WOOD ENGRAVING VERSUS METAL ENGRAVING

The comparison above would obviously have made no sense in the first half of the nineteenth century, during the meteoric rise of wood engraving, even though the aim was much the same then in attempting to distinguish the medium from the well established image making techniques such as metal engraving and etching. The arguments put in defining wood engraving, or usually the wider medium of xylography were based on wood cutting having a language or syntax that was inherent to the material qualities of wood as a matrix. Such arguments almost always began with exemplars by Thomas Bewick and his circle and didn’t progress much further. John Ruskin and a few other critics bemoaned the influence of industry on the craft and resultant demise in quality but generally this commercialisation was justification enough for the importance of wood engraving.

With the rapid demise of facsimile or reproductive cutting in the 1880s, the status of wood engraving as a craft and art became a more vital issue. Theorists of the form in Britain and the United States again sought to define the essential nature of the mode of block cutting but there was more at stake in finding the essence of the medium if one started with the premise that miraculous transformations could only be enacted in any print medium when the engraver/print maker followed the dictates of that specific medium. It was relatively easy to dismiss the many wood engravers in the first decades of the ninetieth century who were forced to copy steel and copper engravings as “wood peckers” as they were forced to peck out the rhomboid white spaces between cross-hatched lines. However, depreciating, as foreign to the medium, the technique of Timothy Cole working from a photograph, was hardly possible considering Bewick had pioneered the judicious use of white line hatching as a fundamental technique for the medium.

When the second edition of Chatto and Jackson’s Treatise on Wood Engraving, was published in 1881, the issues raised by the fusion of photography and wood engraving were ignored and Bewick remained the guiding light for what was true and great in the medium. Much the same tac was followed by Henry Holiday In a series of essays on Wood Engraving published in five parts in the Magazine of Art (London) in 1880, although he does avoid adopting any comparative hierarchy ranking wood engraving over any other medium but remains focused on distinguishing the true non-linear or tone/tint approach of Thomas Bewick.

In wood engraving, outlines are only needed … as a guide, and are not wanted as a method of work any more than in a sepia drawing, and we may look in vain through Bewick's "Birds" for an outline, except in the rare case of a white object being seen against a light ground, as, for instance, a bird's white neck against the sky. But if all the outlines in the book were set together end to end, I doubt if their united length would amount to three inches. In this respect, wood engraving, dealing as it does with tints, not lines, approaches more nearly to nature than an art in which lines are the essential principle. It will, of course, be understood that by lines, I mean single detached lines, as distinct from a close series such as employed to give the effect of a tint. Then, he noted that wood had a certain general advantage, which will be possessed by an art in which lights are taken out of a dark ground, when compared with one which proceeds by the opposite method of drawing black upon white.

It may have seemed a strategic necessity to ignore the implications of xylophotography, and all the associated fusions of wood and photograph, and return to a golden age of Bewick yet it was an unsustainable argument on logical or progressive grounds. Besides, by the 1880s, if aesthetic or perceptual judgment was the only measure, it could be demonstrated that wood engraving could achieve a greater variety of tone and tint than any half-tone process; ocular quality was not the contentious issue, it was the massive cost differential between the two processes. That wood engravers such a Timothy Cole continued to produce very high quality photo-based prints was partly made possible by an embedded acceptance by American audiences that there was no major differential between published wood engravings sourced from photographs or drawn designs, after all the National Police Gazette published in New York retained a massive circulation to the end of the century without recourse to half-tone photographs. [Not forgetting, that it did appeal to the lowest common denominator of human interest] To suggest Bewick and his circle had established that wood engraving was not a medium of line, as engraving and etching were, but the primary medium of tint and tone, or for exposing white in a black ground, only explained why it was used to define the medium of photography which was conceptualised as “drawing with light”. And in turn, supported the obvious proposition that the coupling of photography and wood engraving had been a marriage made in heaven. Additionally, and importantly, William Linton’s book on The history of wood-engraving in America of 1882 which marks the beginning of the acceptance of wood engraving by the expanding market for fine art print collecting in America, collapsed any distinction between wood engraving sourced from photography and paintings or drawings. This made perfect sense considering by the time he was writing almost all drawings and paintings were being first photographed for reproduction regardless if the resulting print was to be from a half-tone plate or wood matrix.