to shaded woodcuts we may mention a kind of wood engraving practised in the middle of the 15th century by a French engraver (often called Bernard Milnet, though his name is a matter of doubt) and by other engravers nearer the beginning of that century. This method is called the criblé, a word for which there is no convenient translation in English, unless we call it drilled. It means riddled with small holes, as a target may be riddled with small shot. The effect of light and dark is produced in this kind of engraving by sinking a great number of round holes of different diameters in the substance of the wood, which, of course, all come white in the printing; it is, in effect, a sort of stippling in white. When a more advanced kind of wood engraving had become prevalent the criblé was no longer used for general purposes, but it was retained for the grounds of decorative wood engraving, being used occasionally in borders for pages, in printers’ marks and other designs, which were survivals in black and white of the ancient art of illuminating. Curiously enough, this kind of wood engraving, though long disused for purposes of art, was in recent times revived with excellent effect for scientific purposes, mainly as a method of illustration for astronomical books. The black given by the untouched wooden block represents the night sky, and the holes, smaller or larger, represent in white the stars and planets of lesser or greater magnitude. The process was perfectly adapted to this purpose, being cheap, rapid and simple. It has also been used in a spasmodic and experimental manner by one or two modern engravers.
The earlier workmen turned their attention to woodcut in simple black lines, including outline and shading. In early work the outline is firm and very distinct, being thicker in line than the shading, and in the shading the lines are simple, without cross-hatchings, as the workmen found it easier and more natural to take out a white line-like space between two parallel or nearly parallel black lines than to cut out the twenty or thirty small white lozenges into which the same space would have been divided by cross-hatchings. The early work would also sometimes retain the simple black patch which we find in Japanese woodcuts, for example, in the “Christmas Dancers,” of Wohlgemuth, all the shoes are black patches, though there is no discrimination of local colour in anything else. A precise parallel to this treatment is to be found in a Japanese woodcut of the “Wild Boar and Hare,” given by Aimé Humbert in his book on Japan, in which the boar has a cap which is a perfectly black patch though all other local colour is omitted. The similarity of method between Wohlgemuth and the Japanese artist is close: they both take pleasure in drawing thin black lines at a little distance from the patch and following its shape like a border. In course of time, as wood engravers became more expert, they were not so careful to spare themselves trouble and pains, and then cross-hatchings were introduced, but at first more as a variety to relieve the eye than as a common method of shading. In the 16th century a simple kind of wood engraving reached such a high degree of perfection that the best work of that time has never been surpassed in its own way.
Wood engraving in the 16th century was much more conventional than it became in more recent times, and this very conventionalism enabled it to express what it had to express with greater decision and power. The wood engraver in those days was free from many difficult conditions which hampered his modern successor. He did not care in the least about aerial perspective, and nobody expected him to care about it; he did not trouble his mind about local colour, but generally omitted it, sometimes, however, giving it here and there, but only when it suited his fancy. As for light-and-shade, he shaded only when he wanted to give relief, but never worked out anything like a studied and balanced effect of light-and-shade, nor did he feel any responsibility about the matter. What he really cared for, and generally attained, was a firm, clear, simple kind of drawing, conventional in its indifference to the mystery of nature and to the poetic sentiment which comes to us from that mystery, but by no means indifferent to fact of a decided and tangible kind. The wood engraving of the 16th century was a singularly positive art, as positive as carving; indeed, most of the famous woodcuts of that time might be translated into carved panels without much loss of character. Their complete independence of pictorial conditions might be illustrated by many examples. In Dürer’s “Salutation” the dark blue of the sky above the Alpine mountains is translated by dark shading, but so far is this piece of local colour from being carried out in the rest of the composition that the important foreground figures, with their draperies, are shaded as if they were white statues. Again, the sky itself is false in its shading, for it is without gradation, but the shading upon it has a purpose, which is to prevent the upper part of the composition from looking too empty, and the conventionalism of wood engraving was so accepted in those days that the artist could have recourse to this expedient in defiance alike of pictorial harmony and of natural truth. In Holbein’s admirable series of small well-filled compositions, the “Dance of Death,” the firm and matter-of-fact drawing is accompanied by a sort of light-and-shade adopted simply for convenience, with as little reference to natural truth as might be expected in a stained-glass window. There is a most interesting series of little woodcuts drawn and engraved in the 16th century by J. Amman as illustrations of the different handicrafts and trades, and entitled “The Baker,” “The Miller,” “The Butcher,” and so on. Nothing is more striking in this valuable series than the remarkable closeness with which the artist observed everything in the nature of a hard fact, such as the shape of a hatchet or a spade; but he sees no mystery anywhere—he can draw leaves but not foliage, feathers but not plumage, locks but not hair, a hill but not a landscape. In the “Witches’ Kitchen,” a woodcut by Hans Baldung (Grün) of Strassburg, dated 1510, the steam rising from the pot is so hard that it has the appearance of two trunks of trees denuded of their bark, and makes a pendant in the composition to a real tree on the opposite side which does not look more substantial. Nor was this a personal deficiency in Grün. It was Dürer’s own way of engraving clouds and vapour, and all the engravers of that time followed it. Their conceptions were much more those of a carver than those of a painter. Dürer actually did carve in high relief, and Grün’s “Witches’ Kitchen” might be carved in the same manner without loss. When the engravers were rather draughtsmen than carvers, their drawing was of a decorative character. For example, in the magnificent portrait of Christian III. of Denmark by Jacob Binck, one of the very finest examples of old wood engraving, the face and beard are drawn with few lines and very powerfully, but the costume is treated strictly as decoration, the lines of the patterns being all given, with as little shading as possible, and what shading there is is simple, without cross-hatching.
The perfection of simple wood engraving having been attained so early as the 16th century by the use of the graver, the art became extremely productive. During the 17th and 18th centuries it still remained a comparatively severe and conventional form of art, because the workmen shaded as much as possible either with straight lines or simple curves, so that there was never much appearance of freedom. Modern wood engraving is quite a distinct art, being based on different principles, but between the two stands the work of an original genius, Thomas Bewick (1753–1828). Although apprenticed to an engraver in 1767, he was never taught to draw, and got into ways and habits of his own which add to the originality of his work, though his defective training is always evident. His work is the more genuine from his frequent habit of engraving his own designs, which left him perfect freedom of interpretation; but the genuineness of it is not only of the kind which comes from independence of spirit, it is due also to his fidelity to the technical nature of the process, a fidelity very rare in the art.
The reader will remember that in wood engraving every cutting prints white, and every space left untouched prints black. Simple black lines are obtained by cutting out white lines or spaces between them, and crossed black lines have to be obtained by laboriously cutting out all the white lozenges between them. In Bewick’s cuts white lines, which had appeared before him in the Fables of 1772, are abundant and are often crossed, but black lines are never crossed; he is also quite willing to utilize the black space, as the Japanese wood-engravers and Dürer’s master Wohlgemuth used to do. The side of the frying-pan in the vignette of “The Cat and the Mouse” is treated precisely on their principles, so precisely indeed that we have the line at the edge for a border. In the vignette of “The Fisherman,” at the end of the twentieth chapter of the Memoir, the space of dark shade under the bushes is left quite black, whilst the leaves and twigs, and the rod and line too, are all drawn in pure white lines. Bewick, indeed, was more careful in his adherence to the technical conditions of the art than any of the primitive woodcutters except those who worked in criblé and who used white lines as well as their dots. Such a thing as a fishing-net is an excellent test of this disposition. In the interesting series by J. Amman already mentioned there is a cut of a man fishing in a river, from a small punt, with a net. The net comes dark against the light surface of the river, and Amman took the trouble to cut a white lozenge for every mesh. Bewick, in one of his vignettes, represents a fisherman mending his nets by the side of a stream. A long net is hung to dry on four upright sticks, but to avoid the trouble of cutting out the lozenges, Bewick artfully contrives his arrangement of light and shade so that the net shall be in light against a space of black shade under some
