Studio: international art (14.1898)

The Future of Wood-Engraving

WOOD-BLOCK. DESIGNED AND CUT BY

MARGARET HARRISON

John Millais, were fostered and encouraged by
the practice of drawing on the wood-block. Its
technicalities and peculiarities were made the
subject of serious study by all illustrators, and
whatever concession it demanded from them was
made willingly enough and without any idea on
their part that they were sacrificing their own
freedom of artistic action for the sake of securing
its assistance and co-operation in their labours. It
was distinctly a petted and favoured art, but it had
the excellent quality of never failing any one who
took the trouble to read its character and under-
stand its limitations.

Yet in less than a quarter of a century it has
fallen from its high estate, and has become a mere
vagrant, dependent for its continued existence upon
casual and rather grudging charity. Its fall has
been greatly the result, it cannot be denied, of
its own indiscretion. So long as wood-engraving
remained an absolute authority, dictating to the
artists who courted its favours the manner in which
it might be approached, and so long as it imposed
upon them a special preparation for admission
within the ranks of its followers, it was secure and
supreme. But it began in a moment of weakness
to unbend. It was injudicious enough to put itself

at the disposal of some art workers who were
strangers to its laws, and committed the mistake of
trying to deal with work which was not specially
designed for it. It set itself, in fact, to outrage
its traditional policy, to alter its methods, and
become not a leader of opinion but a follower,
subject to other men’s fancies. Directly wood-
engraving showed that it was ready to adapt itself
to circumstances, and to handle whatever came
in its way, its degeneration commenced. As soon
as it became a merely reproductive art, willing to
imitate the technicalities of other arts, no one
cared to strive any longer to learn the mysteries
of the craft. It was then nothing but a mechanical
device, an imitative process, copying touch by
touch and blot by blot, the accidental qualities
of the brush or pen. Yet for a while what it
did in this way was excellently done. Twenty
years ago magazines of the better class were full
of exquisitely handled engraved facsimiles of pen
drawings, water-colours, and even oil paintings.
It could not be objected against the wood-engrav-
ing of that date that it failed to reproduce most
attractively a very wide range of art work that was
in character quite unlike the careful designs of the
men who never allowed themselves to forget what
a woodcut ought to be. The pity was that such
admirable technique should be practically wasted,
thrown away upon not too intelligent imitation,
when it might have been far more worthily em-
ployed in the treatment of original and entirely
appropriate material.

The punishment of wood-engraving for its back-
sliding was prompt and severe. No sooner had it
become imitative than photography, safe in the
possession of powers of exact repetition that no
skill of hand could approach, rose up as its fiercest
rival. The process block, by which any sort of
drawing or painting could be reproduced with
almost absolute accuracy, routed the woodcut in an
instant. Everything was in favour of the photo-
graphic device. It was cheap, convenient, easy to
handle, and it demanded from the artists them-
selves hardly anything in the way of irksome
concessions. And, most fatal blow to wood-en-
graving, it could show results as a matter of
everyday performance that were only within the
reach of the most skilful facsimile engravers
working under entirely favourable conditions of
time and opportunity. It could do in hours
what they could only achieve, at best, in many
days; and on the ground of speed alone it was
bound to be preferred over its leisurely competitor,
a survival from other days, when the stress of

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