In Europe the earliest known woodcuts were playing-cards dating back to the beginning of the 15th century. Pictorial prints go back as far as 141o. The earliest dated pictorial print is generally (but not always) admitted to be the St. Christopher of 1423. It is simple, crude, and naïve. It was done with single lines, almost an outline drawing, for its full effect it, and prac tically all prints of its time, depended upon hand-colouring after the print was made.
From 1423 to 1490 the black line woodcut developed from a crude beginning through the block-books that immediately pre ceded type printing to a mastering of the medium that has not been surpassed in that department to this day. The block books originated in Germany and the Netherlands—the oldest ones being Biblia Pauperum (c. 1450) of German origin, and the Apocalypse, the Canticum Canticorem and Biblia Pauperum (c. 1470) of the Netherlands. Diirer's drawings on the block made from 1492 to 1526 and cut laboriously by craftsmen woodcarvers, were complex, sophisticated, varied in quality of line and texture, yet they attained this complexity with lines that were most natural to the medium, that avoided, except in the darkest shad ows, the forced (in this medium) cross hatching of pen and ink. drawings. Here, then, at the time that America was being dis covered was. a mature art in mediaeval Germany, which set the pace for other nations. The subjects were mostly religious.
Diirer (q.v.) was the first great master to use the woodcut extensively as a way of reproducing drawings made for it. With out attaining the unity of means and expression typical of today he refined and widened the process. He had many followers, among them the little masters Altdorfer, the Behams, Pencz and others who forgot the usual religious subjects to record, with a touch of un-German decorative quality learned from Italy, the labours, merriment or debauchery of the everyday life of their time. Influence flowed back and forth between Italy and Ger many, Diirer influencing leading Italians like Marcantonio Rai mondi (148o-153o), and vice versa. By 1490 in the north countries individual blocks were giving way to blocks cut for such newspapers of the day as the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493 and for book illustrations. In Italy the art centred in book illustra tions from the beginning. Lippmann, in his Art of Wood Engrav ing in Italy in the Fifteenth Century, notes this difference between the North and the South by saying, "In Germany the proper function of book illustration was instruction; in Italy, ornament. In thus stating the case he must have meant obvious ornament for there is a decorative design quality in the German work that goes far beyond "instruction." Holbein (q.v.) was the next great artist to design particularly for the woodcut. Working through the woodcutter, Hans Lutzel burger, the greatest master of the knife the craft has produced, he achieved what is probably as complete a synthesis between the means and the expression as is possible with the black line method. His Dance of Death series of blocks is one of the out standing attainments of the medium.
In France the woodcut started in Paris with the cutting of blocks for the popular and frequently published Books of the Hours. Its chief masters in the r6th century were Jean Cousin and Bernard Salomon who worked around 155o. In the 17th and
r8th it gradually declined. In 1766 Jean Michel Papillon wrote his famous Treatise on Engraving and showed in his work the minuteness of technique that was typical of the decline.
Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) did not invent the white line pictorial wood-engraving, there being evidence in his work that he was influenced by Croxall's cuts in his Aesop of 1722. He was, however, the first to give it popularity. The woodcut during the r8th and r9th century decline rivalled the camera as a recording instrument. By adapting itself to the mirroring of a dozen mediums it had been forced into a sphere not its own. Bewick furnished the mechanism for this decline as well as that for the revival from it. The illustration of one of his blocks in Plate II. fig. 7. shows the nature of his work. His finest produc tions are the illustrations to British Quadrupeds (179o) and British Birds ( I 797).
William Blake (1757-1827) made only a few small woodcuts. He used the white line method. Technically they were not par ticularly skillful. But pre-eminently they are wood-engravings. They emerge from blackness into light. They are plastic. They exploit the inherent quality of the medium. In doing these things they are the forerunners in character as well as technic of the significant work of today. (See BLAKE, WILLIAM.) At the end of the century we find Felix Vallotton in Paris playing with solid areas of blacks and whites—one of the first to pick up the thread begun in Florence 500 years ago, the thread that in the 20th century is to develop into the dominant means of the modern expression. (See the woodcut shown in Plate H. figure 6.) The writer's contention that the present is the most fertile period in the history of the woodcut, in actual, contemporary achievement and in future possibilities is supported by two main reasons. The revolution in the mental approach to the making of pictures, which is the contribution of the first quarter of our loth century to art history, and which involves a change from thinking of pictures as imitations or reports of nature to a con ception of them as creatively reorganized interpretations, has brought the woodcut (which has been more sensitive to the new vitality than any other print medium) back into the fold of the grand tradition. Next in importance to this exceedingly significant event, the woodcut has found itself technically. That is, it has, in the last thirty or forty years, ceased forced service as proxy for another medium, the line drawing, and blossomed into a self expression based on its inherent qualities. Its usefulness, how ever, has passed from the multitude who now find their pictorial entertainment in the photo and the pen and ink "funnies," to the few who care to seek out and pay the higher costs of what has become an aristocratic art—aristocratic, yet the lowest priced of all original pictorial works of art. (Prints made and signed by the artist are counted originals.) This grand tradition includes work that is universal rather than particular in conception, creative rather than reportorial; it is older than the woodcut medium by many centuries. Work of today is rooted in fertile soil only when it belongs in both of these classifications. From the one it gains timelessness; from the other timeliness. (For articles relating to the woodcut, see