An engraver’s life

Before Gutenberg invented moveable type around 1450, printing words and images from woodblocks was the norm. Britain’s Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) is acknowledged as one of the greatest wood engravers of all time. Sitting hunched on his workbench, whistling, he shaved away curls of boxwood sent up in logs by sea from London. In the process, he produced engravings that adorned mugs, coffins plates, posters and approximately 750 18th-century editions of children’s books and religious tracts, including an edition of Aesop’s fables.

All these images of birds, animals and country roads captured the vanishing rural life of northern England. The author writes Bewick’s scenes “spoke to the homesick”; they were “at once signals of freedom and tokens of loss.”

Bewick’s painstaking work in “A General History of Quadrupeds,” published in 1790, and his “History of British Birds” (Land Birds, 1797; Water Birds, 1804), earned him the admiration of naturalists and the devotion of children and adults alike. Today we are spoiled by the photography of nature films, but in Bewick’s time, hardly any accurate images of animals or birds existed.

Consequently, his drawings of beasts were an absolute revelation: Bewick had combined keen observation with a new approach, showing birds and animals in their natural settings. Hundreds of specimens — dead and alive — were sent to Bewick so he could accurately reproduce their likenesses on paper. The live ones sometimes made for unforseen amusements or hazards, such as the good-natured guillemot, who sat under his work table, calmly trimming its feathers, or the angry puffin, sent in a box covered with string, who jabbed at workmen with its razor-sharp beak.

Throughout, Bewick’s work shone with what, in “Nature’s Engraver,” Jenny Uglow describes as his “instinctive sympathy and astonished awe at the beauty of living things.” We see it for ourselves in the illustrations exquisitely reproduced in this book, in exactly the same size as Bewick printed them, with lines so fine, the author writes, “that they could have been drawn with a needle.” Their miniature intensity is part of their greatness.

“Each picture told a story,” praised Charlotte Bronte. “With Bewick on my knee, I was then happy.” Other admirers included the artist and naturalist John James Audubon, who met Bewick in his later years and who praised his “penetrating observation”; the poet William Wordsworth (“that the genius of Bewick were mine”) and writer and artist Beatrix Potter, who copied Bewick’s birds and animals into tiny home-made books.

A plain, no-nonsense man, Thomas Bewick was the son of a farmer, devoted to his parents, siblings, wife and children. His chief pleasures (other than his art) were fishing, tramping through the countryside and lifting a pint of ale with other artisans. Bluff, direct, generous (sometimes foolishly so), he was loved by all who knew him. He was also a peaceful man, living during an intense political time; he detested war and its loss of life.

A compulsive illustrator even as a small boy, at age 14 he became the apprentice to an engraver-jeweler, who handed over to Bewick the more common work to be done in wood, keeping for himself the more delicate and fashionable requests for copper engraving. Bewick was not to be deterred.

By studying the work of Albrecht Durer and experimenting with techniques, Bewick mastered the craft of woodblocks and made it his own. “So powerful are these little images that we see them everywhere, probably without even knowing it,” states Ms. Uglow; today in Britain, they can be seen reproduced in posters, jam labels, books and birthday cards.

There are several strands to this story. One is the tale of Bewick and his workshop, another the story of Britain’s early book trade and how the revival of wood engraving gave way to the novels of Dickens. Another is Britain’s “Natural History Revolution” that went on a parallel track with that country’s Industrial Revolution, and still another is how Bewick’s work influenced the dawning Romantic age and a nation’s love affair with nature.

Ms. Uglow skillfully takes us through this so-called “ordinary” life, but she is at her strongest when sharing her thoughts about the individual woodcuts that appear before our eyes. She (like Bewick) essentially asks us “to look deep, as children stare at illustrations when they first start to read, drawn into the pictured world.” We are told to look closely at “the small boy scrambling over a tree branch” or “the blind man tiptoeing over the plank, guided by his dog.”

Under her expert guidance, we cannot fail to miss the humor and inherent danger in one tiny, borderless vignette reproduced before us on the page, showing a toddler tugging at a horse’s tail: “The maid is engaged in a tryst in the bushes … and as his frantic mother leaps over the stile, the horse, turning its head with a familiar malevolent glint, is just baring its teeth and raising a hoof.”

She also describes how engravings were made on the hard and durable boxwood blocks. Included in this book is Bewick’s very last, of a coffin being carried from a house on a hill, down to the river: “The rough, strong strokes of the woodcut reveal the stiffness of Bewick’s elderly hands, but they conjure the moment for us still, across the currents of time.”

“Nature’s Engraver” is a testament to its subject; Bewick was, above all, a skilled craftsman who insisted that any job had to be “perfectly correct.” It is rare to see a book so handsomely produced — it almost takes one back to the days when the legendary American publisher Alfred Knopf was at his height, in charge of producing quality books that were meant to be held, examined, read and — most of all — cherished. This beautiful volume shows that same kind of care: The paper is of high quality, smooth to the touch; the typeface is easy on the eye.

But it is the book’s overall design as well as the quantity and placement of illustrative material that is nothing short of marvelous. This, combined with the magic of Bewick’s illustrations and Jenny Uglow’s lyrical command of her subject and the English language, makes “Nature’s Engraver” the perfect gift for yourself or anyone who truly appreciates a superb book.

Marion Elizabeth Rodgers is the author of “Mencken: The American Iconoclast” (Oxford), chosen “Top Ten Biographies for 2005-2006” by Booklist Magazine and now out in paperback.