Graham's Magazine, Vol. XLI, No. 6, December 1852

It is, in fact, rapidly gaining the preference over metallic engraving; the great expense and very inferior durability of copper, and the coldness, hardness, and absence of richness which seem to be inherent to steel, having gone far to banish both from general use as ornaments or additions to printed books.

As the finest of all methods of reproducing large pictures and fine productions of art; as affording exquisite adornments for the walls of ornamented apartments – vastly superior, would people but believe it, to second-rate oil-paintings – as the legitimate treasures of hoarded portfolios, fine copperplate-engravings will and must ever hold their place. But for the illustration of books – as books must now be – accessible to the million, we fully believe that wood is the best, and soon to be almost the sole material.

The day of steel,1 we think and hope, is already past, for though we have seen good things executed on that most thankless and intractable of substances, we never saw such that we did not regret the time, the talent, and the toil, so comparatively wasted.

Now, to return to the history of wood-cutting proper, we find that but little improvement was effected in the mechanical part, little filling in, very slight efforts at representing texture, and scarcely any chiaro-scuro having been attempted, previous to the invention of movable types and the use of the press.

It is probable that Gutenberg first conceived the idea of movable types, at Strasburg, in or about 1436; and that “with the aid of Faust’s money, and Sheffer’s ingenuity,”2 the art was perfected at Mentz in or about 1452. “In the first book which appeared with a date and the printer’s name,” continues the author I have quoted above – “The Psalter printed by Faust and Scheffer at Mentz, in 1457 – the large initial letters, engraved on wood, and printed in red and blue ink, are the most beautiful specimens of this kind of ornament which the united efforts of the wood-engraver and the pressman have produced. They have been imitated in modern times but not excelled. As they are the first letters, in point of time, printed with two colors, so are they likely to continue the first in point of excellence.”

From this time the art made rapid progress, as connected with the press, which in a very rude and primitive state now came generally into vogue, though the machine of 1460 was as far different from one of Hoe’s marvelous power-presses as is an Indian’s bark canoe from an Atlantic steamer.

Between this date and the conclusion of the century, we find one wood-engraving by an unknown author, the frontispiece of Breydenbach’s Travels, so infinitely superior to every thing that succeeded it for many years as to deserve special notice. It contains the first specimen of cross-hatching known to exist, and attempts both shade and color, not without considerable effect. It is said, by the author above quoted, “not to be only the finest wood-engraving up to that date, but to be in point of design and execution as far superior to the best cuts in the Nuremberg Chronicle, as Albert Durer’s designs are to the cuts in the oldest edition of the ”Poor Preacher’s Bible.“ The engraved frontispiece, in question, bears the date 1486, the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493; and the Biblia Pauperum, as it is – probably erroneously – called, in various editions from 1462 to 1475.”

The following cut is a representation of the press in use at this period, and for some considerable time afterward. It is a fac-simile of an engraving of “the press of Jodocus Badius Ascensianus, from the title page of a book printed by him in 1498.”

The above engraving, although it is not inserted here as a specimen of the style of engraving at this date, but merely as a representation of the machinery in use at the time, may be regarded, on the whole, as about on an average with the ordinary work of the period, both as to design and execution; it is vastly superior to the cuts of the “Biblia Pauperum,” and “Speculum Humanæ Salvationis,” and yet more so to that of the Nuremberg Chronicles; it is inferior to the frontispiece of Breydenbach’s Travels, which, it has been stated above, is the chef-d’œuvre of this epoch; but, although slight and sketchy, it is in all respects superior to the hideous monstrosities which disgrace, in lieu of ornamenting, four-fifths of the cheap publications of the day.

We have now, however, arrived at a period when wood-engraving became not merely a calling, but an art; when painters of the highest degree, higher than ever before or since, were proud and pleased, and, what is more, able to be designers on wood for the engravers. From this date, until the troubles of the civil war and commonwealth in England, and religious conflicts on the continent of Europe, annihilated the arts, put the muses to flight – with one sublime exception – and almost overthrew society itself, such painters as Wolgemuth, and Pleydenwurth, Cranach, and Burgmair, and more famous yet, Albert Durer and Hans Holbein, became the chief patrons and promulgators of the art, constantly themselves designing and completing drawings on wood, for the engraver, although there is no reason for believing – but on the contrary every reason for denying – that these illustrious men ever employed themselves in actual cutting; which was then a process purely mechanical, practiced by persons utterly devoid of all knowledge either of composition or correct drawing. At this time, all the merit of the wood-cut rested with the designer and artist, none with the wood-cutter. Now it is shared by both alike, and to produce an excellent wood-engraving, excellence both in the artist and the engraver is indispensable. Of a bad or indifferent34 composition and design, the best engraver that ever lived cannot make a good picture. And in no smaller degree will the best picture ever composed and drawn by the best artist be ruined, and prove an utter failure, if intrusted to the hands of an ignorant, incompetent, or reckless engraver.

Albert Durer – of whom the following cut is a fac-simile likeness, from a wood-engraving designed by himself – was born at Nuremburg, May 20, 1471, the son of Albert Durer, a goldsmith by profession, a Hungarian by birth.

In those days goldsmiths were artists of the highest order; necessarily sculptors, designers and engravers – witness Benevenuto, Cellini, and others, such as Bandinelli, and various great Italians, whom it would be too long to note, scarcely inferior.

Ambitious of greater things, Durer became apprentice to Michael Wolgemuth, the principal painter of his age and country; and, after having served his time, traveled, married unhappily, and died ere he reached old age, but not before he obtained world-wide, and time-defying renown, as a great painter, as more than a great copperplate-engraver – for it is only the greatest of the present day who are capable of producing fac-similes of his works – and, what most concerns us, as a great patron and promoter of wood-engraving.

That he was no wood-engraver himself, is we consider certainly proved, although by proofs negative.

They are briefly these.

The designs of the wood-cuts ascribed to Albert are in all respects equal to the designs of copper-engravings, known to be both designed and engraved by himself.

The execution and handling on his copperplates is superior to those of any other artist of his day.

Of his wood-cuts, while the designs are transcendent, the execution is ordinary; nor is there any perceptible variation between the execution of the cuts attributed to him, and those known to have been cut by Resch, from his designs.

The style of Durer’s drawing on wood shows the hand of a man used to copper; and is not that the best calculated for producing effects on wood.

Now it is scarcely credible, or even to be imagined, that an artist, who should have attained, himself almost untaught – for whoever they were, he manifestly surpasses all his teachers – such wonderful power and facility in engraving on one substance, should not, with equal practice on a different substance, have evinced the same – or at least some– superiority in handling it.

“There are about two hundred subjects, engraved on wood,” we quote, as before, from Jackson’s History of Wood-Engraving, “which are marked with the initials of Albert Durer’s name, and the greater part of them, though evidently designed by the hand of a master, are engraved in a manner which certainly denotes no very great excellence. Of the remainder, which are better engraved, it would be difficult to point out one which displays execution so decidedly superior as to enable any person to say positively that it must have been cut by Durer. The earliest engravings on wood with Durer’s mark are sixteen cuts illustrative of the Apocalypse, first published in 1498; and between that and 1528, the year of his death, it is likely that nearly all the others were executed. The cuts of the Apocalypse generally are much superior to all wood-engravings that had previously appeared, both in design and execution; but if they be examined by any person conversant with the practice of the art, it will be perceived that their superiority is not owing to any delicacy in the lines, which would render them difficult to engrave, but from the ability of the person by whom they were drawn, and from his knowledge of the capabilities of the art. Looking at the state of wood-engraving at the period when those cuts were published, I cannot think that the artist who made the drawings would experience any difficulty in finding persons capable of engraving them.”

It matters not, however, to the history of the art, whether Durer engraved, or did not engrave, with his own hand; it is sufficient for us to know, that it was he, and his friends and successors, who raised it to the position which it in their time occupied, and which, after a dark interregnum, it now occupies again, how high to soar hereafter we know not.

The works of Durer, “The Triumphal Procession of Maximilian,” in which he was a collaborateur with Hans Burgmair, The “Dance Macaber,” ascribed improperly to Hans Holbein, all executed nearly at this period, if they did not attain the highest attainable pitch of perfection, fell not at least far short of it. If, in after days, the skill of the manual workman has increased, the excellence of the designer is less marked – or, what amounts to the same thing, the best designers have not, until within the last half century, applied their talents to this art. At all events, and all things considered, we may assume with Mr. Jackson, that “at no time does the art appear to have been more flourishing, or more highly esteemed, than in the reign of its great patron the Emperor Maximilian.”

From the date of the appearance of the Dance Macaber, which is considered by good judges equal at least to any wood-cuts ever executed, the art began to decline. In England – later, perhaps, to receive it than the more early refined nations of the continent – it lingered through the reign of Elizabeth; but during the reign of the bestial Scottish despot who succeeded her, and his unhappy race, went out, like an exhausted lamp, for want of nutriment. The Italian school yet for awhile clung to existence, distinguished by inferior vigor, but by superior finish and neatness both of drawing and workmanship, and then perished, effete before mature, and never, we believe, has again revived.

How low the art of wood-engraving sunk after the commencement of the seventeenth century, and how small appeared the chance of its ever rising again from its ashes, may be seen at a glance; by comparing the specimens above, none of them pretending to be exemplars of the finest work of their several epochs, with the following miserable abortion, than which, it needs not now to say, no tolerable apprentice, of one year’s standing in a respectable office, could, unless he tried to do so, produce any thing worse either in design or execution.

And yet this is a very fair example of the style of wood-engraving from the reign of Charles II. to that of George III., with few exceptions. In a word, for some unaccountable reason, this noble art, as an art, had fallen every where – though nowhere, as some persons have fancied, either disused or forgotten – into desuetude, neglect, and contempt, from about the year 1700, until near the close of the eighteenth century. This, too, occurred at a period when, in many other sister branches, art stood as high, perhaps higher than ever, when Antony Vandyke, and Peter Joly, and Godfrey Kneller, and Joshua Reynolds painted, and copper-engraving had shown no decadence, but the reverse, either on the Continent or in England.

On the 10th of August, 1753, at Cherryburn, near Newcastle on Tyne, in Northumberland, was born, the son of a poor owner of a small landsale colliery, Thomas Bewick, who, by his own almost unassisted talents, raised this art, single-handed, from utter disgrace, and all but oblivion, to its very highest pitch of excellence – for in generic drawing and engraving especially, he never has found, and probably never will find, an equal. Designer, draughtsman, engraver, three in one, he has produced wood-cuts which never have been approached, and of which it has been said by competent authority, that “every line that is to be perceived in this, is the best that could have been desired to express the engraver’s perfect idea of his subject.”

It is said that as a boy this great man was employed as a laborer at his father’s coal-pit; but this may be dismissed as improbable at least, since he was early sent to school by his father at the Parsonage House of Ovingham, in an adjoining parish, and was subsequently, in compliance with his own desire, apprenticed to Mr. Beilly, an engraver at Newcastle, where, having by a mere accident of the office been employed to cut some mathematical diagrams on wood, he acquired a taste for the art sufficient to urge him on, without much encouragement, to its prosecution. Shortly after the expiration of his apprenticeship, he returned to his father’s house, and there applied himself earnestly to the study of the art in which he was ultimately to gain so much renown.

In 1775, when he was twenty-two years old, he received a premium from the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures for a cut of “the Huntsman and the Old Hound,” which was first printed in an edition of Gay’s Fables, published by T. Saint, Newcastle, 1779 – a fac-simile of which is given below.

Although this juvenile engraving of the great master in no respect approaches the greatest, or even the average, of his mature works, it yet exhibits great talent and greater promise. The whole later tendency of wood-engraving, such as it was, had been toward conventional method, not toward the study and imitation of nature; and here at once, in his earliest success, we find the learner leaving all rules and precepts behind him, and dashing at once into the bold, free, and irregular imitations of nature, by which he was thereafter to achieve a reputation, create a school, and redeem a noble art from the disrepute into which it had fallen; not – as some foolishly have asserted – to revive a lost or forgotten art; for wood-cutting never had been, even in the worst times, disused, but only degraded from its high estate and abused to base purposes.

It must be evident that within the limits of an article, such as this, it must be impossible to enter fully into the merits and peculiarities of all the wood-engravers of four centuries; when at the present day alone there are living more than twenty, to each of whom more than an equal space were fairly due, if we but had the space to bestow in proportion to their deserts. As it is, even on Bewick, greatest, in our opinion, most original, most truthful to nature, and least a mannerist of all who have succeeded or preceded him, we can dwell long enough only to speak of him generally as the founder of the modern school, superior in delineation of texture, in force, in spirit, and in the true feeling and genius of the art of wood-cutting, to all the world beside. To those who are acquainted with his “British Birds,” we need only refer to his “woodcock” and his “partridge,” more especially, in justification of our unqualified praise and admiration; to those who are not, we can only give our earnest advice to become acquainted with them as soon as may be. Bewick had many scholars and pupils, who have brought down his reputation and much of his skill to the present day. Mr. Harvey, one of his most eminent successors, long considered his best pupil, has given up engraving for designing, still maintaining high character for ability; but, though a man of unquestioned talent, he is rather too much of a mannerist greatly to delight ourselves. The delicious foliage of Linton, king of all modern artists, is known to all our readers from the fine wood-cuts in the illustrated London papers; as are the traits and characteristics of Thompson, Foster, and half a dozen others, although their names may not be so familiar as their works. Beyond all doubt, the English school of wood-cutting, whether for loose, sketchy, landscape, or elaborate portraiture, is now the finest, freest, simplest, and most natural in the world; the French excel in a sort of bold pen and inky style of character and caste delineation – but it is national, not universal – tricky, not artistical, and lacking the “touch of nature which makes the whole world kin.”

No country has, however, made such wonderful strides in this art as America; for twenty years ago scarce twenty wood-engravings were published annually in America; now we should be afraid to say how many times twenty thousand.

Then, there were, to the best of our memory, but two wood-cutters of any great note or merit – certainly in New York, we believe in America. Dr. Alex’r. Anderson, supposed to be the first who produced any thing worthy of note in this profession, commenced the business, which he still pursues, in 1798 or 1799. Mr. J. A. Adams was the next, who applied himself to the art in 1826. He has now retired, it is understood, on a handsome competency earned by his talent and industry; chiefly, it is said, through his engagement on Harper’s illustrated Bible, a work which owes its celebrity to its prestige, as being the first thing of the kind issued in the United States, and by no means to its merits as a work of art. When issued, in the opinions of those who knew, it was barely tolerable for this country, in which the art was nearly unknown; were it to appear now, it would be merely contemptible.

Not to be over boastful of our own columns, we do not fear to challenge comparison between the generic cuts of game, which have appeared in Graham, within the last two years, from the gravers of Devereux and Brightly, against any thing of their character since the days of Bewick. The cuts of Orr – to whom we had intended to allude more fully – in this paper, as well as those of Devereux generally, prove what we shall do hereafter. But want of space, in this number, circumscribes much complimentary mention of these and many other artists.

Note. – The head and tail-pieces of this article, without assuming to be splendid or unusual specimens of art, are given as characteristic examples of the modern style in the treatment of foliage and architecture.