Thomas Bewick may fairly claim to be the father of modern English book illustration. His wood-engravings of animals (started in 1785) were published in A General History of Quadrupeds and made him immediately famous; his two-volume History of British Birds (1797, 1804) confirmed his greatness as a designer, illustrator and engraver.
These two publications went through various editions, and were still being printed from original wood-blocks well into the 19th century: in fact, one of the great marvels of this method of work is that his blocks have been known to yield 900,000 prints without being worn out! The secret of the fine detail and the durability of the blocks is due to his working on the end grain and not on the plank, as had been used previously for wood-cuts (notably in early printed book illustration). This, however, constrained the size of his blocks to quite small dimensions – most of his pictures are no more than 8cm square and many are much smaller. His only really large block, the famous Wild Bull at Chillingham, is still only 20 x 14cm and partly split during use.
Bewick was born in August 1753, at Cherryburn House, near Eltringham, Northumberland, and was apprenticed to a Newcastle engraver at the age of fourteen; he died on 8 November 1828, and is buried in Ovingham churchyard, across the river from Cherryburn.
I have been fond of Bewick's work ever since I can remember looking at pictures – his engravings are so small, so finely detailed, as to be a source of fascination for tiny children. The incredibly small leaves and flowers, the minuscule houses and background animals and trees are a source of endless delight and wonder. The scenes he depicted were often of ordinary day-to-day activities in his native Northumberland countryside, with its unrelenting winter rains and snows and gaunt rook-lined grey skies. Frequently he introduced a slightly comic element – a hat (and periwig) blown off in the gale, an old woman shaking her stick at a bull as she approaches the stile, the tendency towards cruelty in children's games with dogs and cats, and his well-known (and sometimes literal) 'tail-pieces'. He is the homeliest as well as the most assiduous of artists.
Normal reproductions of Bewick's work give little idea of the fine-ness of execution of the originals, except to show Bewick's exceptional self-taught sense of design and structure, and his grasp of the animals and birds he studied at first hand. (Those he was unlucky enough to have to copy from other publications suffer badly from other artists' poor grasp of animal structure.)
The big cat engravings on my web pages were taken from my own early copy of A History of Quadrupeds (3rd edition), printed in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1792. The quality of detail in the originals may be vaguely guessed from the fact that these reproductions are some 50% bigger in each direction; but at least ten times the magnification would be required to show all the detail on a conventional computer screen! Interestingly, Bewick's work is an unusual example of pictorial work which can be magnified to almost any size without losing its scale and scope of detail – whole walls have been covered with giant copies of his work, to great effect.
For pretty fine reproductions of a large proportion of Bewick's output see 1800 woodcuts by Thomas Bewick and his school [ed. Blanch Cirker; Dover Publications, 1962], which prints the pictures classified by subject matter, and also gives a brief biography. Here the printing is very black and clear, but loses some of the very finest detail visible in my much more lightly printed 1792 volume – one of Bewick's tricks was to lower the surface of parts of his blocks so as to introduce an impression of distance, and this subtle effect does not come over so well in reproduction.
Despite the great expense of these books at the time (my copy was "nine shillings in boards"), they were extremely popular, and it is very easy to see why – the sheer quality of design and execution is almost miraculous, and set the scene for book illustration throughout the 19th century, until the rise of photo-engraving of artists' work.
Peter Adamson 1996 (rev 2007)