“while speaking of the english school, i must not omit to notice a truly original genius, who, though not a painter, was an artist of the highest order in his way—thomas bewick, the admirable designer and engraver on wood. his works, indeed, are of the smallest dimensions, but this makes it only the more surprising that so much interest could be comprised within such little spaces. the wood cuts that illustrate his books of natural history may be studied with advantage by the most ambitious votary of the highest classes of art—filled as they are by the truest feeling for nature, and though often representing the most ordinary objects, yet never, in a single instance, degenerating into common-place. the charming vignettes that ornament these books abound in incidents from real life, diversified by genuine humour, as well as by the truest pathos—of which the single figure of a shipwrecked sailor saying his prayers on a rock, with the waves rising round him, is an instance. there is often in these little things a deep meaning that places his art on a level with styles which the world is apt to consider as greatly above it, in proof of which i would mention the party of boys playing at soldiers among graves, and mounted on a row of upright tombstones for horses; while for quaint humour, extracted from a very simple source, may be noticed a procession of geese which have just waddled through a stream, while their line of march is continued by a row of stepping-stones. the student of landscape can never consult the works of bewick without improvement. the backgrounds to the figures of his quadrupeds and his birds, and his vignettes, have a charm of nature quite his own. he gives us, in these, every season of the year; and his trees, whether in the clothing of summer, or in the nakedness of winter, are the trees of an artist bred in the country. he is equally true in his little home scenes, his farm-yards and cottages, as in the wild coast scenery, with the flocks of sea birds wheeling round the rocks. in one of these subjects there stands a ruined church, towards which the sea has encroached, the rising tide threatening to submerge a tombstone raised “to perpetuate the memory,” &c. bewick resembles hogarth in this, that his illustrations of the stories of others are not to be compared with his own inventions. his feeling for the beauties of nature as they were impressed on him directly, and not at second-hand, is akin to the feeling of burns, and his own designs remind me, therefore, much more of burns than the few which he made from the poet.”—leslie’s hand book for young painters.
