Bewick, Thomas

Bewick, Thomas (b Cherryburn farm, Eltringham, Northumberland, 10 or 12 Aug. 1753; d Gateshead, 8 Nov. 1828). English engraver, active for most of his life in Newcastle upon Tyne. There he ran a thriving workshop; his account books and other records (many of which are in the Laing AG, Newcastle) show that he had clients in more than 50 towns throughout England, and he was renowned for his scrupulous honesty as a businessman. Most of the workshop's day-to-day jobs involved copper engraving, but for his own projects Bewick preferred wood engraving, and he was the first artist to show the full potential of this technique. He had a great love of the countryside, and his finest works are natural history illustrations, particularly those to his celebrated books A General History of Quadrupeds (1790) and A History of British Birds (2 vols., 1797 and 1804), for which he wrote most of the text himself. The animals and birds are characterized with great skill, but Bewick is as much admired for his tailpieces—little (sometimes tiny) vignettes with which he concluded his account of each animal or bird. These miniature scenes give a wonderfully shrewd and sensitive picture of rural life, bringing out its bleakness and cruelty as well as its beauty and humour. Bewick himself punningly called these scenes ‘Tale-pieces’, for they were ‘seldom without an endeavour to illustrate some truth or point some moral’. The success of his books helped to make wood engraving the dominant medium for book illustration for most of the 19th century and his work was carried on by several followers in Newcastle, notably his son Robert (1788–1849).

Bewick wrote an autobiography, which was posthumously published (edited by his daughter) in 1862; a more authoritative text, based on the original manuscript (BL, London), appeared in 1975. A year before his death he was visited by Audubon, another great artist-naturalist, who left a touching account of his meeting with this ‘perfect old Englishman’, who was ‘kind and attentive’ and still—at the age of 74—‘active and prompt in his labours’, using ‘delicate and beautiful tools…all made by himself’.