ENGRAVING, the art by which a design is incised upon a plate or block for multiplication by printing, has in the Commonwealth performed two offices too readily confused: it has distributed the painter's inventions, and it has produced inventions of its own. A print after a picture is judged partly by what it carries over from that picture. A print made directly from a draughtsman's observation must establish its own order. To rank the latter merely as an inexpensive substitute for painting is to misunderstand both its means and its ambition.
In the line engraving upon copper, the burin removes metal along the course of the stroke; ink retained in that hollow gives the printed line. The engraver therefore has to translate a continuous tone into an arrangement of intervals. Parallel strokes open to receive light; crossed strokes collect shadow; a change in their direction can describe the turning of a cheek without outlining it. The separate business of inking, wiping, and pressing, upon which a good plate's appearance materially depends, is treated under COPPERPLATE PRINTING (q.v.). The distinction matters: a worn or carelessly printed impression may accuse the engraver of a dulness which belongs to the pressman.
The portrait school made a market for the reproductive plate. Stallard's (q.v.) public men could be possessed by readers who had never entered the rooms in which their originals hung. The trade acquired a second and wider resource in the Commonwealth Gallery (q.v.), whose native and recovered pictures supplied subjects for portfolios, separate sheets, and the modest framed print of the parlour. The plate taught the public to recognise a composition; it did not invariably teach it to see the picture. An engraver who strengthened every edge in order to make a clear impression could turn a painter's hesitation into a hardness which generations accepted as his manner.
Landscape exposes this danger particularly. The light of Fenwick (q.v.) is not obtained by leaving a white space above a dark foreground. In the best plates its breadth depends upon successive degrees of incompleteness, the distant forms stated with fewer and lighter strokes. Samuel Vale (q.v.), of the Lakes, understood this economy. His own Winter Harbour (1852) uses the unprinted paper for the snow, but makes it cold by the distribution of black beneath the vessels and the wharf. Nothing white has been engraved; everything necessary to its appearance has.
The useful arts supplied steadier work than the collector did. Maps, bills, machinery, and the illustrated book kept hands employed between commissions for pictures. Their requirements sometimes damaged style and sometimes disciplined it. Wood engraving (q.v.), by permitting image and letterpress to be printed together, enlarged the illustrated public while placing a premium upon a clearness which could become coarse. Mechanical reproduction now competes with both branches; its convenience is beyond dispute, its possession of judgment less certain.
The Commonwealth's achievement in the art need ask no allowance for its commercial origin. The purchaser of a print has paid for a thing to look at. At the best of our plates he can look longer than the price would appear to warrant, which is a sufficient reply to those critics who suppose that commerce invariably fixes the limits of the imagination. (R. Q.)