Fake 127

The Little Mourner - Frederick Sandys, engraved by the Dalziel Brothers - published 1862. Image from the Tate Gallery.

I was reminded in the course of posting reference 2, about the fact that in the 19th century, wood engravings were widely used to provide the pictures in newspapers, magazines and books. The facts that wood engravings did their work in much the same way as type by transferring black ink from their upper surface to the paper, wood engravings could capture a lot of detail and wood engravings were very durable - made them very suitable for this work. Although that said, the amount of care and the amount of detail were presumably geared to the nature of the intended publication. Were we talking about cheap, mass production printing or expensive art printing, one image at a time?

An enlargement taken from the previous image. Given the layers of processing required to get it here, probably not that reliable in detail, but hopefully good enough to give an idea of the engraving required to produce what you see from the polished end grain of a block of wood, often box.

The catch was that when you scored a line across the block with a graver, that line showed as white on black - unlike a pen or pencil on paper which showed as black on white. With most artists trained on pen and pencil. And this was what the customer was used to. 

With the result that the painter painted the picture. Another painter drew a copy of the painting onto the block of wood. The wood engraver then cut that drawing into the block. The printer included the block in his page of print and produced the page on paper. Noting that in this process we have moved from colour to black on white - or white on black - depending on which way you look at it.

Life’s Journey - Frederick Sandys, engraved by the Dalziel Brothers - published 1862. Image from the Tate Gallery. I have not yet worked out what the story is here, but it is, no doubt, a moral story. Perhaps about the ephemeral nature of life here on earth, be it ever so lush in its prime.

An enlargement taken from the previous image.

Abraham parting from Lot - Illustration for Dalziel's Bible Gallery, published by George Routledge & Sons, London, 1881. Image from NGV. otherwise National Gallery of Victoria, Victoria, Australia.

An enlargement taken from the previous image. Where the black line on white background is clear enough.

Engravers like the Dalziel brothers deployed prodigies of time, care and skill to reproduce, in some large part, with a wood block, the starting point of which is white line on black background, the black line on white background required. So instead, for example, of simply drawing crossed and parallel hatching lines, more or less close together to give some variation of tone to the image, the engraver had to cut out the little specks of wood block corresponding to the white that would have been left by the pen.

It so happened that all this came to a natural end at the end of the nineteenth century with the invention of new printing processes, and the Dalziel brothers, towards the end of their long and productive lives, were able to retire with good grace.

But there was a reaction from all this faking and in the first part of the twentieth century a whole new way of engraving came into being. A whole new approach which respected the material and method in a way that the illustrators of the nineteenth century perhaps did not.

With this example being used as the front copy of my copy of reference 3. I have commented before on the difficulty of getting good reproductions of this sort on thing on computers. But hopefully enough survives to show that the new world was very different from the old.

From where I associate to the work of Eric Gill, for example the engraving of a nude girl given as Figure 16 at reference 4, where the whole body is effected with a very small number of cuts. Very much white on black.

PS 1: someone has seen fit to load lots of Mackley's engravings into Pinterest, albeit at the relatively low resolution of 700 by 600 or so. The one above is rather better than that - or at least it was when it arrived on my laptop.

PS 2: engraving on metal plates produced black lines on white background. Rembrandt, for example, produced many fine prints in this way. But such plates could not be included in a regular printing process - while wood blocks could be. So wood blocks won.

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/fake-126.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2021/09/a-queen-of-egypt.html.

Reference 3: Wood Engraving - George Mackley - 1948 and 1981.

Reference 4: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/11/more-on-making-regions-into-objects-and.html.