Introduction of the artist:

Thomas BEWICK (UK)

Born in 1753, Northumberland, England. Died in 1828, Gateshead, England. Wood engraver and ornithologist.

Introduction of works:

During his lifetime, Thomas Bewick produced thousands of wood engravings. These included vignettes that he referred to as “Tale-pieces”, amusing images intended “to illustrate some truth or point of some moral.” They were cut into blocks of box-wood, an exceptionally close-grained hard wood conducive to a graphic fineness. The fact that the blocks were sections through lengths of timber meant that the pictures could not be anything but small, but this restriction by no means cramped the artist’s style. On the contrary, Bewick developed a meticulousness whereby the slightest nuances could be conveyed through the tiny lines he left in relief after engraving.

The Tale-pieces provide invaluable insight into not only the imagination and wit of the artist but also aspects of contemporary social history, especially rural life in the early nineteenth century. Clearly Bewick was a sceptical individual, unimpressed by institutions. One vignette, for example, depicts a horse stopping on the bank of a river to avoid falling into the water, despite his rider’s encouragement to go on. In others we see children riding gravestones as if they were hobby-horses, a donkey rubbing himself against a memorial erected to celebrate a “splendid (military) victory”, a scarecrow dressed in a soldier’s uniform and so on; all wonderful observations on all-too-human vanity. A small landscape obscured by the artist’s engraved thumb-print is radical in its self-referentiality as well as its implications with respect to the nature of artistic identity.