A Great Engraver
Thomas Bewick : A Bibliography Raisonne. By S. Roscoe. (Oxford University Press. 70s.) •
THOMAS BEWICK iS Still so lively an influence on the craft of wood- engraving that it is surprising to be reminded, by these two books, and by exhibitions of his work at Newcastle and South Kensington, that in August we celebrate the bicentenary of his birth.
So long as artists seek to reproduce designs through the curiously sensitive, variable medium of the wood-block, so long will they have to study, even if they fail to emulate, the " white line " technique in which Bewick achieved, as Mr. Weekley says, " a flexibility and subtlety of expression never surpassed." Several of the finest wood- engravers of our. time—the late Eric Ravilious, Mr. Reynolds Stone, Miss Joan Hassall, and Mr. Robert Gibbings in his later work—are working so closely in the Bewick tradition as almost to seem his pupils.
Yet, when Bewick began to engrave on wood—taking 'on jobs for local printers during his apprenticeship in Newcastle because his master, Ralph Beilby, who has his own niche in the history of art as a decorator of glass, found wood an unsympathetic medium—the craft of wood-cutting had sunk so low in public esteem that it was employed chiefly for broadsides and chapbooks. It needed a man of peasant stock and outlook to revive the homely, popular art of the wood- block, and, by employing it on such rustic spbjects as birds and beasts and cottage landscapes, to show sophisticated taste what could be done with it. Although his father rented a small colliery in the Tyne Valley, Bewick's-upbringing was as simple and harsh as that .of the peasant-poets, Robert Bloomfield and John Clare. When he went to school he knew of no paintings besides the King's arms in the church and the signs of four village inns. His first drawings were done in chalk on gravestones.
I, cannot find Thomas Bewick as sympathetic a personality as his brother John, who had much of his talent, but died of `tuberculosis before his promise was fulfilled. Thomas, however, had a Cobbett- like sturdiness and independence. Dogmatic-and crotchety though he became, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, and he did it, without heed to fashionable demand or metropolitan distractions.
His History of Quadrupeds (1790) and History of British Birds (1797-1804), which, with the Fables of Aesop (1818), form the subject- matter of Mr. Roscoe's superb, exhaustive and much-needed bibli- ography, sold between them over 30,000 copies, and gained for him considerable fame in his own day. But today I think it would be generally agreed that his most distinctive engravings are not the formal studies of animals but the little " tale pieces," as he called them, with which he filled in short pages—masterly vignettes which tell us more about the country life of his time than all the paintings of Morland. Ruskin categorised them as " fitter for the furniture of gaols and pigstyes than of the houses of gentlemen and gentle- women." But then it is difficult to imagine Ruskin, in his childhood, running off for a morning's play on the fells, as Bewick often did, stark naked.
Bewick's other great legacy to posterity, though it was not published until thirty-four years after his death, was his Memoir. Despite a good deal of didactic moralising, this unconsidered masterpiece of childhood recollection is as fresh, vivid, and revealing as the'rustic vignettes. Mr. Weekley's useful and scholarly biography quotes extensively from it. It is astonishing, however, that so valuable and delightful a work should be out of print, and, indeed, that the only publications of it should have been truncated versions, one edited by his daughter Jane in 1862, and uncritically re-issued by Selwyn Image in 1924, the other re-edited by Austin Dobson—but by no means complete—in 1887. I hope that Mr. Weekley will now set about the urgent task of producing a complete and exact edition of Bewick's own manuscript, which is in the British Museum.
JOHN HADFIELD
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