Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick

by Jenny Uglow

Book Overview

A beautifully illustrated biography of Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), the man whose art helped shape the way we view the natural world At the end of the eighteenth century, Britain, and much of the... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571223745
• ISBN13: 9780571223749
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Faber and Faber
• Length: 458 Pages
• Weight: 2.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

An exquisite tour of the life and work of an artist too few of us know

I appreciate the years of hard work that authors put into their books. Their mountain of effort allows me to learn more about their subject through a few hours or days of careful reading. However, some books are greater gifts than others. Jenny Uglow has given me two of my very favorite reading experiences. Her "Hogarth" was a revelation to me. She opened up Hogarth's world and provided such a rich context for his life that my understanding of his time and context made his life and work much more meaningful. With this book, on the life, work, and world of Thomas Bewick, I experienced that delight again. I took my time savoring this book and examining the beautiful reproductions of his work with a magnifying glass (since my eyes can no longer pick up all the detail). Frankly, I had never heard of Thomas Bewick and wanted to read the book because it is by such a wonderful author. He was an engraver who specialized in engraving in boxwood. Again, a subject I knew only in the barest outline. Bewick was from an established but not wealthy family in the Tyne valley in northern England. He apprenticed as an engraver and demonstrated talent enough to found a shop with a partner. His work goes beyond the usual artisanship of wood engraving into a realm of artistry that sets him apart into a world that is still shocks in the effect and composition. This wonderful book provides a large number of his works in their actual size. Boxwood was used because of its hardness and ability to stand up to the number of prints commercial reproduction of the time required. However, the wood was small in diameter and the pieces tend to be small. Yet, they demonstrate a full range of emotion. Bewick is able to capture the images of his time and the countryside he loved. There are pieces that are quite funny and make a point such as the man driving his cow across the river to avoid paying the toll at the bridge, but losing his hat that was more costly than the toll would have been. He also shows us the drama of storms, shipwrecks, and all kinds of vignettes from life. However, his masterworks consumed more than twenty years of his life. The first was his Quadrupeds, which provided wonderful images and interesting text on animals both domestic and exotic. He then produced two magnificent works. The first volume was on the Land Birds of Britain and the second on the Water Birds of Britain. His presentation of the birds transcends mere illustration and were used and loved by naturalists for many decades. Even the great Audubon paid homage to Bewick's achievements. I find their beauty still has the power to stun and invite long and close examination. Uglow provides what is known about his life, his apprenticeship and those who apprenticed with him (a list is provided in the back). We learn about his business dealings, his lack of skill in handling money, but his generous spirit with friends. His somewhat prickly nature also caused strife and on

A charming escape

I'd seen Thos. Bewick's illustrations for years in NY Review of Books and elsewhere; they'd always seemed to me mysterious for their silent detail and concentration. So it was quite refreshing to find out that he was a loud, warm, confident man. He spent his life and career firmly rooted in one place, so unlike myself and many others of us in this "globalized" age. He devoted his career to appreciating the minutiae of life all around him, and innovated new techniques for portraying them. These circumstances, together with the author's calm, clear and often bemused style of writing, create a very cozy experience -- almost like reading a non-fiction fairy tale. I read most of this book in small bites of a chapter or two over the course of a couple of weeks of evenings, and found it a wonderful escape from the pressures of the day. Though the book is very well-researched and surprisingly long (nearly 400 pages), it never drags. I'd been pretty ignorant about late 18th-early 19th Century English history other than a few names and dates, so it was also interesting to learn about the grass-roots resentment of government policies and wars, the government's tendency to turn dissidents into political prisoners, and much other historical context. But this learning is conveyed with a light touch. The illustrations are not only wonderful, they're as numerous as raisins in a cake, yet placed with great taste. A very outstanding book.

Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick

This is a very well written informative biography of the influential wood engraver Thomas Bewick. The author places Bewick and his artistic contribution in the context of his times describing the artist's rise to success at the beginning of England's industrial age and during it's wartime eras with France and America. Uglow is passionate about the artist and his work and the book is beautfully illustrated with well chosen examples of Bewick's phenomenal tiny woodcuts. His work has endured for 2 centuries and this book helps you understand why.

Great Artworks in Miniature

Thomas Bewick was a hulking six foot tall, in the eighteenth century when such stature was remarkable. His realm of interest was the broad Tyne Valley, the region around Newcastle in England. His art, however, was of the miniature, woodcuts of astonishing detail about the size of a calling card. You might think that the life of such a rural artist in a medium that was dying out even when he was perfecting it could not hold much interest, but Jenny Uglow who has written biographies of others from that era has made Bewick's life, art, and world quite fascinating in _Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick_ (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). This is a beautifully produced book, with scores of Bewick's engravings, most reproduced at the same size as he originally made them, often humorous tailpieces that were to fill the blank of a page at the end of a chapter, as well as serious reference illustrations of quadrupeds and British birds. Get out your magnifying glass. Each tiny vignette, composed only of minuscule blobs of black ink, is more full of details than you would have thought possible. Bewick was born in 1753, and drew compulsively as a child. He was apprenticed to an engraver, and took up woodcuts when engraving on copper was becoming more customary. After his children's books, he spent nine years studying animals, live (sometimes in traveling menageries) or as preserved specimens. _ A General History of Quadrupeds_ appeared in 1790. He thereupon took on the task of documenting all the birds of Britain in _A History of British Birds_. An admirer was Audubon, whose big and colorful bird portraits were of a completely different branch of art, but who traveled to see Bewick in 1827, finding him, despite his age, full of life as "he delivered his sentiments with a freedom and vivacity which afforded me great pleasure... when I parted from Bewick that night, I parted from a friend." The attention did not change Bewick in the least; he remained a plain, bluff, down-to-earth engraver. Uglow brings him to life. He was often irascible, and was not the easiest of businessmen to get along with, especially as he kept imperfect records. He chewed tobacco constantly, and might get into heated discussions over his pint at the pub. He loved music and angling, although he was no hunter, having killed a bullfinch with a stone when he was a boy; he remembered the bird long after, thinking that if it could have spoken "it would have asked me why I had taken away its life." He was a soft touch, constantly giving money away, to the consternation of his wife. He put feed out for wild birds, and he was much ahead of his time, as such eccentric behavior did not catch on until the mid-Victorian years. He was something of a conservationist. He sympathized with the Americans in their revolution, and he always felt that working people deserved representation in government. He disliked organized religion, and scoffed that the Bible's doctrine of origin