Edmund Evans

'' is an example of Evans' engraving work. The illustration is designed by Myles Birket Foster. Evans was born in Southwark, London, on 23 February 1826, to Henry and Mary Evans. He attended school in Jamaica Row, where he enjoyed mathematics but wished he had learned Latin. As a 13-year-old he began work as a "reading boy" at the printing house of Samuel Bentley in London in 1839. A year later, Landells launched Punch magazine, and as early as 1842 had Evans illustrate covers for the new publication. Evans worked and became friends with Myles Birket Foster, John Greenaway and George Dalziel. Foster and Evans became lifelong friends. When Landells received a commission from the Illustrated London News to provide illustrations of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, he sent Evans and Foster to Balmoral to make sketches, which Evans engraved. When his apprenticeship ended in 1847, Evans, then 21, refused an offer of employment from Landells, deciding instead to go into business for himself as a wood-engraver and colour printer. In 1848 Evans engraved a title-page illustration, among other commissions, for the Illustrated London News. However, the Illustrated London News stopped employing him on the basis that his wood engraving was too fine for newspaper work. His final print for the Illustrated London News showed the four seasons, and was illustrated by Foster. In fact Foster received his first commission from the publisher Ingram, Cook, and Company to reproduce the four scenes in oil. In 1851, Ingram chose Evans to engrave three prints for Ida Pfeiffer's Travels in the Holy Land. He used three blocks for the work: the key-block, outlining the illustration, was printed in a dark-brown hue; the other two were in a buff colour and a grayish-blue colour. For the same firm, Evans completed an order for a book-cover using bright reds and blues on white paper. That year he received the first commission to print a book, written by Fanny Fern and illustrated by Foster. by 1853 he was the chief yellow-back printer in the city. He developed the yellow-back as he disliked the white paper book-covers that became soiled and discoloured; as a result of this aversion he experimented with yellow paper by treating before adding the printed illustration. By 1856 Evans had "perfected a process of colour printing from wood blocks", and achieved a reputation as the preeminent wood engraver and best colour printer in London. Before he began printing children's books, much of Evans' business was to provide colour printwork for magazines such as Lamplighter, The Sunday School Companion and Chatterbox. With increased print orders, Evans leased space on Fleet Street to expand the business, adding steam engines, boilers and "many extra machines". From the late 1850s to the early 1860s, Evans produced the blocks and printed for, among others, books illustrated by William Stephen Coleman including, Common Objects of the Sea Shore, Common Objects of the Country, Our Woodlands, Heaths, and Hedges, and British Butterflies. The printing process used up to 12 colours and, as was his usual practice, a hand-press. During these years he also completed work on Foster's Bible Emblem Anniversary Book, and Little Bird Red and Little Bird Blue. In 1870, Evans printed In Fairyland, a Series of Pictures from the Elf-World, illustrated by James Doyle's brother Richard in which Doyle depicted fairies living "among birds, snails, butterflies and beetles as large as themselves", and Evans produced his largest wood-engravings for the volume. The 36 illustrations contained within are "often considered the masterpiece of Victorian illustration." During the 1860s and 1870s, he was employing up to 30 engravers. ==Process and techniques==

During the Victorian period, the art of book illustration gained popularity, supported through the work of wood engravers. Woodcut extended back centuries in Europe and further in Asia. Typically the parts to be printed in black were left in relief by the carver, allowing illustrations to be printed along with the text. Thomas Bewick developed the technique in the 18th century and "perfected the process that was used extensively throughout the 19th century, which necessitated the use of hardwood blocks and tools for metal engraving". The preferred method of relief engraving had been to work with the grain on the plank side of a block; however Bewick worked the end of the block and carved against the grain using a burin. Bewick passed his techniques to apprentices, including Landells, who in turn passed them to Evans. In the 1860s, Thomas Bolton developed a method for transferring a photographic image onto block, which enabled the engraver "to work on the surface". For The Poems of Oliver Goldsmith, Evans created a facsimile of a watercolour, by superimposing colours with the use of separate colour blocks, one by one, to achieve the graduated colours of the original. First, Foster drew the illustration directly on the woodblocks that were to be cut, and he then recreated a coloured paper copy of the drawing. Evans, using the same pigments as Foster, grinding them himself, produced inks to match Foster's colours. The printing was done using a hand-press, with nine or ten print runs required for each illustration. Doyle drew the illustrations directly onto the wood blocks and created coloured proofs. Nine or ten wood blocks (colour blocks) were used for each of the 80 illustrations, which Evans again printed on a hand-press. Evans' process involved a number of steps. First, the line drawing of an illustration was photographed and printed onto block while the line drawing was engraved. Proofs of the key block were coloured by the illustrator; Evans would then "determine the sequencing and register ... to arrive at a close reproduction of the artist's original". Blocks were painted and engraved; one for each colour. A proof of each colour block was made before a final proof from the key block. Ideally, the proof would be a faithful reproduction of the original drawing, but Evans believed a print was never as good as a drawing. He took care to grind and mix his inks so they closely emulated the original. Finally, each block was placed so as to allow the individual colours to print on the page exactly as intended. Aware of costs and printing efficiencies, he used as few colours as possible. Each colour was printed from a separately engraved block; there were often between five or ten blocks. The chief problem was to maintain correct register, achieved by placing small holes in precise positions on each block to which the paper was pinned. If done correctly, the register of colours match, although sometimes ink squash is visible along the edges of an illustration. Often the artist drew the illustration in reverse, and directly onto a block; in other cases the printer copied the illustration from a drawing. After the 1860s, images could be photographically projected onto the blocks, although it was more difficult for the printer to carve the reliefs without leaving the distinctive lines of the illustration. Books printed by Evans have been reproduced using some of the original blocks which have "remained in continuous use for over a century". ==Children's books==

Critics regard Evans' most important work to be his prints of children's books with from the latter part of the century with Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, and Randolph Caldecott which revolutionized children's publishing. In 1865, Evans agreed with publishing house Routledge and Warne to provide toy books—paperbound books of six pages, to be sold for sixpence each. They "revolutionized the field of children's books" and lent Evans his association with children's book illustrators. According to Judith Saltman of the University of British Columbia, Evans' work as a printer of children's picture-books is particularly notable; she believes he printed the "most memorable body of illustrated books for children" in the Victorian era, and the three illustrators, whose works he printed, can be regarded as the "founders of the picture-book tradition in English and American children's books". In doing so, Evans hired Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway and Randolph Caldecott as illustrators, all of whom became successful because of Evans' "recognition, encouragement, and brilliant colour reproduction". Walter Crane , and printed in 1878. In 1863, Evans employed Walter Crane to illustrate covers for inexpensive novels sold in railroad stations called "yellow backs"—after their yellow covers. Crane illustrated the early books, printed by Evans, This Is the House That Jack Built and Sing a Song of Sixpence, in which the simple designs are presented without background ornamentation and printed only in red, blue and black. These commercially successful books established Crane as one of the most popular illustrators of children's books in England. The designs gradually became more elaborate, as Crane became influenced by Japanese prints. His interest in design details, such as furniture and clothing, are reflected in his illustrations. Crane was abroad from 1871 to 1873 while Evans continued to print his work. Evans received Crane's illustrations via post, photographed the image to the keyblock to be engraved, and then returned a proof to Crane for colouring. In 1878 Crane and Evans collaborated on ''The Baby's Opera'', a complex project with a dozen fully illustrated pages, and decorative borders on each of the 56 pages. Crane visited Evans at his home in Witley to design the book. Evans gave Crane a dummy book to design the layout of the entire volume. The first print run consisted of 10,000 copies, but Evans quickly added more as demand for the volume grew. Evans added more hues to the illustrations, with "light blues, yellows, and brick reds, delicately blended" replacing the brighter colours of earlier work. In 1880, Crane illustrated and Evans printed, ''The Baby's Bouquet: a Fresh Bunch of Old Rhymes and Tunes, which went on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies. The book shows influences ranging from the Pre-Raphaelites, Japanese art to the incipient arts and crafts movement. Initially Evans hired Caldecott to draw illustrations for nursery rhyme books, beginning with another printing of The House that Jack Built'' in 1877. Evans proposed to fill each page with an illustration, which were "often little more than outlines" to avoid the blank pages which were customary in toy books of the period. Beginning in 1878 through 1885, Caldecott illustrated two books a year for Evans, and secured his reputation as an illustrator. The books were released for the Christmas season, when sales would be sufficient to warrant print runs as large as 100,000. Later, collected editions of four works reprinted in a single volume were published. Throughout the late 1870s, Evans and Caldecott collaborated on 17 books, considered Caldecott's best, and to have changed the "course of children's illustrated books". Ruari McLean explains in the introduction to Evans' Reminiscences, that as late as the 1960s reprints of Caldecott's The House that Jack Built were "astonishingly, still being printed from the plates made from the original wood-blocks engraved by Edmund Evans". Evans invited her to Witley, and as he explains: "I was at once fascinated by the originality of the drawings and the ideas of the verse, so I at once purchased them." Evans believed her illustrations to be commercially appealing and encouraged Routledge to publish the book. Of Greenaway's first collection of illustrations and verse, Evans writes: (1885), engraved and printed by Evans. The girl's hat is a solid yellow against the green background created by colouring with blue and yellow. When George Eliot saw Greenaway's drawings, while visiting the Evanses at their home, she "was much charmed by them", however, she refused Evans' request to write a children's story to be illustrated by Greenaway. Published in 1879, Evans produced 100,000 copies of Under the Window (including French and German editions) which helped launch Greenaway's career as an author and illustrator of children's books. For Under the Window, Evans paid Greenaway outright for her artwork, and royalties up to one-third of proceeds, after the costs of printing; for subsequent books he paid half of the proceeds after deducting the printing costs. Evans photographed Greenaway's drawings to wood, engraved in facsimile, and created colour blocks of red, blue, yellow and flesh tint. Evans paid particular attention to detail in the printing of her Mother Goose. The "antique look" added to the Regency style artwork, while his ink and colouring choices conveyed the look of a hand-coloured book suitable for a mass-market edition. To achieve the antique look, rough paper was pressed and printed, with the roughness restored after printing by dipping the paper in water. As an example of 19th-century book production, Mother Goose is considered exceptional, and facsimiles were printed well into the mid-20th century. as well as Mother Goose (1881), The Language of Flowers (1884), Marigold Garden (1885), The Pied Piper of Hamelin (1887), and King Pepito (1889). Greenaway benefitted from her association with Evans. As the leading publisher of children's books, Routledge provided Greenaway with a commercial base she may not have achieved without Evans' influence. Children's literature scholar Anne Lundin claims the distinctive quality of Evans' printing, as wells as his popularity as a children's book printer, linked Greenaway's name with his, thereby increasing her commercial appeal. During her career as an illustrator, Greenaway used Evans as sole engraver and printer. ==Later work and retirement==

's The Tale of Peter Rabbit, (1902) Evans eventually converted to the three-colour printing technique. In 1902 he used the "recently developed Hentschel three-colour process", at Beatrix Potter's request, to print her watercolour illustrations for her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Towards the end of his career, not all of his work was devoted to the three-colour process; in 1902 he engraved and printed Old English Songs and Dances for W. Graham Robertson, which was described as "harmonious" and "delicate". In 1892, Evans moved to Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, and turned the printing business over to his sons Wilfred and Herbert, although when he stopped engraving wood is unknown. During his last decade he wrote The Reminiscences of Edmund Evans, a short volume he described as "the rambling jottings of an old man". In that book Evans includes few details of his business practices and processes, and is significant because it adds to the scant information available on the colour printers of the era. A substantial number of Evans' original engraved wooden blocks are held at the St Bride Printing Library in London. ==Additional Evans images==

File:Where the bleak Swiss their stormy mansions tread.jpg|Using the same pigments as Foster, Evans ground the inks for the prints in The Poems of Oliver Goldsmith, published in 1859. ==Detail of John Gilpin==

File:Randolph Caldecott collection-page 0072-crop-balance-equalize.jpg|Image from The Diverting History of John Gilpin File:Caldecott bell detail.png|Detail showing vertical hatchings, a variety of ink colours, and stippling. ==References==