XI J 



INTRODUCTION. 



designers cut their own drawings on the wood, this part of the labour being 

 given over to men (and it is said sometimes to women) who had no know- 

 ledge of Art, but who knew how to cut wood round the lines drawn on 

 the flat surface, and who worked under the guiding eye of the draughtsman.* 

 The works of Thomas Bewick are of quite a different class. They, too, 

 as designs, are of the supremest quality. They were not only conceived 

 and drawn, but were also engraved by him. As the productions of a 

 thorough artist, each may be looked on as exemplifying the legitimate 

 condition of the Art of Engraving on Wood, as opposed to plate engraving, 

 and as different from simple wood cutting. A wood engraving ought, as 

 a matter of course, to be a work which cannot be given in a better way 

 by any other method for the purpose for which it is intended to be 

 employed. The greatest use of wood engraving is to have it worked 

 together with type for letterpress printing, and this being what no other 

 method of artistic production could, until very recent years, readily be 

 adapted to, therefore the first consideration is the fulfilment of this condition. 

 It is quite possible so to engrave a wood block that it cannot satisfactorily 

 be printed from. 



The most artistic work is what is termed "white -line" engraving, 

 obtained by cutting the lines forming the picture into the wood. Fac- 

 simile engraving, or as it is sometimes, though perhaps not quite correctly, 

 called, "black-line" work, is produced by cutting away the wood so as 

 to leave the lines drawn by the artist untouched — cross-hatched or other- 

 wise — a style now much more extensively practised than the former. For 

 this less freedom can be allowed than for the other, as the engraver or 

 cutter must carefully, almost servilely, avoid the artist's pencil strokes, 

 and show his skill (and that sometimes he does admirably) by trained hand 



* It is to be remembered, therefore, in examining these old German woodcuts, that while the designs are, for the 

 purpose, of the highest quality, the engraving, or, more exactly, the cutting of these blocks is only a mechanical result^ 

 and one not at all to be admired for its own sake, it being often rude in the extreme. 



