Wood engraving

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Thomas Bewick. Barn Owl (Tyto alba) in History of

British Birds. 1797–1804.
Leather-covered sandbag, wood blocks and tools
(burins), used in wood engraving

Wood engraving is a printmaking and

letterpress printing technique, in which
an artist works an image or matrix of
images into a block of wood.
Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses
relief printing, where the artist applies ink
to the face of the block and prints using
relatively low pressure. By contrast,
ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a
metal plate for the matrix, and is printed
by the intaglio method, where the ink fills
the valleys, the removed areas. As a
result, wood engravings deteriorate less
quickly than copper-plate engravings, and
have a distinctive white-on-black
character.

Thomas Bewick developed the wood

engraving technique at the end of the
18th century.[1] His work differed from
earlier woodcuts in two key ways. First,
rather than using woodcarving tools such
as knives, Bewick used an engraver's
burin (graver). With this, he could create
thin delicate lines, often creating large
dark areas in the composition. Second,
wood engraving traditionally uses the
wood's end grain—while the older
technique used the softer side grain. The
resulting increased hardness and
durability facilitated more detailed
images.

Wood-engraved blocks could be used on

conventional printing presses, which
were going through rapid mechanical
improvements during the first quarter of
the 19th century. The blocks were made
the same height as, and composited
alongside, movable type in page layouts
—so printers could produce thousands of
copies of illustrated pages with almost
no deterioration. The combination of this
new wood engraving method and
mechanized printing drove a rapid
expansion of illustrations in the 19th
century. Further, advances in stereotype
let wood-engravings be reproduced onto
metal, where they could be mass-
produced for sale to printers.

By the mid-19th century, many wood

engravings rivaled copperplate
engravings.[2] Wood engraving was used
to great effect by 19th-century artists
such as Edward Calvert, and its heyday
lasted until the early and mid-20th
century when remarkable achievements
were made by Eric Gill, Eric Ravilious and
others. Though less used now, the
technique is still prized in the early 21st
century as a high-quality specialist
technique of book illustration, and is
promoted, for example, by the Society of
Wood Engravers, who hold an annual
exhibition in London and other British
venues.

History

This is a large wood engraving on an 1883 cover of

Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Such news
engravings were composed of multiple component
blocks, combined to form a single image, so as to
divide the work among a number of engravers
divide the work among a number of engravers.

In 15th- and 16th-century Europe,

woodcuts were a common technique in
printmaking and printing, yet their use as
an artistic medium began to decline in
the 17th century. They were still made for
basic printing press work such as
newspapers or almanacs. These required
simple blocks that printed in relief with
the text—rather than the elaborate
intaglio forms in book illustrations and
artistic printmaking at the time, in which
type and illustrations were printed with
separate plates and techniques.
The beginnings of modern wood
engraving techniques developed at the
end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th
century, with the works of Englishman
Thomas Bewick. Bewick generally
engraved harder woods, such as
boxwood, rather than the woods used in
woodcuts, and he engraved the ends of
blocks instead of the side.[2] Finding a
woodcutting knife not suitable for
working against the grain in harder
woods, Bewick used a burin (or graver),
an engraving tool with a V-shaped cutting
tip.[2] From the beginning of the
nineteenth century Bewick's techniques
gradually came into wider use, especially
in Britain and the United States.
Alexander Anderson introduced the
technique to the United States. Bewick's
work impressed him, so he reverse
engineered and imitated Bewick's
technique—using metal until he learned
that Bewick used wood.[3] There it was
further expanded upon by his students,
Joseph Alexander Adams,

Growth of illustrated
publications

Besides interpreting details of light and

shade, from the 1820s onwards,
engravers used the method to reproduce
freehand line drawings. This was, in
many ways an unnatural application,
since engravers had to cut away almost
all the surface of the block to produce
the printable lines of the artist's drawing.
Nonetheless, it became the most
common use of wood engraving.

Examples include the cartoons of Punch

magazine, the pictures in the Illustrated
London News and Sir John Tenniel's
illustrations to Lewis Carroll's works, the
latter engraved by the firm of Dalziel
Brothers. In the United States, wood-
engraved publications also began to take
hold, such as Harper's Weekly.

Frank Leslie, a British-born engraver who

had headed the engraving department of
the Illustrated London News, immigrated
to the United States in 1848, where he
developed a means to divide the labor for
making wood engravings. A single design
was divided into a grid, and each
engraver worked on a square. The blocks
were then assembled into a single image.
This process formed the basis for his
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
which competed with Harper's in
illustrating scenes from the American
Civil War.

New techniques and

technologies
The modified technique in the wood engraving
Crucifixion of Jesus by Gustave Doré.

By the mid-19th century, electrotyping

was developed, which could reproduce a
wood engraving on metal.[4] By this
method, a single wood-engraving could
be mass-produced for sale to printshops,
and the original retained without wear.

Until 1860, artists working for engraving

had to paint or draw directly on the
surface of the block and the original
artwork was actually destroyed by the
engraver. In 1860, however, the engraver
Thomas Bolton invented a process for
transferring a photograph onto the block.

At about the same time, French

engravers developed a modified
technique (partly a return to that of
Bewick) in which cross-hatching (one set
of parallel lines crossing another at an
angle) was almost entirely eliminated.
Instead, all tonal gradations were
rendered by white lines of varying
thickness and closeness, sometimes
broken into dots for the darkest areas.
This technique appears in engravings
from Gustave Doré's drawings.

Towards the end of the 19th century, a

combination of Bolton's 'photo on wood'
process and the increased technical
virtuosity initiated by the French school
gave wood engraving a new application
as a means of reproducing drawings in
water-colour wash (as opposed to line
drawings) and actual photographs. This
is exemplified in illustrations in The
Strand Magazine during the 1890s. With
the new century, improvements in the
half-tone process rendered this kind of
reproductive engraving obsolete. In a
less sophisticated form, it survived in
advertisements and trade catalogues
until about 1930. With this change, wood
engraving was left free to develop as a
creative form in its own right, a
movement prefigured in the late 1800s by
such artists as Joseph Crawhall II and
the Beggarstaff Brothers.

Timothy Cole was a traditional wood

engraver, executing copies from museum
paintings on commission from
magazines such as The Century
Magazine.

Technique
This original wood block by Thomas Bewick is made
to type height so it could be used in a letterpress.

The block shown from above. Notice the circular

area marking damaged and repaired wood on the
left next to the figure of a man.

A print made from the block. The repaired circular

area is visible on the right between the man and the
dog.

Wood engraving blocks are typically

made of boxwood or other hardwoods
such as lemonwood or cherry. They are
expensive to purchase because end-grain
wood must be a section through the
trunk or large bough of a tree. Some
modern wood engravers use substitutes
made of PVC or resin, mounted on MDF,
which produce similarly detailed results
of a slightly different character.

The block is manipulated on a "sandbag"

(a sand-filled circular leather cushion).
This helps the engraver produce curved
or undulating lines with minimal
manipulation of the cutting tool.

Wood engravers use a range of

specialized tools. The lozenge graver is
similar to the burin used by copper
engravers of Bewick's day, and comes in
different sizes. Various sizes of V-shaped
graver are used for hatching. Other, more
flexible, tools include the spitsticker, for
fine undulating lines; the round scorper
for curved textures; and the flat scorper
for clearing larger areas.

Wood engraving is generally a black-and-

white technique. However, a handful of
wood engravers also work in colour,
using three or four blocks of primary
colours—in a way parallel to the four-
colour process in modern printing. To do
this, the printmaker must register the
blocks (make sure they print in exactly
the same place on the page). Recently,
engravers have begun to use lasers to
engrave wood.

Engraving for Dante's Paradise (Paradiso) by Doré

Don Quijote engraving by Paul Gustave Louis

Christophe Doré
Another Don Quijote engraving by Doré, who
preferred to work with wood engravings.

Notable wood engravers

Joseph Alexander Adams
Leonard Baskin
Thomas Bewick
Torsten Billman
Edward Calvert
Vija Celmins
Timothy Cole
Arthur Comfort
Rosemary Feit Covey
Honoré Daumier
John DePol
Gustave Doré
Godefroy Durand
Nicolas Eekman
Fritz Eichenberg
Andy English
M. C. Escher
William Biscombe Gardner
Eric Gill
Barbara Greg
Greta Hopkinson
Barbara Howard, RCA
Blair Hughes-Stanton
Eduard Magnus Jakobson
David Jones (poet)
Rockwell Kent
Paul Landacre
Julius John Lankes (J.J.Lankes)
John Lawrence
Clare Leighton
Frank Leslie
William James Linton
Iain Macnab
Adolph Menzel
Barry Moser
Zdeněk Mézl
John Nash
Paul Nash
Thomas Nast
Agnes Miller Parker
Garrick Palmer
H.W. Peckwell
Howard Phipps
Monica Poole
Howard Pyle
Eric Ravilious
Gwen Raverat
 Don Rico
Gaylord Schanilec
Reynolds Stone
John Thompson
Nora S. Unwin
Félix Vallotton
Manuel Vermeire
Lynd Ward
Richard Wagener
Alexander Weygers
John Buckland Wright

See also
Flammarion engraving, a celebrated
wood engraving.
References
1. "Thomas Bewick 1753 - 1828" . Tate
Online. Retrieved 15 November 2017.
2. Richter, Emil Heinrich (1914). Prints : a
brief review of their technique and
history . Boston: Houghton. pp. 114–115,
118–119.
3. Fuller, Sarah E. (1867). A Manual of
Instruction in the Art of Wood Engraving .
Boston: J. Watson. pp. 6–9.
4. Emerson, William Andrew (1876).
Practical Instruction in the Art of Wood
Engraving . East Douglass, Mass.: C.J.
Batcheller. pp. 51–52.

Bibliography
Brett, Simon. An engravers globe( )
ISBN 1-901648-12-5
Brett, Simon. Wood Engraving: How to
do it (3rd ed. 2011 ) ISBN 1-901648-23-
0; 1-901648-24-9 (hbk.)
Simon Brett, Engravers: A Handbook for
the Nineties (1987. Silent Books)
Carrington, James B.. 'American
Illustration and the Reproductive Arts',
in Scribner's Magazine; ( July 1992),
pp. 123–128.
Garrett, Albert. British Wood Engraving
of the 20th Century: A Personal View
(1980)
Garrett, Albert. A History of British
Wood Engraving (1978)
Taylor, Welford Dunaway "The Woodcut
Art of J.J.Lankes" David R. Godine,
Publisher. Boston pp. 112 ISBN 1-
56792-049-7
O'Donnell, Kevin E. "Book and
Periodical Illustration [in America,
1820-1870]." American History through
Literature, 1820–1870. Ed. Janet
Gabler-Hover and Robert Sattelmeyer.
Detroit: Charles Scribner's Sons (2006),
144-48.
Pery, Jenny. A Being more Intense: the
art of six wood engravers (2009.
Oblong Creative, Wetherby, UK)
Uglow, Jenny (2006). Nature's
Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick.
 Faber and Faber.

External links
Wikimedia Commons has media related
to Wood engravings.

Prints & People: A Social History of

Printed Pictures , an exhibition catalog
from The Metropolitan Museum of Art
(fully available online as PDF), which
contains material on wood engraving
Wood Engravers Network
Society of Wood Engravers

 Hamerton, Philip; Spielmann, Marion

(1911). "Wood Engraving"  . In Chisholm,
Hugh. Encyclopædia Britannica. 28 (11th
ed.). Cambridge University Press.
pp. 798–801.

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