[Illustration: FIG. 69.--Knife for engraving on soft wood.]
J. M. Papillon, who worked during the earlier half of the eighteenth century, belonged to a French family of wood engravers, and wrote a treatise about wood-cutting with the knife, which is of great interest. His work is small and excellent. Papillon makes mention of a foreigner who worked with him and used the _end_ of the wood to work upon, and that he used a graver. This foreigner is supposed to have been the English artist J. B. Jackson, who was eminent here not only as an engraver, but also as the pioneer in the matter of colour-printing from wood blocks.
No doubt up to about the beginning of the eighteenth century wood cuts had been made on planed pieces of pear or other soft wood cut lengthways. The grain upon such a piece of wood necessitating the use of a knife to cut it, the knife may be a single blade or a double blade of the kind known as a “scrive,” but it cannot be cut with a solid graver.
It is possible enough that to Jackson we owe the idea of making engravings on the cross-cut of a piece of wood, and if so he is entitled to great honour, as all wood work since his time has been done in that way. The graver had long been used on metal, but until the device of cutting blocks across the grain of a hard wood was thought of it could not be used on wood. Hard wood was now wanted with as little grain as possible, and box is the ideal.
In the nineteenth century much excellent wood engraving was done in France. Indeed, after a period of practical non-existence the art once more became one of great importance, and a school of wood engraving grew up that was not only very large, but the work done was of very high quality.
Bewick’s style is not there, although it seems likely that the revival was really due to his influence; the old black line, resembling the engraved metal line, holds undisputed sway. Moreover, the French nineteenth century revival owes much directly to the work and influence of another great English wood engraver, J. Thompson, and with him worked an equally great French engraver, H. L. Brevière. These two men were highly gifted, and their work is always of a high order, and they met with much powerful support from contemporary engravers, followers of their own, the excellence of whose work in many instances ran their own very close.