wood engraving

1. 1. A block of wood on whose surface a design for printing is engraved across the end grain.
   2. A print made from a wood engraving.
2. The art or process of making wood engravings.

The earliest images produced in British North America were relief cuts engraved on wood blocks or type metal by printers such as John Foster (1648–1681), and others who worked anonymously. During the colonial period and later, these cuts appeared in publications such as almanacs, primers, newspapers, and periodicals and on broadsides, government proclamations, currency, and advertising materials. Artisans and skilled engravers used knives to incise type metal or planks of wood cut with the grain for illustrations and decorative ornaments during the colonial and the Revolutionary War periods. These images were inexpensive to produce and decorative. The skill and the training of the engravers varied from almost none to expert. Even well known silversmiths such as Paul Revere (1735–1818) and James Turner (1722–1759) made cuts for newspapers and broadsides, in addition to engravings on copper for an elite audience.

In England during the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Thomas Bewick and others made relief cuts using the burin of an engraver on the end grain of dense wood, particularly boxwood. In New York, Alexander Anderson (1775–1870), a self-taught engraver, followed their lead, producing thousands of cuts over his seventy-five-year career. Changing technology led to the use of wood engravings as the basis for stereotyped plates that could be produced to order for printers and publishers across the nation. Anderson's cuts appeared in tract society publications and children's books issued by publishers in New York and other cities in the Northeast.

During the 1840s, the training and skill of wood engravers improved; their engravings after drawings by artists such as Felix Octavius Carr Darley (1822–1888) and John Gadsby Chapman (1808–1889) graced the pages of novels, drawing manuals, Bibles, and other publications. The widespread popularity of the pictorial press, beginning with Ballou's Pictorial in Boston and Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper in New York in the 1850s, led to the proliferation of images. The circulation of the copiously illustrated Harper's Weekly reached over 100,000 in the 1860s, bringing reproductions of designs by Winslow Homer (1836–1910) and other artists to a sizeable portion of the literate public. Depictions of camp scenes of the Civil War made details of that conflict vivid to Americans everywhere. In the 1870s, reproductive wood engraving reached its height in The Aldine, a fine-art journal with full-page reproductions of paintings by European and American artists. The wood engraver and historian William J. Linton (1812–1897) considered the engravings that he did for that journal to be the best of his career.

In the 1870s, artists' drawings were transferred to wood blocks photographically, changing the role of the engraver from interpreter of an artist's drawing to copyist. The so-called New School of Engraving was characterized by prints that reproduced drawings exactly using short white lines and cross-hatching as well as dots to simulate stippling. Linton and his followers preferred the old methodology, but they were challenged by others who preferred exact facsimiles. The advent of photoengraving a few years later rendered the controversy moot.

During the twentieth century, artists turned to woodcuts and wood engraving as an artistic medium. Artists such as Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922), Rockwell Kent (1882–1971), Clare Leighton (1901–1988), Thomas Nason (1889–1971), Rudolph Ruzicka (1883–1978), Blanche Lazell (1878–1956), Louis Schanker (1903–1981), and Leonard Baskin (1922–2000) have created relief prints of great interest and originality.

Bibliography

Acton, David. A Spectrum of Innovation: Color in American Printmaking, 1890–1960. New York: Norton, 1990.

Linton, William J. American Wood Engraving: A Victorian History. Watkins Glen, N.Y.: American Life Foundation and Study Institute, 1976.

Reilly, Elizabeth Carroll. A Dictionary of Colonial American Printers' Ornaments and Illustrations. Worcester, Mass.: American Antiquarian Society, 1975.

Wakeman, Geoffrey. Victorian Book Illustration: The Technical Revolution. Newton Abbot, U.K.: David & Charles, 1973.

The noun has 2 meanings:

Meaning #1: an engraving made from a woodcut
  Synonym: woodcut

Meaning #2: engraving consisting of a block of wood with a design cut into it; used to make prints
  Synonyms: woodcut, wood block

Thomas Bewick. Barn Owl (Tyto alba) in History of British Birds. 1847.

Wood engraving is a relief printing technique, where the end grain of wood is used as a medium for engraving, thus differing from the older technique of woodcut, where the softer side grain is used.

Contents 1 Origin and technique 2 Commercial use in the 19th century 3 Notable wood engravers 4 See also 5 Bibliography 6 References 7 External links

Origin and technique

The technique of wood engraving developed at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, with the works of Thomas Bewick. Bewick generally made his engraving in harder woods than normally used, and would engrave the end of a block instead of the side. Finding a knife not suitable for working against the grain in harder woods, Bewick used the engraving tool the burin, which has a V-shaped cutting tip. Engraving on wood in this manner produced highly detailed images, usually quite unlike those produced by engraving on copper plates. Furthermore, unlike copper-plate engravings that quickly deteriorated, thousands of copies could be printed from engraved wood blocks. Since wood engraving is a relief process while metal engraving is an intaglio technique, wood engravings could be used on conventional print presses, which were themselves making rapid mechanical improvements during the first quarter of the 19th century. As a result of Bewick's innovation and improvements in the printing press, illustrations of art, nature, technical processes, famous people, foreign lands and many other subjects became more widely available.

Commercial use in the 19th century

Bewick's innovations were developed and expanded by a large group of professional wood engravers. Magazines with large circulations (The Illustrated London News, and Harper's Weekly) were illustrated with large wood engravings that were the product of a collaboration between draftsmen and wood engravers. Wood engraving was a choice medium for these publications because it lent its self to mass printing via the the electrotyping process. The engravings themselves were created on blocks of boxwood about 4 inches across. These blocks were then composited together to make much larger illustrations. The wood engraving was then copied via the electrotype process which produced a metal printing plate master to make further plates for mass publication^[1].

Gustave Doré's famous works were a collaborative product of Doré and a group of talented wood engravers. In 19th century France wood engravings became besides lithography the medium of choice for caricaturist such as Honoré Daumier, who published his wood engravings in daily satirical papers such as the Charivari.

Wood engraving as a reproductive (rather than artistic) technique has been displaced by advances in printing technology. Wood engraving is now used to create bookplates, fine art limited edition prints, and a few book illustrations and commercial artwork.

Notable wood engravers

In rough chronological order:

• Thomas Bewick
• Edward Calvert
• Honoré Daumier
• Adolph Menzel
• Gustave Doré
• Thomas Nast
• Eduard Magnus Jakobson
• William Biscombe Gardner
• Timothy Cole
• H.W. Peckwell (artist)
• Arthur Comfort
• Eric Gill
• Iain Macnab
• Gwen Raverat
• Hans Alexander Mueller
• Paul Nash (artist)
• John Nash (artist)
• Paul Landacre
• David Jones (poet)
• Agnes Miller Parker
• John Buckland Wright
• Clare Leighton
• Reynolds Stone
• Alexander Weygers
• Fritz Eichenberg
• Blair Hughes-Stanton
• Eric Ravilious
• Lynd Ward
• Don Rico
• E. Mervyn Taylor (New Zealand)
• Bernard Brussel-Smith
• Garrick Palmer
• Vija Celmins
• Barry Moser
• John Steins
• Gaylord Schanilec
• Andy English
• Barbara Howard, RCA (Canada)
• Rosemary Feit Covey
• Jim Westergard
• Simon Brett
• Leonard Baskin
• Richard Wagener

See also

• Flammarion woodcut, a celebrated wood engraving.

Bibliography

• Brett, Simon. An engravers globe ISBN 1-901648-12-5
• Brett, Simon. Wood engraving: how to do it. ISBN 1-901648-23-0; 1-901648-24-9 (hbk.)
• Carrington, James B. "American Illustration and the Reproductive Arts," Scribner's Magazine, July 1992, pp. 123-128.

References

1. ^ Schiffer, Clara Goldberg, collector. Collection, 1839-1994: A Finding Aid - BIOGRAPHY

External links

• Wood Engravers Network
• Society of Wood Engravers

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.

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