

Figure 13. — "Pintail Duck" by Iiiomas Bewick 

 (actual size), from History of British birds, vol. 2, 

 1804. The detail opposite is enlarged three times. 



^'■^C^'^Hlii^' 



At about the same time the all-iron Stanhope press 

 began to be manufactured in quantity, and shortly the 

 new inking roller invented by the indispensable Earl 

 came into use to supplant the old inking balls. 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 faith- 

 full\ that all the original textures were apparent.^" 

 The engraver, concerned entirely with accurate repro- 

 duction, became little more than a mechanic whv 

 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. 



'" The elcctrotyping proccs,s, which came into prominence in 

 1839 throut;h the experiments of Professor J acobi in St. Peters- 

 burg and Jordan and .Spencer in England, had made it possible 

 to produce substitute 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 direc- 

 tion of commercialism to fill an overwhelming mass 

 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 effeciix'eness 

 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 contem- 

 porary 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 cf academic 

 training saved him from the inanity of repeating the 

 old decorative devices — trophies, cartouches, classical 

 figures, Roman ruins, and other international con- 

 ventions that had lost their significance by the 1780's, 

 although a spurious classicism was still kept alive for 

 genteel consumption and the romantic picturesque 

 still persisted in interior decoration. 



Figure 14. — Titi.e-Pagk Illi'stration by Thomas 

 Bewick, horn History of British birds, vol. i, 1797- 

 (Actual size.) 



200 



BULLETIN 218: CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE MUSEUM OF HISTORY .^ND TECHNOLOGY 



