Wood Engraving: A Short History
The oldest known means for reproducing a picture is relief printing. This process, developed over 2000 years ago in Asia, involves making a print from a surface which has been carved so that the images to be printed is raised or ‘in relief’. A common example of a relief printing surfaced today are the numbers on a bank card or a credit card which could be printed if the swiping or tapping modes on the machine failed.
Stone was likely used for the first relief prints, though by the 13th century woodcuts had been introduced into Europe and were gaining in popularity. By c.1450 when Johannes Gutenberg invented movable type, woodcuts images had become important elements in the development of the book. Best known of the early woodcut artists in undoubtedly Albrecht Durer whose illustration of his Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse of 1498 represent the zenith of the art in its golden years in Northern Europe.
By the 18th century, however, the woodcut had been largely replaced by etching and engraving on metal, techniques that produce a broader range of effects making image reproduction and hence book production more sophisticated. Printing from the metal plates is an intaglio process, the opposite from relief printing. The image is cut into the printing surface using either acid (etching) or tools (engraving) and the ink is actually forced into the etched or engraved lines, not applied to a raised surface.
The use of etching and engraving for illustrations and movable type for the text caused problems for the publishing industry that were not so much artistic as economic. Since etching and engraving on metal are intaglio printmaking mediums and type is a relief medium, two distinct printing processes and two different printing presses were required to produce an illustrated book. As publishing costs rose in the mid 1700’s, artists and printers sought new ways to print books which combined text and illustrations.
It is generally agreed among scholars that it was Thomas Bewick (1753 - 1828), an established English metal engraver, who first arrived at the solution. Having a life-long passion for natural history, Bewick decided to publish an illustrated book on quadrupeds. Rather that printing the books in the conventional way which would have been prohibitive economically speaking, Bewick chose to use blocks of hardwood in place of metal for his engravings, using the hard end-grain, not the side-grain as a woodcut artist would do. He also gauged his blocks to the same height as the printing type so that the text and wood engraved illustrations could both be printed on the same press, a letterpress.
Bewick’s Natural History of Quadrupeds (1790) and his two volume History of British Birds (1797 and 1804) were so popular in their day that he was almost single-handedly responsible for establishing wood engravings the primary medium for book illustration over the next hundred years. Bewick’s leap of imagination was to adapt his metal engraving tools for use on the engrain surface and also to follow his natural instinct and allow the image to be revealed in the white lines created by the tools. His engravings were so appealing that artists such as William Blake and Edward Calvert tried their hand at wood engraving, elevating if further as an art form. But more importantly, with advances in printing and paper making during the Victorian era, wood engraving developed into a huge trade industry growing dramatically to meet the demands of publishing houses.
The skill for the average 19th century wood engraver became so highly developed that it seemed there was not limit to what could be engraved. But by the end of the century the trade engraver had become a mere technician reproducing images that an artist had drawn on the block. From there it was not long before the wood engraver was replaced by newly-developed photographic techniques which copied artists’ work faster and cheaper. These changes had a drastic effect on the trade of wood engraving and it was soon in a steep decline.
The fate of wood engraving, however, was not oblivion. In the late 1800’s the Arts and Crafts Movement lead by William Morris, Edward Burn-Jones and other artists who were disenchanted with the dehumanizing aspects of industrialization, promoted a revival of the traditional handcrafts, among them wood engraving, printing by hand, bookbinding and other book arts. The Private Press Movement, as this phenomenon was called, became the new haven for the art of wood engraving.
From the 1890’s to the 1940’s the Private Press Movement had a significant influence on the artistic side of the design and publishing world. Wood engraving blossomed again and many of the leading artists of the day worked in the medium including, Eric Gill, Paul Nash and Gertrude Hermes and a young Henry Moore.
Wood engraving is still a valid art medium today, often employed in book illustration, especially in high-end publishing. It is also used in the commercial design world as a specialty technique. The Society of Wood Engravers in England formed in the early 1900’s is still going strong today and the more recently established Wood Engraver’s Network is enjoying steady growth in North America. The future looks promising for the art of wood engraving.
