In Great Britain a few engravers of high rank and ability still followed the art which was raised to so high a pitch by W. J. Linton (d. 1898). Such were Mr Charles Roberts, Mr Biscombe Gardner, Mr Comfort, Mr Ulrich and a few more—the first two the better engravers for being also practising artists. But there is every reason to fear that if wood engraving as a craft, for ordinary purposes, ceases to exist, wood engraving as a fine art must disappear as well—as there would be nothing to support the young craftsman during the years of apprenticeship and practice required to make an “artist” of him, and nothing to compensate him if he fail to attain at once the highest accomplishment.
Another circumstance which has contributed to the overthrow of wood engraving in England is the rapture begotten of the extraordinary executive perfection to which the art had been brought in America. These engravings, published in magazines and books having wide circulation in England, awakened not an intelligent but a foolish appreciation among the public. Just as the over-refinement of engraving on steel of Finden and his school killed his art by stripping it of all interest, so the unsurpassable perfection of the American wood engraver, by the law of paradox, effectually stifled xylography in England, as it has since done to an almost equal degree in America. The reason is simple. With the object of “disindividualing” himself, as he called it, the engraver sought to suppress his own recognizable manner of craftsmanship when translating the work of the artist for the public; and the more he succeeded in effacing himself, and the more he refined and elaborated his technique and imitated textures, and the more he developed extreme minuteness and excessive dexterity (so as to secure faithfulness and smoothness), the more closely did the result approximate to a photograph and nothing more. The result, in fact, became the reductio ad absurdum of the passion for the minute and the perfection of mere technique. The result was amazing in its completeness, but curiously grey and monotonous; and matter-of-fact publishers and public alike preferred the photograph, which in their eyes did not differ so very much (except in being a little greyer and more monotonous) reproduced by the half-tone block, while the cost of the latter was but a fraction of that of the former. The extreme elaboration, satisfying a craving of an acrobatic kind, defeated its own end. The public were pleased for a time, and the result has been disastrous for the art.
In England, in spite of the International Society of Wood Engravers, of which little is now heard, there are no signs of a general revival, and it seems as if the art must be born again, so long as the public interest in photographs continues. Charles Ricketts and Miss Housman have gone back to a Düreresque, or Florentine, manner of the Early Renaissance woodcut, while others are striving to begin engraving where Bewick began it. If the true art is ever restored, the revival will rather be based on a revolt against the greyness of the process-block, and the offensively shiny surface of the chalk-coated paper on which it is printed, than on any aesthetic delight in intelligent wood engraving, its expressive line, its delicate, pearly tones, and its rich, fat blacks.
In America, where the power of resuscitation is great, the miraculous technical perfection brought about by Timothy Cole and Frederick Juengling, as leaders of the school, has promptly given way to a greater feeling for art and a lesser worship of mechanical achievement, and, within strict limits, wood engraving is saved. Curiously enough, Cole (an Englishman by birth) was equally a leader in recognizing the danger which his own brilliant proficiency had helped to bring about. The “decadent” de luxe who had overwhelmed his art in the refinements which threatened to destroy it, and who had been seconded by the splendid printing-presses of America (which might without exaggeration be called instruments of precision), gave up what may be termed hyper-engraving, and, surrendering his wonderful power of imitating surfaces and textures, changed his manner. He became broader in handling; his example was followed by others, and wood engraving in a very few hands still prospers in the United States.
In France, where the art has reached the highest perfection and the most consummate and logical development, it flourishes up to a certain point on the true artistic instinct of the engraver, on the taste of an intelligent and appreciative public, and on official recognition and encouragement. Nevertheless, it was found necessary to establish a “Society of Wood Engravers” (with a magazine of its own) to protect it against the inroad of the process-block. The art doubtless produces more engravers of skill than it can provide work for; but that is evidence rather of vitality than of decay. Lepère, Baude, Jonnard and Florian have been among the leaders who, in different styles of wood engraving, have sustained the extraordinarily high level which has been attained in France, and which is fairly well maintained by virtue of the encouragement on which it has thriven heretofore. Florian, who died in 1900, was a man who successfully sought to obtain effects of tone rather than line, leaving masses of unengraved surface to enhance the delicate beauty of his pearly greys. But in rebelling against the mechanical style formerly so much in vogue in Germany, of indicating roundness of form by curved lines carried as far as possible at right angles to the convexity, and in substituting more or less longitudinal lines of shading, he sacrificed a good deal of the logic of form-rendering, and started a method that has not been entirely successful.
In Germany the artistic standard is lower than in France. It is true that few outside Germany could model a head as finely as M. Klinkicht in his own style of a judicious mingling of the black line and the white line; but, as a rule, German engraving is far more precise, more mechanical, more according to formula, and heavier and more old-fashioned than that of either France or America. The art has been injured by the great “studios” or factories designed to flourish on strictly business principles, workshops which, in the education of the craftsman, to some extent annihilated the artist. A few there are, however, of great ability and taste. The attempt to print wood engravings in colours has done little to improve the status of the art. In other countries, however, “original” work helped to raise the standard. Thus the work of Elbridge Kingsley, who would sit down in the woods and engrave the scene before him directly on to the block, exercised no little influence in America. The similar ability of Lepère to engrave directly from nature, whether from the trees of Fontainebleau Forest or the palace of Westminster, has in its time been much appreciated in his own country and in England. The efforts at block-printing by Charpentier and others, not only with colour, but by reinforcing it with blocks that print neither lines nor colour but “blind” pattern, raised or depressed upon the paper, are evidence of the movement by which new methods have been sought to interest the public. The immediate results have not been very serious, yet the fact shows the existence of a vitality that gives some hope for the future. But while the practice of dry-printing upon “surface paper” is maintained, it is hopeless to expect in the immediate future, in Great Britain at least, any permanently good results from orthodox wood engraving.
See the works cited under Engraving; and also J. Jackson, Treatise on Wood-Engraving (1839), Didot's Essai sur l'histoire de la gravure sur bois (1863); W. S. Baker, American Engravers and their Work (Philadelphia, 1875); J. Jackson and W. A. Chatto, Treatise on Wood-Engraving (Chatto, 1881); P. G. Hamerton, The Graphic Arts (Seeley, 1882), W. J. Linton, History of Wood-Engraving in America (Chatto, 1882); G. E. Woodberry, History of Wood-Engraving (S. Low, 1883); Sir W. M. Conway, The Wood-cutters of the Netherlands in the 15th century (Cambridge Press, 1884), W. J. Linton, Wood-Engraving (G. Bell & Sons, London, 1884); Dr F. Lippmann, Wood-Engraving in Italy in the 15th century (Quaritch, 1888), John Ruskin, Ariadne Florentina (Allen, 1890); W. J. Linton, The Masters of Wood-Engraving: folio, issued to subscribers only (London, Stevens, Charing Cross, 1889 and 1892); P. G. Hamerton, Drawing and Engraving (A. & C. Black, 1892), an extended reprint of the article on “Engraving” in the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Louis Fagan, History of Engraving in England (text and three portfolios of plates) (Low, 1893–1894); George and Edward Dalziel, The Dalziel Brothers: a record of 50 years' work, 1848–1899 (Methuen, 1901). (P. G. H.; M. H. S.)
WOODFALL, HENRY SAMPSON (1739–1805), English printer and journalist, was born in London on the 21st of June 1739. His father, Henry Woodfall, was the printer of the newspaper the Public Advertiser, and the author of the ballad Darby and Joan, for which his son's employer, John Darby, and his wife, were the originals. H. S. Woodfall was apprenticed to his father, and at the age of nineteen took over the control of the Public Advertiser. In it appeared the famous letters of “Junius.” Woodfall sold his interest in the Public Advertiser in 1793. He died on the 12th of December 1805. His younger brother, William Woodfall (1746–1803), also a journalist, established in 1789 a daily paper called the Diary, in which, for the first time, reports of the parhamentary debates were published on the morning after they had taken place.
WOODFORD, an urban district in the Walthamstow (S.W.) parliamentary division of Essex, England, 9 m. N.E. from Liverpool Street station, London, by a branch of the Great Eastern railway. Pop. (1901) 13,798. Its proximity to the southern outskirts of Epping Forest has brought it into favour both with residents and with holiday visitors from London. A converted mansion, Woodford Hall, forms a convalescent home. On high ground to the N. is the ecclesiastical parish (one of three) of Woodford Wells, where there is a mineral spring.
WOOD GREEN, an urban district in the Tottenham parliamentary division of Middlesex, England, suburban to London, 7 m. N. of St Paul's Cathedral, on the Great Northern railway. Pop. (1891) 25,831, (1901) 34,233. The name covers a populous residential district lying north of Hornsey and west of Tottenham. To the west lies Muswell Hill, with the grounds and building of the Alexandra Palace, an establishment somewhat similar to the Crystal Palace. It was opened in 1873, destroyed by fire almost immediately, and reopened in 1875. Muswell Hill
