Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter

Miniature Worlds: Little Landscapes from Thomas Bewick to Beatrix Potter

Laing Gallery, Newcastle Upon Tyne
Wood engravings on paper

I recently had the pleasure of encountering Blake’s stand-alone work in woodblock printing: The Pastorals of Virgil. Exhibited as part of a wider collection of artists whose work emphasises the technical skill of translating the world around them into miniature printed form, the show places particular emphasis on the tireless work of Northumberland’s most famous printer, Thomas Bewick, whose exquisitely detailed landscapes and studies of nature remain unmatched. 

I’d never actually seen these works of Blake’s before, and was initially struck by the density of the ink. The saturation of the print almost obscures each detail and line, the lines becoming amorphous. At first they feel like the antithesis of the painstaking lengths he went to in his copperplate printing and sketching. Each print, about the size of an old cigarette card, renders faces obscured and almost impressionistic. It’s interesting that Blake perhaps only utilised this technique once in his life, at the age of 64. His copperplate technique was rejected, and instead he was asked to complete the drawings in woodblock. 

In comparison to Bewick, whose meticulously defined white lines are the emphasis of his talent, The Pastorals lack Blake’s usual vibrancy. To me they have an almost gloomy Futurist element, especially the worker rolling the metal mill and the weather-beaten tree in ‘The Blighted Corn’. The 19th-century artist Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, whose prominent work hangs in the upstairs gallery, was a controversial First World War artist; his work is unyielding and uses stark graphite to exemplify the body in labour, which brings me back to the tone of ‘’A Rolling Stone is ever Bare of Moss”. The ink feels as dense as the bodies in labour, and the moon features more heavily than the sun. 

Also within the exhibition are ‘Ancients’ such as Samuel Palmer, who said of Blake’s wood engravings“They are visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry…”, and his contemporary Edward Calvert. 

Neither Blake nor Bewick had a formal academic education. Both served as apprentices, yet each created a lifetime’s worth of personal and commissioned works. Bewick is the elemental counterpoint to Blake’s technique. Though formally trained in metal engraving, he became famous for woodcut and the white-line technique. Blake became a master of copper engraving, and these works stand in comparison to his singular foray into woodblock engraving. Bewick was a meticulous replicator of natural history, whereas Blake’s metalwork operated in a more open field of interpretation and original artistry. Blake worked with the imagination in nature; Bewick sought to recreate it. It’s interesting that the medium itself, derived from nature, produced some of Blake’s heaviest and most laboured images to the naked eye. 

The woodblocks are currently in the possession of the British Museum.

Lucy Valentine