This is the text for a short guide I wrote for the exhibition I curated at Salisbury Museum in Wiltshire, which took place from 16 October 2021 – 16 January 2022, and which also included an exhibition of work by the wood engraver Howard Phipps. It was featured on BBC Radio 4's arts programme, 'Front Row,' on 16 December 2021.
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Gwen Raverat, Poplars in France (1914), private collection
The technology of printing onto paper from wooden blocks goes back many centuries: its earliest origins have been dated to Ancient China in the first centuries AD. Both printing and paper-making technology arrived in Europe from China some time in the thirteenth-century, with Johannes Gutenberg going on to invent his famous printing press using moveable metal type in 1439. This heralded a printing revolution that helped change the world.
The illustrations that appeared in many of the first European printed books were made using wooden blocks fashioned with traditional wood working instruments such as knives, gouges and chisels. These cut an image along the grain of the wood (like working into the soft face of a plank, rather than the much harder end grain). Though usually intended to accompany a piece of text, these woodcut images could nonetheless became highly desirable items in their own right. In the hands of a master-practitioner such at the German artist Albrecht Dürer, who worked in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, incredible detail could be achieved. The technique became hugely popular for producing mass-produced images through to the early modern period, when it was largely replaced by engraving onto metal plates (principally copper).
But a woodcut is not quite the same thing as a wood engraving.
Thomas Bewick
A wood engraving differs from a woodcut in that the image is cut along the end grain of the wood block, using fine metal engraving tools, such as a burin or graver, originally intended to engrave copper plates. The perfection of this seemingly simple innovation (which made for longer-lasting blocks with much finer detail and expression) is generally credited to the English craftsman and naturalist, Thomas Bewick (1753 –1828).
Thomas Bewick, The Chillingham Bull (1789), private collection
Bewick was born into a Northumberland farming and mining family who lived in the village of Mickley, a dozen miles or so west along the River Tyne from Newcastle. Bewick’s childhood home, Cherryburn House, still stands, and is now owned by the National Trust. In 1767 the teenage Bewick was apprenticed to a jewellery, enamelling and engraving business in Newcastle. It was there that he began engraving on wood, developing the techniques and style for which he would become famous. His illustrated books, Aesop’s Fables, A General History of Quadrupeds and A History of British Birds, enjoyed remarkable popularity and renown in the nineteenth century, both in Britain and abroad.
White Line Engraving
Traditionally, woodcut designers had carved their wooden printing block to create lines emulating those made in a pen drawing. Think of cutting two parallel grooves into a square piece of wood: when printed, this will create a black line between two white lines in a black background. This is known as black-line engraving, and it mirrors the effect achieved by copper plate engraving. (When printing from a copper plate, the cut line is filled with ink, and when run through a heavy press the line prints black. In a woodblock print, however, the cut line is not exposed to ink, and it thus prints white.)
Bewick reconceptualized printing from wooden blocks by focusing his designs on the white lines that he cut away from the block with his tools. His method is known as white-line engraving. (This can seem a little confusing at first, for conceptually it is a little tricky to get one’s head around the difference.) Bewick’s method allowed him to use his tools with a much greater degree of flexibility and freedom of expression, and to achieve far greater variation of tone. More subtle effects could also be gained by combining both techniques.
Through the course of the nineteenth century, wood engraving became hugely popular worldwide as a method of mass-producing cheap images. However, whilst Bewick had drawn, cut and printed his own works himself, wood engraving became an increasingly industrialised process, with each stage carried out by a different operative. The intimate relationship between artist and end product was lost.
Revival
In 1821 another English artist-engraver, William Blake, produced a remarkable series of white-line wood engravings as illustrations for an edition of Virgil’s Eclogues. Blake’s young friend, the painter Samuel Palmer, would famously describe them as ‘visions of little dells and nooks and corners of Paradise: models of the exquisitest pitch on intense poetry.’ They rather overlooked at the time, would later prove hugely influential on a generation of twentieth-century British artists.
It was not, however, until the 1890s that a coterie of British artists, Charles Ricketts, Charles Shannon and Lucien Pissarro, re-established the link between artist and medium. Thomas Sturge Moore, Edward Gordon Craig followed their lead into the early twentieth century, and in 1905 the artist Noel Rooke began teaching what would eventually prove to be an influential course in wood engraving and book illustration at the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London (now part of Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design). In a 1925 lecture, Rooke would advise that there was ‘only one way of getting a thoroughly satisfactory engraving: the designer and the engraver must be one and the same person.’
An important early figure in the new generation of modern wood engravers was Gwen Raverat (1885–1957). A granddaughter of Charles Darwin, she had first seen and admired Bewick’s wood engravings as a teenager. In 1908 she went to study at the Slade School of Art in London, where her contemporaries included Stanley Spencer (who became a close friend) and Paul Nash (1889–1946). Though it might not seem a technique particularly suited to daring young advocates of the machine age, Modernist artists soon put wood engraving to startling effect. In 1914 and 1915 two Slade graduates, the Vorticists Edward Wadsworth and Percy Wyndham Lewis, printed powerful wood engravings in both editions of the avant-garde journal, BLAST.
The growing interest in wood engraving led a group of British artists, including Lucien Pissarro, Edward Gordon Craig, Robert Gibbings, Gwen Raverat and John Nash (1893–1977), to found the Society of Wood Engravers in 1920. Their annual exhibitions attracted contributions from other important British artists. They included John’s brother Paul, whose modernist artistic sympathies lay with the Vorticists, and the more traditionally minded Clare Leighton (1898–1989), a recent graduate from the Slade.
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In the years immediately after the First World War two new art schools were established where the study of wood engraving was promoted alongside other classes and courses. In 1921 Leon Underwood (1890–1975) founded the Brook Green School of Art in Hammersmith, south-west London. Though his most famous pupils would prove to be the sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, his printmaking students included Gertrude Hermes (1901–1983) and Agnes Miller Parker (1895–1980). Both would become leading practitioners of the art form. Then in 1925 Iain Macnab (1890–1967) established the Grosvenor School of Modern Art at his home in Warwick Square, Pimlico, south London. Best known today for its coloured linocuts – especially those by Claude Flight, Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power – it was also an important centre for teaching wood engraving. Macnab’s students included Tom Chadwick (1915–1942) and Rachel Reckitt (1908-1995).
It was Paul Nash who encouraged one of his hugely talented design pupils at the Royal College of Art, Eric Ravilious (1903–1942), to exhibit with (and eventually join) the Society of Wood Engravers. Though best known today for his beautiful watercolours of the English countryside and the ships and planes of the Second World War, Ravilious started his career as an engraver and muralist. Through the 1920s and 1930s he made numerous highly accomplished and assured white-line wood engravings, and was another leading practitioner, as well as something of an experimenter. His friend Edward Bawden would recall how Ravilious ‘never made the slightest mistake or showed the faintest indecision. His cutting was superb.’ Ravilious would in his turn teach the art to others, and his own pupils at the Royal College of Art would include the painter and wood engraver John O’Connor (1913–2004).
The various small private printers and publishers that thrived in this period – the Curwen Press, the Gregynog Press, the Golden Cockerel Press and the Nonesuch Press, among others – commissioned numerous artists to design illustrations for their sumptuously decorated books. As well as the artists whose work is included in this exhibition (which hardly aims to be definitive), there were numerous other important twentieth-century British wood engravers. They include Mabel Annesley, Robert Gibbings, Eric Gill, Blair Hughes-Stanton, David Jones and Reynolds Stone, among others.
When Gibbings took over the Golden Cockerel Press in 1924 he noted that wood engravings were not to be considered as ends in themselves, but as the accompaniments to text. For Gibbings, and others, the relationship between word and image was integral and indelible, as it had been for Thomas Bewick. But wood engravings were not only to be seen in specialist, limited edition works: popular books were often illustrated in this way, too. John Farleigh (1900–1965), for example, designed wood engravings for George Bernard Shaw’s allegorical tale, The Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God (published by Constable of London in 1932), whilst Clifford Webb (1894–1972) is perhaps best known for his illustrations for Arthur Ransome’s children’s book, Swallows and Amazons (published by Jonathan Cape in 1931).
There was a reaction, however, against the notion that wood engravings should always be embellishments to text. In 1925 Leon Underwood left the Society of Wood Engravers to establish the short-lived English Wood Engraving Society. Its member included Gertrude Hermes, as well as the future surrealist painter, Eileen Agar. It sought to promote wood engravings as a medium that could exist independently from any purely illustrative function. Though the Society folded in 1931, with some members rejoining the SWE, as this exhibition shows wood engravings can work equally well both as illustration and as stand alone works of art in their own right.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 – and the Great Depression that followed – curtailed the activity of many of the specialist presses. In 1938 Underwood’s Brook Green School closed, followed by the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in 1940. The Second World War – in which Eric Ravilious would be killed whilst serving as an official war artist with the RAF, and Tom Chadwick at the battle of El Alamein – proved the final nail in the coffin. Though important wood engravers, including Underwood, Hermes, Miller Parker, John Nash and O’Connor, continued to produce significant work long after the war was won, this second golden age of wood engraving effectively came to an end.
A New Era
Though George Mackley (1900–1983) published his important guide book, Wood Engraving, in 1948, the technique went into steady decline after the Second World War. A key new talent, however, was Monica Poole (1921–2003), who between 1945 and 1949 was taught by John Farleigh at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. Poole drew inspiration from the Neo-Romantic movement that flourished in the 1940s. Artists such as Graham Sutherland (who had started his own career as a metal engraver before turning to painting) had drawn inspiration from the wood engravings of William Blake and Samuel Palmer’s visionary period painting in Shoreham, Kent, in the 1820s and early 1830s. But as Poole’s obituary in The Guardian observed, ‘this phase of British art was short lived and, as the subject matter of Poole’s work went out of fashion, interest in her preferred medium of wood engraving, by the 1950s, was nearly extinct.’ By that date, there was only one firm in the UK still manufacturing the highly polished blocks of boxwood the engraver depended on.
By the 1960s even the Society of Wood Engravers had gone into abeyance. Artists and the public seemed much more excited by the modern world. Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism had little time for something as seemingly old fashioned as wood engraving. But the love of nature, landscape, history – subjects for which wood engraving seems so ideally suited – will not go away. In 1984 there was sufficient revival of interest for the artist Hilary Paynter to revive the SWE. Monica Poole became one of a number of stalwart members showing in the revived annual exhibitions. Of course, not all British wood engravers joined the Society – some highly accomplished artists nurtured their independence. But its growing success reveals the firm re-establishment of wood engraving as a much loved and popular medium through the late twentieth century and into the new millennium.
As the examples of work by contemporary wood engravers such as Anne Desmet, RA, Paul Kershaw, Colin See-Paynton and George Tute reveal, it remains possible to find new approaches, with each artist expressing their own interests and individuality. Some like Neil Bousefield are making an exciting addition of colour into their work. Furthermore, specialist publishers such as the Fleece Press have re-emerged, producing carefully crafted books dedicated to the art of wood engraving. And only last year, the Bodleian Library produced a beautiful new edition of Aesop’s Fables with original illustrations by Agnes Miller Parker. Almost two centuries after Thomas Bewick’s death, wood engraving remains a treasured and affordable art form, yet still one that he would still instantly recognise.
Further Reading
Thomas Balston, English Wood-Engraving, 1900-1950 (Dover Publications, 2016)
Simon Brett, Wood Engraving: How to Do It (Herbert Press, 2018)
Anne Desmet, Scene Through Wood: A Century of Modern Wood Engraving (The Ashmolean Museum, 2020)
Andy Friend, John Nash: The Landscape of Love and Solace (Thames & Hudson, 2020)
Andy Friend, Ravilious & Co. (Thames & Hudson, 2017)
Anne Hayward, Wood Engraving and Linocutting (The Crowood Press, 2008)
Clare Leighton, Four Hedges (Little Toller Books, 2010)
George Mackley, Wood Engraving (National Magazine Company, 1948)
Jenny Uglow, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick (Faber & Faber 2007)
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