An adventure of discovery
Colin Campbell
BRITISH WOOD-ENGRAVED BOOK ILLUSTRATION, 1904-1940 by Joanna Selborne Clarendon, £70, pp. 432 Stigmatised by its association with craft, 20th-century wood-engraving is still widely regarded as a quaint survival from Victori- an times — on a par, as one wag put it, with thatching and smock-making. James Hamilton's general survey of the field, pub- lished in 1994, Wood-engraving and the Woodcut in Britain, c. 1890-1990 helped to put the record straight, but the more spe- cialised area of engraved book-art from the first four decades of the century has long been neglected by art historians, who are inclined to view illustration as a so-called `minor' art form labouring under the restraints of representing a set subject. All the more reason, then, to welcome Joanna Selbome's excellent study of an era that saw the use of the versatile medium of wood-engraving in books ranging from Penguin illustrated classics to Eric Gill's magnificent Four Gospels (1931).
Artists sometimes wonder why they both- er with wood-engraving at all. Setting out to master this intricate relief method, Robert Gibbings questioned whether the `finicky' work on a tiny block of fine- grained boxwood, followed by inking up and printing, was worth the trouble to get a few lines that might have been obtained more easily with a pen or brush. However, he soon began to enjoy the sensuousness derived from the 'crisp purr' of the graver as it furrowed the polished surface of his block, and above all the excitement that he and the other early 20th-century practition- ers experienced as they began, in the wake of precursors like William Nicholson and Gordon Craig, to use the medium for origi- nal work, rather than simply as a means of reproducing other artists' drawings. The campaign to revive autographic wood-engraving, initiated by Noel Rooke in 1904, gave rise to many single prints, but it was quickly extended to book-illustration, a role to which wood-blocks are inherently suited since they can be both printed simul- taneously with a page of type and made to harmonise with that type. Some of the new illustrations were created by specialist engravers such as Gwen Raverat, others by painters like Vanessa Bell. Not everyone was inspired by a love of literature, and the The Three Carts' by John Nash (The Sun Calendar, 1920) images produced varied widely, encompass- ing the subjective visions of Gertrude Her- mes and the more robust, modernistic work of Edward Wadsworth. What they all had in common was the conviction that engraved illustrations would reflect the nature of the wood and tools used, and be conceived in relation to accompanying typography.
The illustrators were initially dependent on the private presses (Golden Cockerel, Gregynog, Nonesuch); but by the 1930s their work was also to be found in the trade editions of commercial publishers, where it influenced general standards of production and even (in John Farleigh's contributions to Bernard Shaw's Adventures of the Black Girl in her Search for God, 1932, and the `countryside' books of Clare Leighton and Agnes Miller Parker) achieved popular success. Sadly, economic conditions forced publishers to withdraw their support on the outbreak of the second world war. Leighton emigrated to the USA in 1939; Eric Ravilious died in a plane crash in 1942; Farleigh, Hermes, Blair Hughes- Stanton and a few others continued to engrave after 1945, but post-war publishers preferred illustrations which could be printed by the new offset and filmsetting methods.
Using unpublished material gleaned from artists' correspondence, art school records, and publishers' and print societies' archives, Selbome sketches the background to this revival, introduces us to the move- ment's pioneers and analyses the work pro- duced by Gill, Ravilious, David Jones, Paul Nash and others between 1920 and 1940. Mindful of the neo-picturesque efforts of Thomas Bewick's latter-day followers (cas- tigated by Farleigh as 'portraits of full- blown thistles and village pumps' that had nothing to say), the author concentrates on `the more inventive artists'. But what is invention in art? There is more to it than idiosyncratic subject-matter or boldness of style, and some wheat has been thrown out with the chaff. The gifted Reynolds Stone and Charles Tunnicliffe, for example, are among the 'unadventurous' individuals whose renderings of the natural world (to which wood-engraving is so well adapted) receive little or no attention.
The author's otherwise admirably com- prehensive treatment of her subject high- lights the disparity in quality of the work of the movement's various members, leading one to regret the exclusion of experimental engravers like Charles Ginner and C.W.R. Nevinson who did not make the transition from wall prints to illustration. Nonethe- less, she succeeds in conveying a sense of the vitality of the movement, documenting its debates and outstanding achievements, and identifying its links with mainstream art. With its reliable text and 212 black- and-white illustrations, this handsome vol- ume is the first major contribution to our understanding of what Gill called British wood-engraving's 'adventure of discovery'.
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