The origin
of wood engraving, like the birth of original sin, is hidden in the
night of time. There seems to have been wood engravers among the
builders of the pyramids of Egypt. The Emperor Fuh-Ki of China, who as
everybody knows, reigned 164 years, had his edict establishing the
institution of marriage illustrated with explanatory cuts. It seems even
certain that jointed blocks were known in the Middle Ages.
Nevertheless, at the revival of art, in the fifteenth century, when a
demand arose for the reproduction of pictures for general distribution,
copper and steel superseded wood as the vehicle for the engraver. Not
only were copies of the works of Raphael, Vandyke, Mantegna, and their
contemporaries made on copper with the etching needle, but Albert Durer,
Rembrandt and other leaders of art often expressed their thoughts in
original etchings on metal in preference to paintings. The art was
steadily progressive until the present century. To the mass of mankind,
the great pictures of the present day have been made known by copper
plate and steel plate reproductions. But for them, few would know
Leutze’s picture of “Washington Crossing the Delaware,” or Da Vinci’s
“Last Supper,” or Raphael’s “Transfiguration,” or the other fine old
paintings of the Italian school, or the popular pictures of animal life
of Landseer, or, for that matter, the great body of the works of Vernet,
Delaroche, Turner, Trumbull, Wilkie, and the famous French, English, and
American painters of the century. For one person who has seen these
masterpieces on the canvas, a thousand have admired them in their
reproduction in steel or copper engravings.
The trouble with the latter was their cost, and the prodigious length
of time required to produce them. Raphael Morghen, Von Muller,
Henriguel-Dupont, Martin, Smillie and other great engravers took a year
to copy a leading work of art, and unless the reproduction secured a
large sale, the engraver starved. Happily for this country, the demand
for such works as the “Signing of the Declaration of Independence” and
the “Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers” was practically inexhaustible, and
impressions from the plate were printed indefinitely.
Still, the necessity for a cheaper process, and one by which pictures
could be made more rapidly, was realized by artists, and no one was
surprised when Senefelder announced, a hundred years ago, that he had
discovered a method of engraving on stone. The material he used, which
is the same as lithographers use to-day, is argillaceous limestone, sawn
into slabs of two or three inches in thickness, and ground to a polished
surface. On this stone he drew pictures with crayons composed of tallow,
was, hard soap and shellac, just as he would have drawn with a pen or
pencil on paper. Over the drawing he poured diluted nitric or
hydrochloric acid, which ate away the uncovered portions of the stone,
leaving the lines in slight relief, ready to receive the ink for
printing. Since his time a variety of improvements have been introduced
into lithography. The picture is often drawn upon paper coated with gum,
starch and alum. This is known as transfer paper – being laid upon the
stone, the picture is transferred to its surface, and impressions may be
taken by the printing press. Where a large number of impressions are
required, several transfers may be made, either by hand or by
photo-lithography, and each may be sent to press separately.
Lithography and its branches – photo-lithography and chromo-lithography
– were cheaper than steel engraving and the work did not take so long.
Still, slabs of stone were cumbrous, and their porous nature rendered it
difficult to draw a straight line on them. On their surface lines became
rows of dots. It was felt that some better process could be devised if
an inventive mind were brought to bear upon it. No such fine work as the
steel engravers turned out could be fairly expected from wood engraving,
but still the art was in its infancy, and there was no saying what
improvements might not be made. Artists and engravers gave the matter
thought.
One of the results was the announcement in 1833 that a firm of English
publishers would shortly begin the publication of a periodical to be
called the Penny Magazine; that it would appear at intervals; that it
would contain entertaining and instructive matter, as well as stories,
and that the matter would be illustrated with wood cuts, executed in the
highest style of art. The engagement was faithfully lived up to. The
Penny Magazine appeared at intervals, which afterward came to mean once
a week. It did contain interesting and instructive matter, which was
illustrated with wood cuts, executed as well as the resources of artist
and engraver in that day could accomplish. Ample patronage rewarded the
enterprise of the publisher. Everybody wanted the new Penny Magazine,
the pennies grew into pounds and the pounds into a fortune.
The pictures were drawn with a hard pencil on a smooth piece of
boxwood, which had been washed with flake white; when the artist had
completed his work the engraver with a sharp graving tool cut out all
the whites in the picture, leaving the blacks as a sort of basso relievo,
ready for the reception of the printer’s ink. The experiment was
successful and wood engraving became an established industry, not only
in London, but also at Paris and elsewhere. The engravings were sketchy,
coarse and rough, but they were a novelty and they came into general
demand. To satisfy that demand, in 1842, the Illustrated London News was
founded by Herbert Ingram. The late Mr. Marriott of the News Letter in
this city was associated in the enterprise, but its success seemed so
doubtful that he abandoned it and came to this country to seek his
fortune. Indeed, he who at the present day turned over the early numbers
of the News will not be surprised at its slow progress in public favor.
It was, however, in the News office that the system of jointed blocks
was brought to perfection. Blocks which were a single piece could only
be engraved by a single hand. If the picture was elaborate it took the
engraver weeks or months to cut out all the whites, so as to prepare if
for the printer. To save time blocks were made of many pieces, which
were screwed together so as to present a smooth, uniform surface. When
the picture was drawn the pieces were unscrewed and each one was handed
to a separate engraver; in this way twenty or thirty engravers, perhaps,
were employed simultaneously on a single picture and the work of the
engravers did not consume much more time than the work of the artist. It
was the use of jointed blocks which paved the way for the publication of
such picture papers as Harper’s Weekly, the London Graphic and the
Illustration.
The success which these journals achieved proved that the public wanted
the news of the day presented to them in the form of pictures as well as
words. It became obvious that a picture which conveys an impression to
the eye and mind at a single glance was more effective as a means of
imparting information than a long account in words and sentences.
Advertisers were the first to seize upon the idea. They insisted that
part of the space they purchased in newspapers should be devoted to cuts
of the articles which they offered for sale. Their idea was embraced by
publishers of weekly newspapers, but, so far as the daily press was
concerned, the slow processes by which illustrations were then produced
consumed a period of time so far in excess of the interval between the
occurrence of an event and the appearance of the paper next morning that
the improvement, thoroughly as its value was realized, seemed
impracticable. Still, sporadic attempts were made here and there to
surmount the difficulty. In 1865 the “Chronicle” of this city published
a wood cut representing the assassination of Lincoln, and another giving
a portrait of Booth. Again, in 1872, it illustrated in rough
unpretentious style, the earthquake of that year in Inyo county. An idea
of the obstacles which had to be overcome may be formed when it is
stated that in 1865 there were but two wood-engravers in San Francisco
and of these one had so much steady employment that he could not afford
to fool with pictures in newspapers.
The fist serious attempt made to illustrate the events of the day in a
daily American newspaper was made by a party of Canadians who, in 1873,
established the Daily Graphic in New York. Its pictures were produced by
photo-lithography, which had been invented in 1859 by I. W. Osborne and
was shortly afterward applied to practical use by the Photo-lithographic
Company of New York. The process was very simple. A sheet of paper,
coated with a mixture of albumen, gelatine, and bichromate of potash,
was dried and exposed under a negative of the picture to be reproduced.
Thus a positive was obtained. This, being inked all over, when dry was
pulled through the press face down in contact with a lithographic stone
to which an even coating of transfer ink had been applied. The usual
washes were then called in requisition, and the result was a
photo-lithograph of the picture. One side of the pages of the Daily
Graphic was occupied with print, the other was filled with pictures of
the events of the day.
It has always been a puzzle why the Graphic did not succeed. It was
miserably edited, but this did not matter so much in a paper in which
illustrations were the leading feature. The Illustrated London News has
never been renowned for its literary merit. The Graphic pictures were
coarse and unfinished, but the pictures in the early volumes of Harper’s
Monthly can hardly be classed as works of art. Perhaps the Graphic, like
Fulton’s steamboat was ahead of its time. Certain it is that after
flourishing a few years it gave up the ghost.
Its brief career had the effect of drawing the attention of the
conductors of the daily press to the possibility of combining
illustrations with text and producing the former in a minimum of time.
They had no difficulty in deciding that there would be a gain in
substituting sheets of zinc, which are light and easily handled, for the
ponderous and unwieldy stones of the lithographer. They adopted a
process which bore a close resemblance to the one that had been employed
in the Graphic office.
Pictures were drawn in black and white on cardboard, generally twice
the size required by the newspaper. These pictures were photographed,
generally by arc light, with a common copying camera, upon a wet plate,
prepared with collodion in the old way; the negative films were stripped
from the glass on which they were originally deposited and transferred
to a thick plate glass for printing. Then the zinc sheet came into play,
generally one-fourteenth of an inch thick, polished with charcoal or on
a buffing wheel, and washed with a weak dilution of albumen, in which a
little bichromate of ammonia was dissolved. When the sheet dried it was
found to be coated with a thin film of bichromatized albumen. The
negative and this prepared zinc plate were laid together in a heavy
printing frame, and in from eight to twenty minutes the picture was
transferred to the zinc, the albuminous film adhering to its surface.
The lines of the picture, at first faint, were easily brought out by an
application of black lithographic ink. Where the light had shown through
the clear glass parts of the negative, corresponding to the black lines
of the drawing, the albumen film, with its coating of ink shielded from
the light by the dense portions of the negative, washed off easily
leaving the bright zinc exposed; and the final result was a facsimile in
black ink of the original drawing.
Now the etcher comes into play with his acid. He dusts the plate with red
dragon’s blood, which is powdered gum resembling resin, that sticks to
the ink but is easily brushed off the bright parts of the zinc. The
application of heat on a zincographic stone fuses the ink and powder
together and coats the plate with a hard black enamel which cannot be
scratched and is not affected by acid. After painting the back of the
plate with asphaltum varnish it is placed in a tank of dilute nitric
acid, which bites the exposed surface of the zinc between the lines to
about the depth of a thick sheet of paper. The plate is then taken out
of the tank, rinsed in water and dried, and the process is repeated. It
is again dusted with the red powder which is melted by renewed
application of heat, and a second immersion in the acid bath follows.
Zincographers call this the second bite. A third bite and a fourth bite
follow by the same process, and then the plate, in which the whites are
eaten away to a depth of one-half its thickness, is ready for the
printer with all the lines of the drawing standing out in relief.
It need hardly be observed that a very trifling accident or error in
any stage of the operation may be fatal to the plate. If the acid is too
strong, or if the etching is carried too far in any bite the etching
ground will be broken through and the work destroyed. If the powder is
not brushed off clear, or if too much heat is applied, of if the etching
is not carried far enough the shield will be too high and wide and will
not etch away in subsequent bites. When the etcher has done his work the
plate is washed with strong lye, the large open spaces and high lights
are cut our and deepened with a revolving tool, and the cut is mounted
on a metal block type high. It is then ready to go into the form.
The book printer who uses high-grade ink and fine calendered paper,
whose presses revolve slowly and are closely watched, can attain
satisfactory results with wood cuts or zincographs which could not be
used at all on fast newspaper presses, printing on soft paper. Such
pictures as are printed in leading magazines and command deserved
admiration, would be likely to appear as a mere blur in a newspaper
printed on newspaper stock at the rate of 20,000 or 30,000 an hour.
Pictures from photographic negatives containing not merely blacks and
whites, but intermediate shades also, broken up into grain or stipple,
are also beyond the reach of the daily paper. These half-tones as hey
are called, are only available on slow presses, which use fine paper.
The chalk-plate process, which requires no photography, saves time and
is therefore in use by the evening papers. The artist copies his pencil
sketch upon a chalk bed laid on a metal plate. Instead of pen or pencil
he uses a steel stylus, which cuts into the chalk just as the Roman
stylus used to cut into the was sheet which served as paper. Upon the
chalk thus inscribed the stereotype metal is poured, and when it cools
the printer prints directly from that. Of course, fine outlines, effects
of light and shade, and degrees of expression are impossible in a
picture made from an impression on chalk; but a rough idea of the scene
delineated can be conveyed and to the average public this is much better
than nothing. People have got so accustomed to pictures that the modest
sketch is often preferred to the most elaborate description in words.
Introduction
1. The Chronicle's
Exhibition of Pictorial Art in Journalism, by staff
2. A History of Art in
America, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
3. The Process of
Reproducing Images, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
4. America's Greatest
Newspapers, by Chronicle writer John Bonner
5. History of
Illustration among America's Major Newspapers, by Chronicle
writer John Bonner
6. Critics Preempt the
Exhibition
