Wood engraving is a technique in printmaking where the "matrix" worked by the artist is a block of wood. It is a variety of woodcut and so a relief printing technique, where ink is applied to the face of the block and printed by using relatively low pressure. A normal engraving, like an etching, has a metal plate as a matrix and is printed by the intaglio method. In wood engraving the technique for working the block is different from woodcut, using an engraver's burin to create very thin delicate lines, and often having large dark areas in the composition, though by no means always. Wood engraving traditionally utilizes the end grain of wood as a medium for engraving, while in the older technique of woodcut the softer side grain is used.
The technique of wood engraving developed at the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century, with the works of Thomas Bewick. Bewick generally made his engraving in harder woods than are now normally used, and would engrave the end of a block instead of the side. Finding a knife not suitable for working against the grain in harder woods, Bewick used the engraving tool the burin, which has a V-shaped cutting tip. Engraving on wood in this manner produced highly detailed images, which are distinct in style from those produced by engraving on copper plates. Since wood engraving is a relief process (ink is applied to the raised surface of the block) while metal engraving is an intaglio technique, wood engravings deteriorated much less quickly than copper-plate engravings and had a distinctive white-on-black character. Wood-engraved blocks could be used on conventional print presses, which were themselves making rapid mechanical improvements during the first quarter of the 19th century. Cut to be type-high, the blocks were composited within the page layout along with the movable type, and thousands of copies of such an illustrated page could be printed with almost no deterioration of the illustration blocks. As a result of Bewick's innovation and improvements in the printing press, illustrations of art, nature, technical processes, famous people, foreign lands and many other subjects became more widely available.
Following the achievements of Bewick, wood engraving was used to great effect by 19th century artists such as Edward Calvert, and its heyday lasted until the early and mid 20th century when remarkable achievements were made by Eric Gill, Eric Ravilious and others. Though less widely used now, the technique is still prized in the early 21st century as a high-quality specialist technique of book illustration, and is promoted by the Society of Wood Engravers who hold an annual exhibition in London and other regional British venues.
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From the beginning of the nineteenth century Bewick's techniques gradually came into wider use, especially in Britain. Besides its use for interpreting details of light and shade, the method found another use from the 1820s onwards as a means of reproducing freehand line drawings. This was in many ways an unnatural application, since the engravers were obliged to cut away almost all the surface of the block in order to leave printable the black lines of the artist's drawing; nonetheless, it became by far the most common use of wood engraving. Examples include the cartoons of Punch magazine, the pictures in the Illustrated London News and Sir John Tenniel's illustrations to Lewis Carroll's works, the latter engraved by the firm of Dalziel Brothers.
Until 1860, artists working for engraving had to paint or draw directly on the surface of the block and the original artwork was actually destroyed by the engraver. In that year, however, the engraver Thomas Bolton invented a process for transferring a photograph onto the block.
At about the same time, French engravers developed a modified technique (partly a return to that of Bewick) in which cross-hatching (one set of parallel lines crossing another at an angle) was almost entirely eliminated; instead, all gradations of tone were rendered by white lines of varying thickness and closeness, sometimes broken into dots for the darkest areas. This technique can be seen in the engravings from Gustave Doré's drawings.
Towards the end of the century, a combination of Bolton's 'photo on wood' process and the increased technical virtuosity initiated by the French school gave wood engraving a new application as a means of reproducing drawings in water-colour wash (as opposed to line drawings) and actual photographs. This is exemplified in the illustrations to The Strand Magazine during the 1890s. With the new century, improvements in the half-tone process rendered this kind of reproductive engraving obsolete, although in a less sophisticated form it survived in advertisements and trade catalogues until about 1930. With this change, wood engraving was left free to develop as a creative form in its own right, a movement prefigured in the late 1800s by such artists as Joseph Crawhall II and the Beggarstaff Brothers.
Wood engraving blocks are typically made of boxwood or other hardwoods such as lemonwood or cherry. They are expensive to purchase because end-grain wood must be a section through the trunk or large bough of a tree. Some modern wood engravers use substitutes made of PVC or resin, mounted on MDF, which produce similarly detailed results of a slightly different character.
The block is manipulated on a "sandbag" (a sand-filled circular leather cushion), enabling curved or undulating lines to be produced with minimal manipulation of the actual tool being used.
Wood engravers use a range of specialist tools. The lozenge graver is similar to the burin used by copper engravers of Bewick's day, and comes in different sizes; there are also various sizes of V-shaped graver used for hatching. Other more flexible tools include the spitsticker, which will produce fine undulating lines; the round scorper, which is excellent for textures involving curves; and the flat scorper which is useful for clearing larger areas.
Wood engraving is generally a black-and-white technique. However there are a handful of wood engravers who also work in colour, using three or four blocks of primary colours, a similar principle to the four-colour process in modern printing. To do this, the printmaker must register the blocks (have a system to make sure that they are all printed in exactly the same place on the page).
In rough chronological order:
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.