woodcut. Term applied to the technique of making a print from a block of wood sawn along the grain and also to the print so made. Although the term is often loosely used for any type of print made from wood, it refers specifically to those made from blocks in which the grain runs lengthways across the surface (as in a plank of wood). It can thus be distinguished from
wood engraving, in which the print is made from wood sawn across the grain, which produces a surface that is harder to cut but capable of taking finer detail.
Woodcut is the oldest technique for making prints and its basic principles are simple. The design is drawn on a smooth block of wood (almost any wood of medium softness can be used—beech, pear, sycamore for example) and the parts that are to be white in the print are cut away with knives and gouges, leaving the parts that will print black standing up in relief. The block is then inked and the design printed on a sheet of paper (usually in a press, although it is possible to make a print using only hand pressure). Cutting blocks of any complexity is a highly skilled business and this part of the work has often been done by specialist craftsmen rather than the artist responsible for the design. Coloured woodcuts, generally made by using a separate block for each colour, have been particularly popular in Japan (see
Ukiyo-e).
The origins of woodcut are obscure (the principle was employed in fabric printing in China at least as early as the 3rd century
ad). There is evidence that woodcut prints as we know them were being produced in Europe in the 14th century, but the earliest surviving reliably dated example is perhaps the
St Christopher (1423) by an unknown artist in the John Rylands Library, Manchester. Many of the earliest woodcuts were crude popular religious images designed to be sold at fairs and pilgrim shrines (see also
block book), but in skilled hands the technique could produce much more sophisticated results. It was at its peak in the first 30 years of the 16th century, in both individual prints and book illustrations, with
Dürer being the supreme master.
The connection between woodcut and the art of the book was very close at this time, as both used essentially the same method of printing and therefore could be readily combined. In block books, the text and image were cut on the same piece of wood, but in books printed from movable metal type, the woodcut blocks and the type were locked together in the press, so that text and illustration were inked and printed together. This procedure was much cheaper and simpler than illustrating with copperplate engravings, which had to be printed separately (a heavier press was required), and bound into the book afterwards. The earliest printed books had been produced to look like manuscripts, so woodcut illustrations were usually eschewed, but they became highly popular in the 1490s, the first great landmark being Hartman Schedel's
Weltchronik (World Chronicle), published in Nuremberg in 1493, with illustrations by Michael
Wolgemut. Although there was a vogue for the
chiaroscuro woodcut in Italy, in general woodcut was used less there than in northern Europe. Nevertheless, there were some outstanding Italian achievements in the art, notably in Venice, for example the illustrations to the
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, published in 1499, and Jacopo de'
Barbari's huge view of the city, published in 1500.
In spite of the versatility and relative cheapness of woodcut, during the 16th century it steadily lost ground to
line engraving, which could produce finer detail and subtler effects. By about 1600 it was little used apart from jobbing work and ephemera—broadsheets, chapbooks, playbills, and so forth—although the Flemish printmaker Christoffel Jegher (1596–1652/3) produced some vigorous woodcut reproductions of
Rubens's work. In the 18th century the technique was only sporadically employed by serious artists;
Hogarth, for example, originally had his
Four Stages of Cruelty (1751) produced as woodcuts, seeking a popular style and market, but he changed his plans and redid the designs on copper.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries there was a major revival of interest in the woodcut as a medium of original artistic expression. Now that photomechanical methods had taken over the reproductive functions of printmaking, all kinds of hand engraving could make a fresh start. The simplicity and directness characteristic of 15th-century prints was revived, with the difference that modern exponents of woodcut learned the craft themselves and cut their own designs on the block.
Gauguin and
Munch were the great pioneers in the 1890s, using the grain of the wood to create bold and vigorous textural effects, and they were followed by the German
Expressionists (notably the members of Die
Brücke), some of whom virtually hacked the design into the block.