Wood Engraving - History

History

From the beginning of the nineteenth century Bewick's techniques gradually came into wider use, especially in Britain. Besides its use for interpreting details of light and shade, the method found another use from the 1820s onwards as a means of reproducing freehand line drawings. This was in many ways an unnatural application, since the engravers were obliged to cut away almost all the surface of the block in order to leave printable the black lines of the artist's drawing; nonetheless, it became by far 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.

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 that year, 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 gradations of tone were rendered by white lines of varying thickness and closeness, sometimes broken into dots for the darkest areas. This technique can be seen in the engravings from Gustave Doré's drawings.

Towards the end of the 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 the illustrations to The Strand Magazine during the 1890s. With the new century, improvements in the half-tone process rendered this kind of reproductive engraving obsolete, although 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.