Page:Contemporary English woodcuts.djvu/13

 the sixteenth century practice of reproducing in several tints the washed drawings of painters.

In the eighteenth century the woodcut was not much used except in vignettes and head-and-tail pieces for the decoration of books, but towards the end of it there was another remarkable revival of the sixteenth century practice of engraving in chiaroscuro, or camaïeu, as it is called in France, where it has recently been revived again. John Baptist Jackson, who worked in Venice, and afterwards in Battersea, produced a fine series of woodcuts in colour after the Venetian painters, Rubens and others, while the English amateur, John Skippe, and the Italian, Zanetti, imitated the drawings of Parmigiano with a skill almost equal to that of his contemporaries.

Late in the eighteenth century (his earliest work dates from 1770) comes Thomas Bewick, the first English original wood engraver of note, whose name is associated with a technical innovation of great importance, the substitution of actual engraving with the burin on hard boxwood cut across the grain ("the end of the wood") for the older practice of cutting with a knife "on the plank," i.e., on the surface of the softer wood sawn in the direction of the grain. This practice became traditional; it persisted among wood-engravers of the professional school all through the nineteenth century, and until, in the twentieth, the art of wood-engraving, as handed down and taught in the trade since Bewick's day, became practically extinct, succumbing to the competition of rapid photomechanical processes. Some of the old professional wood-engravers yet survive, but few traces of their handiwork can be found; it has been driven from the newspapers and magazines into the humbler pages of illustrated trade catalogues.

The great thing to notice about this whole nineteenth century practice of wood-engraving is that it was almost without exception reproductive. As in the days of Dürer and Holbein, so in the days of Northcote and W. M. Craig, of Menzel and Richter, of Gavarni and Gustave Doré, of Millais, Keene, and Tenniel, of Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Walter Crane, the artist drew his design upon the block or, at a later time, had it transferred to the surface of the block by photography, and took no further part in the production of the woodcut till a proof was submitted to him to be touched for alterations. It was the business of the professional wood engraver, the Dalziels, Swain, Linton, and a host of others, to preserve the artist's drawing with absolute fidelity, leaving his lines standing by cutting away the intervening spaces, or, at the most, to interpret the artist's intention, and convert a slight sketch into a finished engraving