IXTHE UNITED STATES
Inearly days, the American colonies were indifferent if not inhospitable to the fine arts. Only portraiture and expressions of patriotism found a welcome, both in painting and engraving. These, with some maps, diagrams, and views, gave partial employment to a few engravers, with such additions to their number as landed from time to time from Europe for a sojourn more or less prolonged. Prominent among early arrivals was Peter Pelham, an artist of good abilities, who portrayed in mezzotint a number of New England ministers.
THOMAS JEFFERSONDavid Edwin
THOMAS JEFFERSONDavid Edwin
THOMAS JEFFERSON
David Edwin
Passing on to the Washington period, we find in Charles Willson Peale an American painter-engraver of merit. Such mezzotint portraits as General and Lady Washington, Lafayette, Franklin, and others easily rankamong the best native productions of that period. David Edwin, an immigrant from England, brought proficiency in stipple engraving. His merits can be judged from the best of his plates, the portrait of Thomas Jefferson, appropriately simple and dignified in execution. With the advancing nineteenth century, engraving becomes plentiful in this country. Publishers require many portraits, views, subjects of all kinds, nor must we forget the important and flourishing branch of bank-note engraving. This teeming activity brings with it a commercial sameness of execution, a workmanlike, metallic sleekness, not quite absent even in the charming vignettes of John Cheney, which adorn the gift-books of the forties and fifties. A portrait of Chief Justice Marshall, engraved by Asher Brown Durand, after Inman’s painting, is shown as an illustration of good nineteenth-century work. Generally speaking, portrait engraving had fallen into a rut, suggested by the tonalityof photographs, a development shared by wood-engraving.
CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALLAsher Brown Durand
CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALLAsher Brown Durand
CHIEF JUSTICE MARSHALL
Asher Brown Durand
The ingenious innovation of the Englishman Thomas Bewick—which rejuvenated and refined the mishandled and discredited woodcut, by substituting cross-grained blocks of boxwood and the graver, for planks and the knife—was championed in America by Dr. Alexander Anderson. None of the early American wood-engravers were endowed with great artistic gifts, but ere long the steady demand by publishers brought to the fore men of acknowledged ability. Their achievements are plentifully illustrated in books and magazines; the “Still-life with the Peacock,” engraved by W. J. Linton, a well-known writer on wood-engraving, is reproduced here as a reminder of their skill. Originally the tendency of wood-engraving, or white-line engraving, as it is sometimes called, had been to obtain effects by white lines (the natural expression of the graver on the black surface of the block) and by black and white masses. As the wood-engraver grew proficient in his technique, he widened his field by imitating the effect of etching or engraving on copper, in rivalry with this form of illustration. In this he succeeded so well that the other, more expensive modes of adornment were largely driven from the field of book illustration. With the advent of photography, the design could be fixed upon the wood block mechanically, accurately, without the trouble of a careful drawing. The values of tone in the photograph relieved the engraver from the work of translating color-values into black and white. The blending half-tones of the photograph invited close imitation, and thustone-engravingdeveloped, with its masses of fine lines, close together, merging into tone. Beautiful results were achieved in this way by men like Jüngling, French, Timothy Cole, Wolf, and many other engravers; but soon the human hand was dispossessed altogether by thehalf-tone plate which makes the photographic image printable by mechanical means alone.
STILL-LIFE WITH THE PEACOCKWood-engraving. W. J. Linton
STILL-LIFE WITH THE PEACOCKWood-engraving. W. J. Linton
STILL-LIFE WITH THE PEACOCK
Wood-engraving. W. J. Linton
The great European revival of etching extended to the United States in the seventies. It proved a fruitful period, with names like the Morans, Ferris, Farrar, Duveneck, Charles Platt, and many others which might be mentioned. The vogue of etching, it will be remembered, was short because mediocrities soon glutted the market and sent purchasers to other fields for a while. Interest in the process has awakened again of late, but that is matter of too recent date to be discussed in these few pages.