Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 8.djvu/459

Rh ENGRAVING 439 .13- te.l i ,tes. mil bcess j Klern icxl en giving. ehis- ric en- avin&amp;lt;_. late- inting the shades of the brush. In the pen drawings the lines are Dor6 s, in the brush drawings the lines are the engraver s. In the night scenes M. Pisan has usually adopted Bewick s system, of white lines, the block being left untouched in its blackness wherever the effect permitted. Modem English wood engraving shows to great advantage in such newspapers as the Illustrated London News and the Graphic, the best of their kind in the world, and also in vignettes for book illustration, which English artists usually execute with delicacy and taste. A certain standard of vignette engraving was reached by Mr Edmund Evans in Mr Birket Foster s edition of Cowper s Task, which is not likely to be surpassed in its own way, either for delicacy of tone or for careful preservation of the drawing. An important extension of wood engraving in modern times has been clue to the invention of compound blocks. Formerly a woodcut was limited in size to the dimensions of a block of boxwood cut across the grain, except in the primitive condition of the art, when commoner woods were used in the direction of the grain ; but in the present clay many small blocks are fitted togther so as to form a single large one. They can be separated or joined together again at will, and it is this facility which has rendered possible the rapid production of large cuts for the newspapers, as many cutters work on the same subject at once, each taking his own section. The process of modern wood engraving may be briefly described as follows. The surface of the block is lightly whitened with Chinese white so as to produce a light yellowish grey tint, and on this the artist draws either with a pen if the work is intended to be in line, or with a hard pointed pencil and a brush if it is intended to be in shade. If it is to be a line woodcut the cutter simply digs out the whites with a sharp burin or scalpel (he has these tools of various shapes and sizes), and that is all he has to do ; but if the drawing on the wood is shaded with a brush, then the cutter has to work upon the tones in such a manner that they will come relatively true in the printing. This is by no means easy, and the result is often a disappoint ment, besides which the artist s drawing is destroyed in the process, so that it is now customary to have the block photographed before the engraver touches it, when the drawing is specially worth preserving. This was done for Mr Leighton s illustrations to Romola. Copper and Steel Plate Engraving. Engraving on plates of copper and steel is the converse of wood engraving in method. In line engraving it is the line itself which is hollowed, whereas in the woodcut, as we have seen, when the line is to print black it is left in relief, and only white spaces and white lines are hollowed. There was no difficulty about discovering the art of line engraving, which has been practised from the earliest ages. The prehistoric Aztec hatchet given to Humboldt in Mexico was just as really and truly engraved as a modern copper plate with outlines after Flaxman or Thorwaldsen ; the Aztec engraving is of course ruder than the European, but it is the same art. The important discovery which made line engraving one of the multiplying arts was the discovery how to print an incised line, which would not occur to every one, and which in fact was hit upon at last by accident, and known for some time before its real utility was suspected. Line engraving in Europe does not owe its origin to the woodcut, but to the chasing on gold smiths work. If the reader will look at any article of jewellery in which the metal is ornamented with incised designs, he will there see the true origin of our precious Ditrers and Marcantonios. The history of the first plate- printing is as follows. The goldsmiths of Florence in the middle of the 15th century were in the habit of ornamc nt- ing their works by means of engraving, after which they filled up the hollows produced by the burin with a black enamel made of silver, lead, and sulphur, the result being that the design was rendered much more visible by the opposition of the enamel and the metal. An engraved design filled up in this manner was called a niello, and our Nielli, modern door-plates are really nielli also, for in them too the engraved lines are filled with black. The word comes from nigellum, and simply refers to the colour of the enamel. Whilst a niello was in progress the artist could riot see it so well as if the enamel were already in the lines, and on the other hand, he did not like to put in the hard enamel prematurely, as when once it was set it could not easily be got out again. He therefore took a sulphur cast of his niello in progress, on a matrix of fine clay, and filled up the lines in the sulphur with lampblack, thus enabling himself to judge of the state of his engraving. At a later period it was discovered that a proof could be taken on damped paper by filling the engraved lines with a certain ink and wiping it off the surface of the plate, sufficient pressure being applied to make the paper go into the hollowed lines and fetch the ink out of them. This was the beginning of plate printing, but nobody at first suspected the artistic and commercial importance of the discovery. The niello engravers thought it a convenient way of proving their work, as it saved the trouble of the sulphur cast, but they saw no further into the future. They went on engraving nielli just the same to ornament plate and furniture ; nor was it until the next century that the new method of printing was carried out to its great and wonderful results. Even in our own day the full import ance of it is only understood by persons who have made the fine arts a subject of special study. There are, however, certain differences between plate printing and block printing which affect the essentials of art. When paper is driven into a line so as to fetch the ink out of it, the line may be of unimaginable fineness, it will print all the same ; but when the paper is only pressed upon a raised line, the line must have some appreciable thickness, so that the wood engraving can never be so delicate as plate engraving. Again, not only does plate printing excel block printing in delicacy ; it excels it also in force and depth. There never was, and there will never be, a woodcut line having the power of a deep line in a plate, for in block printing the line is only a blackened surface of paper, whereas in plate printing it is a cast with an additional thick ness of printing ink. Having limited ourselves in this article to engraving for the press, we do not stay to enumerate the niello engravers, but pass at once to the art of line engraving for prints ; and first let us describe the process, which is as simple in theory as it is difficult in practice. The most important of the tools used is the burin, which is a bar of steel with xiie one end fixed in a handle rather like a mushroom with one burin, side cut away, the burin itself being shaped so that the cutting end of it when sharpened takes the form of a lozenge. Burins are made in many varieties to suit in dividual tastes and the different uses to which they are applied, but most burins resemble each other in presenting the shape of a more or less elongated lozenge at the end where they are sharpened. The burin acts exactly like a plough : it makes a furrow and turns out a shaving of metal as the plough turns the soil of a field. The burin, however, is pushed while the plough is pulled, and this peculiar character of the burin as a pushed instrument at once establishes a wide separation between it and all the other instruments employed in the arts of design, such as pencils, brushes, pens, and etching needles. The manual difficulty which has to be overcome by the engraver is in making himself master of the burin, and in order to Artistic import- a &quot; ce of