Wood
Engraving
It
is only in English that a distinction is
commonly made between wood engraving and
woodcut. In French the cumbersome phrase gravure
sur bois au canif exists but usually gravure
sur bois or even just bois,
as with the German Holzshnitt,
is used for both woodcuts and wood engravings.
Appropriately original wood engraving is
also a quintessentially English art.
The
wood engraver’s principal tool is
a burin, a sharpened steel rod with a triangular
or lozenge shaped section secured in a
wooden handle, similar to a copper line-engraver’s
burin. Variations in section and purpose
rejoice in such names as scorpers, spitstickers,
bullstickers and tint tools. The burin
can achieve very fine detail, but only
on a hard, dense surface of wood, such
as box, which has been cut across the grain
(known as end-grain). Because box is very
slow growing only small blocks are available,
this has led to wood engravings often being
on an intimate scale. For
larger images several blocks are joined
together by tongue and groove. For ease
of manipulation the engraver often works
with the block resting on a small leather
cushion filled with sand and known as a
sandbag (see image to the right of
a wood engraver at work).
Wood
engraving reverses the procedure of woodcut.
The design is incised into the woodblock
leaving the unengraved surface in relief
to receive the ink, so that the design
prints ‘white’ against a black
ground. As in the intaglio technique of
mezzotint, the wood engraver works from
darkness towards light. Although
the first treatise on wood engraving was
published in 1776 in France by J M Papillon,
it was the Newcastle engraver, Thomas Bewick,
who revealed its potential and developed
and perfected the technique. Through Bewick’s
apprentices, such as Luke Clennell, the
fashion spread to London, and was adapted
to the reproduction of journalistic drawings.
By Victorian times, throughout Europe,
thousands were employed as ‘woodpeckers’ to
cut woodblock illustrations for newspapers,
periodicals and books.
Whereas
Bewick had engraved his own designs into
his blocks, Victorian wood engraving was
used for reproductive purposes; technically
skilful but often soulless. Photo-engraving
techniques developed in the 1860’s
ended this commercial exploitation and
wood engraving was rediscovered by artists
as an original medium for printmaking.
As
an exception to the reproductive rule and
subsequently of seminal influence were
the original wood engravings made by William
Blake to illustrate Dr Thornton’s
school edition of “The Pastorals
of Virgil”, 1821 (see illustration
immediately below).
The publisher thought Blake’s images
so crude they were almost abandoned; it
was the enthusiastic support of fellow
artists that prompted their use. And artists
and print collectors have been fervent
admirers since.
“Colinet departs in Sorrow”.
One of William Blake’s miniature wood
engravings, measuring only 35 x 75 mm, to
illustrate ‘The Pastorals of Virgil’,
1821.
Edward Calvert (one of The Ancients – followers
of Blake) wrote of Blake’s
wood engravings
-‘They are done as if by a child, several
of them careless
and incorrect, yet there
is a spirit in them, humble enough and of
force
enough to move simple souls to tears.’
From
the 1890’s the artists of the Private
Press movement, Charles Ricketts, Lucien
Pissarro, Gordon Craig and slightly later
Eric Gill, Robert Gibbings, &c. took
wood engraving into new realms. Noel Rooke
began to give lessons in the technique
at the Central School of Art from 1912
and inspired and trained a whole generation,
who produced both independent prints as
well as images for book illustration. The
popularity of the medium was confirmed
in 1920 with the founding of The Society
of Wood Engravers (SWE.).
Wood
engraving has attracted a larger number
of women artists than any other of the
printmaking techniques, of whom several,
such as Claire Leighton, Gwen Raverat and
Gertrude Hermes, are pre-eminent in the
medium.
 Agnes
Miller Parker (1895–1980):
"
The
Challenge".
Wood engraving,
1934.
(143
x 164 mm).
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