IOO 



THOMAS BEWICK. 



and minute character of the foliage ; the trees, which form a rich back- 

 ground, seem to have had more loving labour bestowed on them than the 

 animal itself ; and the intensely realistic plants on the ground show how care- 

 fully and patiently Bewick studied from nature, and how triumphant the 

 master could render his art when the subject was one in which his whole soul 

 delighted. Bewick was one of the earliest English artists to go direct to 

 nature and transfer her forms unaltered to his picture, and this at a time when 

 landscape painting was little practised in England, and when illogical Sir 

 Joshua was discoursing on Generalisation and the Grand Style as the only 

 true means of attaining distinction. Bewick might in our day have been styled 

 a Pre-Raphaelite, "retaining in his delineation of natural scenery a fidelity 

 to the facts of science so rigid as to make his work at once acceptable and 

 credible to the most sternly critical intellect ;" and the engraving of the vege- 

 tation in the Chillingham Bull is one of the most striking proofs of this 

 faculty. It is a cut too precious to be lost sight of or neglected by those 

 who would study art in all its phases. 



Opinions, nevertheless, differ as to the artistic value of the Chillingham 

 Bull. Bewick himself is said to have considered it his chief work, which it 

 undoubtedly is as a separate engraving, and many are still of the same opinion. 

 Chatto, in the "Treatise on Wood Engraving," makes a very guarded 

 estimate of its value. He says — 



" Though it is well engraved, and the character of the animal is well expressed, 

 yet as a wood engraving it will not bear a comparison with several of the cuts in his 

 ' History of British Birds.' The grass and the foliage of this are most beautifully 

 expressed, but there is a want of variety in the more distant trees, and the bark of 

 that in the foreground to the left is too rough. This exaggeration of the roughness 

 of the bark of the trees is also to be perceived in many of his other cuts. The style 

 in which the bull is engraved is admirably adapted to express the texture of the 

 short white hair of the animal ; the dew-lap, however, is not well represented, as it 

 appears to be stiff instead of flaccid and pendulous : and the lines intended for hairs 

 on its margin are too wiry." 



The British Quarterly Review, in an article in 1845, a ^ so speaks somewhat 



