Page:A History of Wood-Engraving.djvu/156

154 for it is only within that time that the value of a print has been due to the engraver’s capacity for thought and his artistic skill in line-arrangement, as well as to the designer’s genius. The use of white line as a mechanical mode of obtaining color was not unknown in the sixteenth century, and the artistic value of white line was definitely felt in early French and Italian wood-engraving; but the possibilities of development were not seen, and no such development took place. The step in advance was taken by Bewick, who thus disclosed the opportunities which wood-engraving offers its craftsmen for the exhibition of high artistic qualities. The white line revolutionized the art, and this is the essential meaning there is in calling Bewick the father of wood-engraving.

Of course the older method has not ceased to be practised; artists have drawn upon the block, and their lines have been reproduced; sometimes a part of the lines are thus drawn, particularly the leading lines, and the minor portions of the sketch have been indicated by the designer by washes and left to be rendered by the engraver in his own lines. Old or modern wood-engraving as a mode of reproducing designs in facsimile is valuable, but none of the artistic merit they may possess is due to the engraver; while the artistic merit shown in the new style of wood-engraving, as an art of design in white line, belongs wholly to the engraver. It results from this that white line is the peculiar province of wood-engraving, considered as an art; but that does not exclude it from being practised in its old manner as a mode of copying and multiplying ordinary design which it is able to reproduce.

Thomas Bewick, the founder of the modern art, was born