the poor wood-engraver was well-nigh forgotten.

In London a new edition of 'aesop's Fables,' edited by Dr. Samuel Croxall, and ill.u.s.trated with many woodcuts much better engraved than was customary at the time, was published by Jacob Tonson at the Shakespear's Head, in the Strand, in 1722. We do not learn the names of the artists. In 1724 Elisha Kirkall engraved and published seventeen Views of Shipping, from designs by W. Vandevelde, which he printed in a greenish kind of ink; and in a portfolio full of woodcuts in the Print Room of the British Museum Mr. W.

J. Linton recently discovered a large Card of Invitation (query--to a wedding?) from Mr. Elisha and _Mrs._ Elizabeth Kirkall, dated '_August_ the 31st, 1709. Printed at His Majesty's Printing Office in _Blackfryers_,'

which is very firmly and boldly engraved, probably in soft metal. On the left of the Royal Arms, Fame, blowing a trumpet, holds up a circular medallion portrait of Guttenburgh (we follow the spelling); a similar figure on the right holds the portrait of W. Caxton and a scroll; at the foot, in the middle, is a view of London Bridge over the Thames, with the Monument and St. Paul's Cathedral, and on either side is a Cupid--one with a torch and a dove, with masonic emblems at his feet, the other with attributes of painting, sculpture, and music. The Cupids are very like the fat-faced little cherubim we so constantly meet with on seventeenth-century monuments, though Mr. Linton has nothing but praise to give to the engraving, which he says is the first example of the use of the 'white line' in English work.

In Paris there was a family of three generations of {107} engravers named Papillon, who ill.u.s.trated hundreds of books with small and very fine cuts, in evident imitation of the copper-plates then so much in vogue. Jean Michel Papillon, the youngest of them, published a _Traite Historique et Pratique de la Gravure en Bois_, in two volumes with a supplement, which, though full of credulous errors, has been of inestimable service to all writers on the history of wood-engraving. This Papillon was probably in England at one time, for he received a prize from the Society of Arts. He was born in the year 1698, began to engrave blocks when only eight years old, and lived till the year 1776.

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CHAPTER XII

_THOMAS BEWICK AND HIS PUPILS_

In the year 1775, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts offered a series of small money premiums for the best engravings on wood. These prizes were won by Thomas Hodgson, William Coleman, both then living in London, and Thomas Bewick, of Newcastle, who sent up for compet.i.tion five engravings intended to ill.u.s.trate a new edition of 'Gay's Fables.' It is of the last of these three--who received an award of seven guineas, which he immediately gave over to his mother--that we have now to write. He was born at Cherryburn, a farmhouse on the south bank of the Tyne, in the parish of Ovingham, about twelve miles from Newcastle, in August 1753. This we learn from an inscription now over the door of the 'byre,' or cowshed, which is still standing. His father was a farmer, who also rented a small coal-pit at Mickley, close by. After having received a fair education at local schools and at Ovingham parsonage, young Thomas, who had shown a great love of drawing, was in October 1767 apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, a general engraver, in St. Nicholas' Churchyard, Newcastle. Here the boy learned to cut diagrams in wood, engrave copper-plates for books, tradesmen's cards, etch ornament on sword-blades, and other work of the kind, much as Hogarth had done some fifty years before him; and, as luck would have it, his master received an {109} order to engrave a series of wood-blocks to ill.u.s.trate a 'Treatise on Mensuration' written by Mr. Charles Hutton, a schoolmaster in Newcastle--afterwards Dr. Hutton, a Fellow of the Royal Society. This work was issued in fifty sixpenny numbers, and published in a quarto volume in 1770. It was on this book that Thomas Bewick trained his 'prentice hand in the art in which he was afterwards to become so famous.

At the end of his apprenticeship in 1774, he worked with his old master for a short time at a guinea a week; then he went to live for a time at Cherryburn, and in 1776, with three guineas sewed in his waist-band, he walked to Edinburgh, Glasgow, and northwards to the Highlands, always staying at farm-houses on the road. He returned to Newcastle in a Leith sloop, and, after working till he had earned sufficient money, took a berth in a collier for London, where he arrived in October and soon found several Newcastle friends. But London life did not suit this child of the country-side. 'I would rather be herding sheep on Mickley bank top,' he writes to a friend, 'than remain in London, although for so doing I was to be made Premier of England.'

Soon after his return to Newcastle he joined his old master in partnership, and took his younger brother, John, as an apprentice, and for eight years the brothers made a weekly visit to Cherryburn, often fishing by the way.

In the year 1785, their mother, father, and eldest sister all died, and in the following year Thomas Bewick married Isabella Elliot, of Ovingham, one of the companions of his childhood. He was at that time living in the 'fine, low, old-fashioned house'--with a long garden behind it, in which he cultivated roses--formerly occupied by Dr. Hutton; and going daily to work in the old house overlooking St. Nicholas' Churchyard.

We have previously said that the early wood-engravings were cut with a knife, held like a pen and drawn towards the craftsman, on 'planks' of the soft wood of the pear or {110} apple-tree, or some similar tree. It is believed that Bewick was the first who used the wood of the box-tree, which is very hard, and who made his drawings on the b.u.t.t-ends of the blocks, and cut his lines with the graver pushed from him. He brought into practice what is known as the 'white line' in wood-engraving; that is, he produced his effects more by means of many white lines wide apart to give an appearance of lightness, and by giving closer lines to produce a grey effect, as in our cut of 'The Yellowhammer.' He gave up the old method of obtaining 'colour,' as it is termed, by means of cross-hatching, and used a much simpler and more expeditious way of giving depth of shadow by leaving solid ma.s.ses of the block, which of course printed black--and he constantly adopted the plan of lowering the wood in the background, and such parts of the block as were required to be printed lightly.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE YELLOWHAMMER (_From_ '_The Land Birds_')]

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The first book of real importance that was ill.u.s.trated by Thomas Bewick was the 'Select Fables' published by Saint of Newcastle in 1784; this is now very rare; there is, however, a copy in the British Museum (press-mark 12305 g 16) which can at all times be consulted. Most of the designs are derived from 'Croxall's Fables,' and many of these were copied from the copper-plates by Francis Barlow in his edition of aesop, published 'at his house, The Golden Eagle, in New Street, near Shoo Lane, 1665.' Though Bewick improved the drawings, there was little originality in them, but the engravings were far in advance of any other work of the kind done at that period. The success of this book induced him to carry out an idea he had long entertained of producing a series of ill.u.s.trations for a 'General History of Quadrupeds,' on which he was engaged for six years, making the drawings and engraving them mostly in the evening. He tells us he had much difficulty in finding models, and was delighted when a travelling menagerie visited Newcastle and enabled him to depict many wild animals from nature.

It was while he was employed on this work that he received a commission to make an engraving of a 'Chillingham Bull,' one of those famous wild cattle to which Sir Walter Scott refers in his ballad, 'Cadyow Castle':

'Mightiest of all the beasts of chase That roam in woody Caledon.'

He made the drawing on a block 7 inches by 5 inches, and used his highest powers in rendering it as true to nature as he could; it is said that he always considered it to be his best work. After a few impressions had been taken off on paper and parchment, the block, which had been carelessly left by the printers in the direct rays of the sun, was split by the heat; and, though it was in after years clamped in gun-metal, no impressions could be taken which did not show {112} a trace of the accident. Happily, one of the original impressions on parchment may be seen in the Townsend Collection in the South Kensington Museum. Meanwhile the 'Quadrupeds' were going on bravely: Ralph Beilby compiled the necessary text, which Bewick revised where he could, and in 1790 the book was published. It sold so well that a second edition was issued in 1791, and a third in 1792. Since then it has been frequently reprinted. [The first edition consisted of 1,500 copies in demy octavo at 8s., and 100 in royal octavo at 12s. The price of the eighth edition, with additional cuts, published in 1825, was one guinea.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: TAIL-PIECE (_From 'The Quadrupeds'_)]

Besides the engravings of quadrupeds, the best that had appeared up to that time, the numerous tail-pieces which Bewick drew from nature charmed the public immensely. We give an example, one of them in which a small boy, said to be a young brother of the artist, is pulling a colt's tail, while the mother is rushing to his rescue. This little cut gives an admirable idea of their style. Many of them are humorous, many very pathetic, many grimly sarcastic, and all perfectly original. {113}

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE WOODc.o.c.k (_From 'The Water Birds'_)]

As soon as the success of the 'Quadrupeds' was a.s.sured, Bewick commenced without delay his still more celebrated book, the 'History of British Birds.' In making the drawings for this work he was much more at home, for he knew every feathered creature that flew within twenty miles of Ovingham, and it was all 'labour of love.' He worked with all his soul first at the 'Land Birds' and afterwards at the 'Water Birds,' and it is on these two books that Bewick's fame both as a draughtsman and an engraver princ.i.p.ally rests. We give a copy of the 'Yellowhammer,' which the artist himself considered to be one of his best works, and the 'Woodc.o.c.k,' in which all the excellences of his peculiar style may readily be traced.

The first volume, the 'Land Birds,' appeared in 1797, and was received with rapture by all lovers of nature. Again, {114} the tail-pieces, pictures in miniature, were applauded to the skies, and the gratified author was beset on all sides with congratulations. Mr. Beilby wrote the descriptions as before, and performed his work very creditably.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A FARMYARD (_From 'The Land Birds'_)]

The partnership between Ralph Beilby and Thomas Bewick was dissolved in 1797, and the descriptions to the second volume, 'The Water Birds,' which did not appear till 1804, were written by Bewick himself, and revised by the Rev. H. Cotes, Vicar of Bedlington. It is known that Bewick was a.s.sisted in the tail-pieces by his pupils, Robert Johnson as a draughtsman, and Luke Clennell as an engraver, but it is certain that every line was done under his immediate superintendence, and no doubt the originator of these excellent works was beginning to feel that he was no longer young.

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[Of the first edition of the 'Land Birds' 1,000 were printed in demy octavo at 10s. 6d., 850 on thin and thick royal octavo, at 13s. and 15s., and twenty-four on imperial octavo at 1 1s. The first edition of the 'Water Birds' in 1804 consisted of the same number of copies as that of the 'Land Birds,' but the prices were increased respectively to 12s., 15s., 18s., and 1 4s.]

The only book of importance on which Bewick was engaged after 1804 was an edition of 'aesop's Fables,' which was published in 1818. Mr. Chatto says: 'Whatever may be the merits or defects of the cuts in the Fables, Bewick certainly had little to do with them--for by far the greater number were designed by Robert Johnson and engraved by W. W. Temple and William Harvey, while yet in their apprenticeship.' Bewick amused himself by re-writing the Fables, to which he contributed a few of his own, but he was in no sense a literary man, and several of his greatest admirers openly expressed their disappointment at the book; even his supreme advocate, Dr. Dibdin, said: 'I will fearlessly and honestly aver that his "aesop" disappointed me.'