Why Bewick Succeeded Part 2

[21] Dobson, _op. cit._ (footnote 8), p. 56.

Even in the _Select fables of Aesop and others_ of 1784, when Bewick's special gifts began to emerge, the cuts on laid paper appeared weak in comparison with his later work. Bewick was still using wood engraving as a cheaper, more quickly executed subst.i.tute for the woodcut. The designs were based upon Croxall's edition of _Aesop's Fables_, published in 1722, which was probably the best and most popular ill.u.s.trated book published in England during the century up to Bewick's time. According to Chatto, the cuts were made with the burin on end-grain wood, probably by Kirkall,[22] but Bewick believed they were engraved on type metal.[23] It was not easy to tell the difference. Type metal usually made grayer impressions than wood and sometimes, but not always, nail-head marks appeared where the metal was fastened to the wood base.

The Croxall cuts, in turn, were adapted with little change from 17th-century sources--etchings by Francis Barlow and line engravings by Sebastian Le Clerc. Bewick's cuts repeated the earlier designs but changed the locale to the English countryside of the late 18th century.

This was to be expected; to have a contemporary meaning the actors of the old morality play had to appear in modern dress and with up-to-date scenery. But technically the cuts followed the pattern of Croxall's wood engraver, although with a slightly greater range of tone. Artistically Bewick's interpretation was inferior because it was more literal; it lacked the grander feeling of the earlier work.

Bewick really became the prophet of a new pictorial style in his _A general history of quadrupeds_, published in 1790 on wove paper (see figs. 8, 9, and 10). Here his animals and little vignetted tailpieces of observations in the country announced an original subject for ill.u.s.tration and a fresh treatment of wood engraving, although some designs were still copied from earlier models. The white line begins to function with greater elasticity; tones and details beyond anything known previously in the medium appear with the force of innovation. The paper was still somewhat coa.r.s.e and the cuts were often gray and muddy.

But the audacity of the artist in venturing tonal subtleties was immediately apparent.

[22] Chatto, _op. cit._ (footnote 6), p. 448.

[23] Thomas Bewick, _Fables of Aesop and others_, Newcastle, 1818.

One of Bewick's old friends at Newcastle had been William Bulmer, who by the 1790's had become a famous printer. In 1795 he published an edition of _Poems by Goldsmith and Parnell_, which was preceded by an Advertis.e.m.e.nt announcing his intentions:

The present volume ... [is] particularly meant to combine the various beauties of PRINTING, TYPE-FOUNDING, ENGRAVING, and PAPER-MAKING.... The ornaments are all engraved on blocks of wood, by two of my earliest acquaintances, Messrs. Bewick [Thomas and his brother and apprentice John], of Newcastle upon Tyne and London, after designs made from the most interesting pa.s.sages of the Poems they embellish. They have been executed with great care, and I may venture to say, without being supposed to be influenced by ancient friendship, that they form the most extraordinary effort of the art of engraving upon wood that ever was produced in any age, or any country. Indeed it seems almost impossible that such delicate effects could be obtained from blocks of wood. Of the Paper, it is only necessary to say that it comes from the manufactory of Mr.

Whatman.

The following year, 1796, a companion volume, _The Chase, a Poem_, by William Somervile, appeared with cuts by Bewick after drawings by his brother John (see fig. 11). In both books, although no acknowledgment was given, there was considerable a.s.sistance from pupils Robert and John Johnson and Charlton Nesbit, as well as from an artist a.s.sociate Richard Westall.[24] Bulmer was quite conscious that a new era in printing and ill.u.s.tration had begun. Updike[25] notes Bulmer's recognition of the achievements of both Baskerville and Bewick in giving the art of printing a new basis:

To understand the causes of the revival of English printing which marked the last years of the century, we must remember that by 1775 Baskerville was dead.... There seems to have been a temporary lull in English fine printing and the kind of type-founding that contributed to it. The wood-engraving of Thomas Bewick, produced about 1780, called, nevertheless, for more brilliant and delicate letter-press than either Caslon's or Wilson's types could supply.

If Baskerville's fonts had been available, no doubt they would have served.... So the next experiments in typography were made by a little coterie composed of the Boydells, the Nicols, the Bewicks (Thomas and John), and Bulmer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 9.--Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick (actual size), from _A general history of quadrupeds_, 1790, in the collections of the Library of Congress.]

When the cuts in this book are compared with earlier impressions from wood blocks, the difference is quickly seen. The blocks are more highly wrought, yet every line is crisp and clear and the impressions are black and brilliant. When we realize that the only new technological factor of any consequence was the use of good smooth wove paper, we can appreciate its significance.

There were no other developments of note in the practice of printing during the 18th century. The old wooden hand press, unimproved except for minor devices, was still in universal use. Ink was little improved; paper was handmade; type was made from hand moulds. The ink was still applied by dabbing with inking b.a.l.l.s of wool-stuffed leather nailed to wooden forms. The leather was still kept soft by removing it and soaking it in urine, after which it was trampled for some time to complete the unsavory operation. Paper still had to be dampened overnight before printing, and freshly inked sheets were still hung to dry over cords stretched across the room.

[24] D. C. Thomson, _The life and works of Thomas Bewick_, London, 1882, p. 152.

[25] D. B. Updike, _Printing types, their history, forms and use_, Cambridge and London, 1922, vol. 2, pp. 122, 123.

But with a more sympathetic surface for receiving ink from relief blocks, a new avenue for wood engraving was now open. In the following year, 1797, the first volume of Bewick's finest and best-known work was published. This was the _History of British birds_, for which he and his pupils did the cuts while Ralph Beilby, his partner and former master, provided the descriptions (see figs. 12, 13, and 14.) It achieved an immense and instantaneous popularity that carried the artist's name over the British Isles. The attractiveness of the subject, the freshness of the medium--which could render the softness of feathers and could be interspersed with text--the powerful and decorative little tail pieces, and the comparative inexpensiveness of the volumes, brought the _Birds_ into homes everywhere.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 10.--Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick (actual size), from _A general history of quadrupeds_, 1790, in the collections of the Library of Congress.]

Actually, wood engraving was not immediately adopted on a wide scale.

Having done without it for so long, printers and publishers made no concerted rush to avail themselves of the new type of cuts. Bewick's pupils found little of this kind of work to do before about 1830. Luke Clennell dropped engraving for painting; William Harvey restricted himself to drawing and designing; Charlton Nesbit and John Jackson remained engravers, as did a host of lesser individuals. Dobson says:[26]

The pupils who quitted him to seek their fortunes in London either made their way with difficulty, or turned to other pursuits, and the real popularization of wood-engraving did not take place until some years after his death.

One reason for delay in adopting the new technique may have been the danger of the block splitting, or of the sections of wood coming apart at the mortise-joints during the printing operation. If this happened, work had to be suspended until a new block was engraved, or until the sections were reglued. For periodicals with deadlines, this was a serious hazard.

Wood Engraving and the Stereotype

In any event, wood engraving did not really flourish until a practical stereotyping process was perfected. By this procedure subst.i.tute blocks of type metal could replace the wood engravings in the press, and the danger of splitting the block was eliminated. The first steps of any importance toward a practical process were made by the Earl of Stanhope around 1800, but not until Claude Genoux in France, between 1828 and 1829, developed the papier mache or wet mat process could acceptable stereotypes of entire pages be produced.[27] By this method, patented on July 24, 1829, and others that followed, a number of duplicate plates of each page could be made as required for rapid printing on a battery of presses. Wood engraving now emerged as a practical method of ill.u.s.tration for popular publications. The _Penny Magazine_ and the _Sat.u.r.day Magazine_, founded in 1832, immediately made use of Genoux's stereotyping process. Dobson[28] describes the effect of these periodicals:

"The art of wood engraving received an astonishing impact from these publications. The engraver, instead of working merely with his own hands, has been obliged to take five or six pupils to get through the work." (Mr. Cowper's evidence before the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, 1835). It is difficult nowadays [1884] to understand what a revelation these two periodicals, with their representations of far countries and foreign animals, of masterpieces of painting and sculpture, were to middle-cla.s.s households fifty years ago.

[26] Dobson, _op. cit._ (footnote 8), p. 174.

[27] George Kubler, _A history of stereotyping_, New York, 1941, p. 75.

[28] Dobson, _op. cit._ (footnote 8), p. 173.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 11.--Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick (actual size), engraved after a drawing by John Bewick, from _The Chase_, by William Somervile, 1796. (_Photo courtesy the Library of Congress._)]

We will not pursue Bewick's career further. With habits of hard work deeply ingrained, he kept at his bench until his death in 1828, engraving an awesome quant.i.ty of cuts. But he never surpa.s.sed his work on the _Birds_, although his reputation grew in proportion to the spread of wood engraving throughout the world.

The medium became more and more detailed, and eventually rivaled photography in its minute variations of tone (see figs. 15 and 16). But printing wood engravings never was a problem again. Not only was wove paper always used in this connection, but it had become much cheaper through the invention of a machine for producing it in lengths. Nicholas Louis Robert, in France, had developed and exhibited such an apparatus in 1797, at the instigation of M. Didot. John Gamble in England, working with Henry and Charles Fourdrinier, engaged a fine mechanic, Bryan Donkin, to build a machine on improved principles. The first comparatively successful one was completed in 1803. It was periodically improved, and wove paper appeared in increasing quant.i.ties. Spicer[29]

says: "Naturally these improvements and economies in the manufacture of paper were accompanied by a corresponding increase in output. Where, in 1806, a machine was capable of making 6 cwt. in twelve hours, in 1813 it could turn out double that quant.i.ty in the same time at one quarter the expense."

[29] A. D. Spicer, _The paper trade_, London, 1907, p. 63.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 12.--Wood Engraving by W. J. Linton, 1878 (Actual Size). The detail opposite is enlarged four times to show white line-technique.]

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 13.--"Pintail Duck" by Thomas Bewick (actual size), from _History of British birds_, vol. 2, 1804. The detail opposite is enlarged three times.]

At about the same time the all-iron Stanhope press began to be manufactured in quant.i.ty, and shortly the new inking roller invented by the indispensable Earl came into use to supplant the old inking b.a.l.l.s.

Later in the century (there is no need to go into specific detail here) calendered and coated papers were introduced, and wood engraving on these glossy papers became a medium that could reproduce wash drawings, crayon drawings, pencil drawings, and oil paintings so faithfully that all the original textures were apparent.[30] The engraver, concerned entirely with accurate reproduction, became little more than a mechanic who rendered pictures drawn on the blocks by an artist. In time, photographic processes came to be used for transferring pictures to the blocks and eventually, of course, photomechanical halftones replaced the wood engraver altogether.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 14.--t.i.tle-Page Ill.u.s.tration by Thomas Bewick, from _History of British birds_, vol. 1, 1797. (Actual size.)]

[30] The electrotyping process, which came into prominence in 1839 through the experiments of Professor Jacobi in St. Petersburg and Jordan and Spencer in England, had made it possible to produce subst.i.tute plates of the highest fidelity. For fine work, these were much superior to stereotyping.

Bewick was an artist, not a reproductive craftsman. His blocks were conceived as original engravings, not as imitations of tones and textures created in another medium. If wood engraving advanced in the direction of commercialism to fill an overwhelming ma.s.s need, it was only because he had given it a technical basis. But it had greater artistic potentialities, as proved by Blake, Calvert, and Lepere, among others, and has found new life in the engravers of the 20th-century revival.

The reasons for Bewick's remarkable effectiveness can now be summed up.

He succeeded, first, because he was the natural inheritor of a specifically English graphic arts process, burin-engraving on the end grain of wood. This had been practiced almost solely in England, which lacked a woodcut tradition, for about 75 years before the date he finished his apprenticeship. We know from Jackson's contemporary account that end-grain wood engraving was standard practice in England from about 1700. Bewick merely continued and refined a medium that came down to him as a national tradition.

Secondly, his country isolation and lack of academic training saved him from the inanity of repeating the old decorative devices--trophies, cartouches, cla.s.sical figures, Roman ruins, and other international conventions that had lost their significance by the 1780's, although a spurious cla.s.sicism was still kept alive for genteel consumption and the romantic picturesque still persisted in interior decoration.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

Thirdly, he looked at life and nature with a fresh eye, without preconceptions. While his lack of larger vision held him down as an artist, it contributed to his feeling for natural textures and story-telling detail. His approach to ill.u.s.tration, therefore, was the spontaneous expression of an observant but unimaginative nature, coated with a bitter-sweet sentiment. It was this quality, so homely and common and yet so charged with integrity, that delivered the shock of recognition to a ma.s.s audience.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly in the long run, he was fortunate enough to live at a time when a necessary prerequisite for the physical appearance of his work, wove paper, was coming into use. Without it he would soon have had to simplify his line system, returning to older and less detailed methods, or his work would have remained unprintable. It was the new paper that allowed him to extract unprecedented subtleties from the wood block, that made his cuts print clearly and evenly, and that encouraged the expansion of the wood engraving process. These factors, taken together, make up the phenomenon of Thomas Bewick.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Figure 15.--Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick, from _History of British birds_, vol. 2, 1804. (Actual size.)]

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