in black line, or to translate a wash drawing into white line with the graver, a process which gave scope for some degree of originallty, and was developed to its extreme of rather tiresome perfection in the United States.
This general statement about nineteenth century engraving admits of certain exceptions. Originality breaks out now and again, whether in the humbler form of broadsides and advertisements and illustrations to chap-books, ballads, and children's story books, or in the work of those rare artists who chose to learn the craft of wood-engraving for themselves, and engrave their own designs without employing a professional hand as interpreter. Blake, who drew and cut his illustrations to Thornton's Virgil, and Blake's disciple, Edward Calvert, who engraved a few small exquisite pastorals of his own design, are the chief of these rare exceptions. There is hardly another case of original wood-engraving to be met with in England till about 1890, though Lepère, the pioneer of the revival of original wood-cutting in France, had begun his career much earlier than that; it was not till about 1895, however, that he relinquished the practice of engraving for that of cutting on the plank, the method adopted for most of his work from that time onwards.
In England, apart from a few modest ventures in The Hobby Horse (1886-1892) which published some original woodcuts by Herbert Horne, the modern woodcut made its début in The Dial (1889-1897) in the books illustrated by Mr. Ricketts and Mr. Charles Shannon before the foundation of the Vale Press, and in the portfolios of woodcuts by Mr. Lucien Pissarro (1891) and Mr. T. Sturge Moore (1895), which they published at the Vale, Chelsea. William Morris had used woodcuts, of course, in many of the Kelmscott Press books, but they were reproductive woodcuts, by W. H. Hooper and others, from designs by other artists, and when Morris made experiments, long before this, in cutting blocks himself, the illustrations which he engraved for a projected edition of "Cupid and Psyche" had been designed by Burne-Jones. The Birmingham school of illustrators, which followed in the tracks of Morris, did not contribute very much to the development of wood-engraving. With the exception of Mr. Bernard Sleigh, most of this group confined themselves to making designs in the woodcut manner, which were reproduced by process. Somewhat later than this Mr. Gordon Craig, standing quite apart from this group, engraved beautiful decorations on wood for The Page and The Mask, and Mr. Brangwyn is another of the older artists, detached from those of whom I shall have to speak, who have done remarkable work on wood.
The artists of this older generation, the original wood engravers of
