Woodcuts had existed for over 1300 years by the time wood engraving developed in the 16th century. And it was another century before wood engraving achieved any sort of prominence, primarily through the work of Thomas Bewick.
As noted in our previous posts,wood engraving typically allows an artist to achieve much finer detail than is possible with woodcuts:
Grace Thurston Arnold Albee, The Boyer Place, 1946
Wood engraver John Steins gives some insight into how such detail is achieved in this video.
Like the woodcut, wood engraving was eclipsed by the photomechanical illustration techniques that became widely available in the late 19th century. (For a while these processes existed simultaneously --magazines like Harper's, for example, often printed several individual wood engravings as a single large electrotype.)
The ascendance of photomechanical illustration techniques probably saved wood engraving as an art form. (The need for a continuous and prodigious supply of wood engravings by mass market magazines had led to a serious degradation of artistic quality in wood engravings by the end of the 19th century.)
Wood engraving was derided for decades by many artists as merely a "reproductive technique," since the design of a wood engraving and the actual carving of a wood engraving generally were done as separate processes by separate people (as noted in a previous post). It was not until the the 1930s that designer and engraver began to merge into the persona of a single individual, as several progressive artists began to use wood engravings as a way to bring art "to the masses:"
Eric Gill, The Four Gospels, 1931
Tomorrow, we will examine in detail some of the more notable wood engravers of the past century....
Recent Comments