Technique Bewick's art is considered the pinnacle of his medium, now called
wood engraving. This is due both to his skill and to the method, which unlike the
woodcut technique of his predecessors, carves
against the grain, in hard
box wood, using fine tools normally favoured by metal engravers. Boxwood cut across the end-grain is hard enough for fine engraving, allowing greater detail than in normal woodcuts; this has largely replaced the basic woodcut since Bewick's time. In addition, since wood engraving is a
relief printing technique, inked on the face, it requires only low pressure to print an image, so the blocks last for many thousands of prints, and importantly can be assembled into the same
forme as the
letterpress or metal type for the text, allowing both on the same page, and all the printing to be done in a single run. In contrast, copper plate
engravings are an
intaglio printing technique, inked in the engraved grooves, the face being wiped clean of ink before printing, so a special type of
printing press applying much higher pressure is required, and images must be printed separately from the text, at far greater expense. Bewick made use of his close observation of nature, his remarkable visual memory, and his sharp eyesight to create accurate and extremely small details in his wood engravings, which proved to be both a strength and a weakness. If properly printed and closely examined, his prints could be seen to convey subtle clues to the character of his natural subjects, with humour and feeling. This was achieved by carefully varying the depth of the engraved grooves to provide actual greys, not only black and white, as well as the pattern of the marks to provide texture. But this subtlety of engraving created a serious technical difficulty for his printers; they needed to ink his blocks with just the right amount of ink, mixed so as to be of exactly the right thickness, and to press the block to the paper slowly and carefully, to obtain a result that would satisfy Bewick. This made printing slow and expensive. It also created a problem for Bewick's readers; if they lacked his excellent eyesight, they needed a magnifying glass to study his prints, especially the miniature tail-pieces. But the effect was transformative, and wood engraving became the main method of illustrating books for a century. Bewick ran his workshop collaboratively, developing the skills of his apprentices, so while he did not complete every task for every illustration himself, he was always closely involved, as John Rayner explains: Over 100 of Bewick's wood-engraved blocks are held by the
Newberry Library.
Major works of
Wycliffe, Yorkshire in 1789 Works using his wood engraving technique, for which he became well known, include the engravings for
Oliver Goldsmith's
Traveller and
The Deserted Village, for
Thomas Parnell's
Hermit, and for
William Somervile's
Chase.
Bookplates The workshop of Beilby, Bewick, and son produced many ephemeral materials such as letterhead stationery, shop advertisement cards, and other business materials. Of these ephemeral productions, "bookplates have survived the best". Bewick's
bookplates were illustrations made from engravings, containing the name or initials of the book's owner.
''Aesop's Fables'' The various editions of
Aesop's Fables illustrated by Bewick span almost his entire creative life. The first was created for the Newcastle bookseller Thomas Saint during his apprentice years, an edition of
Robert Dodsley's
Select Fables published in 1776. With his brother John he later contributed to a three-volume edition for the same publisher in 1784, reusing some pictures from the 1776 edition. Bewick went on to produce a third edition of the fables. While convalescing from a dangerous illness in 1812, he turned his attention to a long-cherished venture, a large three-volume edition of
The Fables of Aesop and Others, eventually published in 1818. The work is divided into three sections: the first has some of Dodsley's fables prefaced by a short prose moral; the second has "Fables with Reflections", in which each story is followed by a prose and a verse moral and then a lengthy prose reflection; the third, "Fables in Verse", includes fables from other sources in poems by several unnamed authors. Engravings were initially designed on the wood by Bewick and then cut by his apprentices under close supervision, refined where necessary by himself. This edition used a method that Bewick had pioneered, "white-line" engraving, a dark-to-light technique in which the lines to remain white are cut out of the woodblock. It deals with 260
mammals from across the world, including animals from "
Adive" to "
Zorilla". It is particularly thorough on some of the domestic animals: the first entry describes the horse. Beilby and Bewick had difficulty deciding what to include, and especially on how to organise the entries. They had hoped to arrange the animals systematically, but they found that the rival systems of
Linnaeus,
Buffon and
John Ray conflicted, and in Linnaeus's case at least changed with every edition of his work. They decided to put useful animals first "which so materially contribute to the strength, the wealth, and the happiness of this kingdom". The book's coverage is erratic, a direct result of the sources that Bewick consulted: his own knowledge of British animals, the available scholarly sources, combined with
George Culley's 1786
Observations on Livestock and the antique John Caius's 1576
On English Dogs. Bewick had to hand the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman's account of his visit to the
Cape of Good Hope on Cook's expedition of 1772 to 1776, and animals from the Southern Cape figure largely in the book. It was an energetic muddle, but it was at once greeted with enthusiasm by the British public. They liked the combination of vigorous woodcuts, simple and accurate descriptions, and all kinds of exotic animals alongside things they knew. Bewick was helped by his intimate knowledge of the habits of animals acquired during his frequent excursions into the country. He also recounts information passed to him by acquaintances and local gentry, and that obtained in natural history works of his time, including those by
Thomas Pennant and
Gilbert White, as well as the translation of
Buffon's
Histoire naturelle. Many of the illustrations that have most frequently been reproduced in other books and as decorations are the small tailpieces that Bewick had placed at the bottoms of the pages of the original. Bewick sometimes used his
fingerprint as a form of signature, (accompanied by the words "Thomas Bewick his mark"), as well as engraving it in one of his tail-pieces as if it had clouded the tiny image of a rustic scene with a cottage by mistake. Uglow notes one critic's suggestion that Bewick may have meant we are looking at the scene through a playfully smudged window, as well as drawing our attention to Bewick, the maker. Adrian Searle, writing in
The Guardian, describes the tiny work as "A visual equivalent to the sorts of authorial gags
Laurence Sterne played in
Tristram Shandy, it is a marvellous, timeless, magical joke." == Tributes ==