Line Engraving

Italy, in the i8th century, has nothing to show in engraving at all comparable. The most original work was that produced in Venice by Giovan Marco Pitteri (1703-1786), in a style resem bling that of Mellan. The work of Giovanni Volpato 1803), and his famous pupil, Raphael Morghen (1758-1833), with all its prodigious skill, is decidedly devoid of life and character.

In England excellent work was done in engraving by Sir Robert Strange (1721-1792), who learnt his art in Paris, by William Woollett (1735-1785), whose landscapes after Richard Wilson especially form a real contribution to engraving, and by William Sharp (1749-1824), whose works after English portrait painters are of particular excellence.

Nineteenth Century.—Illustration in England, though it had never attained the distinction which had marked it in France, was not brought to a sudden end, as it was on the other side of the Channel, by the Revolution. A great deal of work, much of it, however, wholly or in part in stipple, was produced in this line in England at the end of the i8th and beginning of the i9th century.

The name which stands out at the period is that of William Blake (1757-1827), who, trained as a regular engraver, still executed his most characteristic and distinguished work in other mediums. The illustrations to the Book of Job and Young's Night Thoughts, wonderful as their conception is and worthy of Blake's genius, are carried out with much of the monotonous accomplishment of contemporary work, and lose, rather than gain, by the skill which Blake had acquired as a professional engraver. The popularity of Turner is reflected in the very numerous landscape engravings which were made by such engravers as W. B. and G. Cooke, John Pye, R.. Brandard, E. Goodall and others, after his water colour drawings. They are usually in the form of illustrations and on a small scale, but engraving seems hardly suited to the rendering of the peculiar qualities of the great landscape painter, and, amazing as is the skill with which Turner's obviously untranslatable creations are interpreted, the dullness of entire efficiency engrosses them. This blight, and the beginning of the use of mechanical means such as machine ruling, lies over all the work produced in England, and indeed, in Europe and America, in the middle of the century.

Merely reproductive as its purpose was, engraving obviously had no future in competition with the rapidly perfected photographic processes, and by the end of the century had died out almost completely.

Engraving of

a less elaborate form, its technique deriving from that of the age of Diirer, had pursued its humble course almost uninterrupted through the 17th, i8th and i9th centuries in the hands of engravers of heraldic bookplates. Craftsmen like C. D. Sherborn (1831-1912) in England, did sound work in this field, and form a link which connects the recent revival of engraving since the World War within the great tradition. It is too early yet to speak of the permanence or importance of this movement, which, if partly archaistic in tendency, still derives its chief strength from the realization that the engraved line has a particular incisive beauty and character of its own, a character more circumscribed and more exacting than that which the etched line possesses. Engravers like Pieter Dupont (1870– 1911) in Holland, who was perhaps the earliest rather isolated resuscitator of the medium, E. Laboureur in France, whose work in line, however, differs singularly little from his etched work, and in England younger men like Stephen Gooden, R. S. Austin and Job Nixon are doing work of originality and character. (See ENGRAVING.) BIBLIOGRAPHY.—Adam Bartsch, Le Peintre Graveur, 26 vols. (Vi enna, 1803-20 ; J. D. Passavant, Le Peintre Graveur (supplement to Bartsch), 6 vols. (Leipzig, 5860-64) ; F. Lippmann, Der Kupferstich, 3rd ed. (Berlin, 1905) ; Paul Kristeller, Kupferstich and Holzschnitt in vier Jahrhunderten (Berlin, 4th ed., 1922) ; A. M. Hind, A History of Engraving and Etching (3rd ed., revised, 1923), with full and excellent bibl. Technique:—A. Bosse, Traite des manieres de graver (Paris, 1645), later editions revised by C. N. Cochin fits, Particular countries and periods:—Max Lehrs, Geschichte und krit ischer Katalog des deutschen), niederlandischen und franzosischen Kup ferstiches im 15. Jahrhundert (Vienna, /908), etc. (in progress) ; M. Geisberg Die Anfiinge des deutschen Kupferstiches und der Meister E.S. (Leipzig, 1908), and Kupferstich der Friihrzeit (Strasbourg, 1923) ; A. M. Hind, Catalogue of Early Italian Engravings in the British Museum, 2 vols. (London, 191o) ; F. Courboin, Histoire de la Gravure en France (Paris, 1923-26). (A. E. P.)