View Edward Johnston and Wood Engraving
From an article by the late MICHAEL RENTON in the exhibition catalogue ‘Sharpness, Unity and Freedom’ (The Edward Johnston Foundation, Ditchling 1994)
Category:Wood Engraving
Category:Calligraphy
Edward Johnston’s achievement in renewing the art of the scribe and the understanding of letterform sprang from the quality of his mind – his quietly insistent logic, and devotion to first principles in everything from mathematics to making toast. This was not without other consequences. In its origins the technique of wood engraving owes everything to its association with the written and printed word. From humble beginnings it attained artistic respectability in the hands of Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), and helped to create an expanding market for illustrated literature. But in service to this and to commercial demands accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, it became itself an industry, and largely a reproductive rather than a creative skill. With the advent of photographic ‘process’ engraving in the 1880s it faced a crisis of identity. A few artists began to see more personal possibilities in the medium, but their approach was confused by its reproductive heritage and by an awe of the Renaissance woodcut, technically and otherwise a different animal.
Among Edward Johnston’s earliest students were, of course, Eric Gill and Noel Rooke. In Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering some Bewick engravings are reproduced, with a note by Rooke suggesting them as possible models for a student-illuminator.1 Elsewhere in the book Johnston commends ‘The splendid effect of Title and Initial pages engraved in wood... seen in the books of the Kelmscott Press’. Though generally favouring ‘ordinary typography’ for ordinary purposes he says ‘If special forms or arrangements of letters are required, for which type is lacking or unsuited, they are best cut in wood or metal. The engraver leaves the mark of his tool and hand upon, and so gives character to, such lettering; while, if he has some knowledge of letters, he may give fresh beauty to their forms’.2 In a lecture on 30th November 1906 he said ‘I commend wood engraving to you for its simplicity & its direct educational value... you will find the wood & the graver will teach you at once things about form that are new to you & wonderful’.3 This reflects the excitement of very recent discovery; his work diary for the same year and month records:
Nov 16 Fri. Bt. Wood Engraving matls.
17 Sat. My 1st Wood Engraving
18 Sun. 2nd Wood Engraving
3rd Wood Engraving
20. Tues. Gill abt. 9.pm till 2am (21st)
(trying engraving)
(EJ’s 4th wood-engraving)4
The latter entry matches one in Eric Gill’s diary for the same date: ‘Tried wood Engraving a little in evening’ – clearly the two sat down together that night (and characteristically into the small hours of the next morning) to share their adventure. Proofs of Johnston’s efforts survive – not masterpieces, but one is thoroughly Johnstonian in its humour. Noel Rooke had already made his own start. He had been drawing for illustration since 1900; but, dissatisfied with ‘the Zincograph Process’ which had ousted wood engraving from its purely reproductive role and ‘Inspired by the thought of Johnston’s calligraphy I started in 1905 to make wood engravings on the same basis’, i.e. Johnston’s definition of formal writing as ‘the characteristic product of a special tool’. ‘I concluded that wood-engraving offered the best web hosting services of book decoration and illustration for the future, but on condition that it was done from a new point of view. All the attempts to revive it had failed because they followed the error which had caused its destruction fifty years ago, i.e. making engraving a method of reproducing drawings, instead of making it the chance of creating designs which could not be brought into existence in any other way.’5 These were the principles on which wood engraving would be redeveloped in the twentieth century. Rooke was not quite alone in pursuing them – Edward Gordon Craig, Sydney Lee and one or two others were working independently on similar lines – but his claim that this was the start of a movement was essentially justified.
Johnston had been rubricating books by hand for the Doves Press, run by his Hammersmith neighbour T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Soon both Rooke and Gill were engraving initial letters, headpieces and the like not only for the Doves Press but the German publishers Insel Verlag, through the agency of Count Harry Kessler, from Johnston’s originals. Though this was in fact reproductive engraving, both moved on quickly to work which was their own in all ways. Johnston himself engraved a Christmas card in 1913, but does not seem to have pursued the medium further after this – no doubt calligraphy as such, and teaching commitments, were proving a sufficient tax on his never-abundant energy. Gill’s engraving developed steadily into a major part of his output, especially after his and Johnston’s mutual friend Hilary Pepler had started the St Dominic’s Press at Ditchling. Though he never taught engraving formally Gill was always a powerful example, articulate in his view of the medium and encouraging to others. Noel Rooke was a tutor in book illustration at the Central School from 1905, but overcame unaccountable opposition to the teaching of wood engraving only in 1912. Two years later he became Head of Book Production, which no doubt restricted his own output but was a position from which he could exert unrivalled influence. The mark of his teachings can be seen in the work of many wood engravers who emerged over the next generation. One of the earliest and most energetic, Robert Gibbings, seems first to have mooted the idea of a group which would draw together the somewhat scattered activities of artists working in the medium. But the catalyst for its realisation was Philip Hagreen, self-taught as an engraver though his early work suggests Rooke’s influence. On the initiative of these two the Society of Wood Engravers was formed in 1920. Rooke and Gill being at once invited to membership. Hagreen’s encounter with Eric Gill transormed his artistic outlook – he worked at Ditchling Common then and much later, becoming among other things an engraver of lettering too little appreciated even now.
A further circle, as it were, was completed when Gibbings took over the Golden Cockerel Press in 1924, commissioning engravings (as well as a proprietary typeface) from Gill. The summit of their collaboration, the Four Gospels of 1931, is a supreme realisation of that ideal of ‘the Book Beautiful’ which had inspired Cobden-Sanderson, and Johnston’s association with him, years earlier. Around 1930 Johnston was working on typefaces, and Gill was engraving, for Count Kessler’s Cranach Press; both were involved in Kessler’s editions (German and English) of Hamlet with woodcuts by another pioneering figure, Gordon Craig. About this time, too, the young Reynolds Stone, fresh from Cambridge and the University Press (where Stanley Morison’s typographic authority ensured that Johnstonian principles were honoured) met Gill and was effectively launched on his own engraving career. He was to demonstrate further that, in Johnston’s words, the engraver with a knowledge of letters ‘may give fresh beauty to their forms’.
Reynolds Stone was also one of those who kept wood engraving in the public eye when the excitements of the ‘revival’ – actually of course an entirely new movement – cooled down. The principles enunciated by its founders had sometimes been carried to extremes but a body of original and vigorous work had been created. Noel Rooke taught at the Central School until 1947, being succeeded by another distinguished ex-pupil, John Farleigh, founder in the same year of the Crafts Centre of Great Britain. In a lecture shortly before his retirement Rooke foresaw the developments – changes in fashion and the uses of graphic media, in art education and printing technology – which would combine to make the future of wood engraving again problematical. Symptomatic and maybe symbolic was the decline of the Society of Wood Engravers, even to apparent extinction in the 1970s – and its rebirth in 1984 (it was good that one of its principal founders, Philip Hagreen, should have lived long enough to receive the news of this). Continuity has been maintained, new talents continue to come forward and the spirit of exploration is alive and well. In this renewed vitality there is still a fundamental debt to the perceptions of Edward Johnston and those he inspired a hundred years ago.
FOOTNOTES
1 Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, pp 189-193.
2 Ibid, pp 328-330.
3 Lessons in Formal Writing, ed. Heather Child and Justin Howes, 1986, pp 96-7.
4 Edward Johnston’s Work Diary, held at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Surrey.
5 Quoted in ‘Noel Rooke: the early years’ by Justin Howes, Matrix 3, 1983.
Category:Wood Engraving
Category:Calligraphy
Edward Johnston’s achievement in renewing the art of the scribe and the understanding of letterform sprang from the quality of his mind – his quietly insistent logic, and devotion to first principles in everything from mathematics to making toast. This was not without other consequences. In its origins the technique of wood engraving owes everything to its association with the written and printed word. From humble beginnings it attained artistic respectability in the hands of Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), and helped to create an expanding market for illustrated literature. But in service to this and to commercial demands accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, it became itself an industry, and largely a reproductive rather than a creative skill. With the advent of photographic ‘process’ engraving in the 1880s it faced a crisis of identity. A few artists began to see more personal possibilities in the medium, but their approach was confused by its reproductive heritage and by an awe of the Renaissance woodcut, technically and otherwise a different animal.
Among Edward Johnston’s earliest students were, of course, Eric Gill and Noel Rooke. In Writing & Illuminating, & Lettering some Bewick engravings are reproduced, with a note by Rooke suggesting them as possible models for a student-illuminator.1 Elsewhere in the book Johnston commends ‘The splendid effect of Title and Initial pages engraved in wood... seen in the books of the Kelmscott Press’. Though generally favouring ‘ordinary typography’ for ordinary purposes he says ‘If special forms or arrangements of letters are required, for which type is lacking or unsuited, they are best cut in wood or metal. The engraver leaves the mark of his tool and hand upon, and so gives character to, such lettering; while, if he has some knowledge of letters, he may give fresh beauty to their forms’.2 In a lecture on 30th November 1906 he said ‘I commend wood engraving to you for its simplicity & its direct educational value... you will find the wood & the graver will teach you at once things about form that are new to you & wonderful’.3 This reflects the excitement of very recent discovery; his work diary for the same year and month records:
Nov 16 Fri. Bt. Wood Engraving matls.
17 Sat. My 1st Wood Engraving
18 Sun. 2nd Wood Engraving
3rd Wood Engraving
20. Tues. Gill abt. 9.pm till 2am (21st)
(trying engraving)
(EJ’s 4th wood-engraving)4
The latter entry matches one in Eric Gill’s diary for the same date: ‘Tried wood Engraving a little in evening’ – clearly the two sat down together that night (and characteristically into the small hours of the next morning) to share their adventure. Proofs of Johnston’s efforts survive – not masterpieces, but one is thoroughly Johnstonian in its humour. Noel Rooke had already made his own start. He had been drawing for illustration since 1900; but, dissatisfied with ‘the Zincograph Process’ which had ousted wood engraving from its purely reproductive role and ‘Inspired by the thought of Johnston’s calligraphy I started in 1905 to make wood engravings on the same basis’, i.e. Johnston’s definition of formal writing as ‘the characteristic product of a special tool’. ‘I concluded that wood-engraving offered the best web hosting services of book decoration and illustration for the future, but on condition that it was done from a new point of view. All the attempts to revive it had failed because they followed the error which had caused its destruction fifty years ago, i.e. making engraving a method of reproducing drawings, instead of making it the chance of creating designs which could not be brought into existence in any other way.’5 These were the principles on which wood engraving would be redeveloped in the twentieth century. Rooke was not quite alone in pursuing them – Edward Gordon Craig, Sydney Lee and one or two others were working independently on similar lines – but his claim that this was the start of a movement was essentially justified.
Johnston had been rubricating books by hand for the Doves Press, run by his Hammersmith neighbour T.J. Cobden-Sanderson. Soon both Rooke and Gill were engraving initial letters, headpieces and the like not only for the Doves Press but the German publishers Insel Verlag, through the agency of Count Harry Kessler, from Johnston’s originals. Though this was in fact reproductive engraving, both moved on quickly to work which was their own in all ways. Johnston himself engraved a Christmas card in 1913, but does not seem to have pursued the medium further after this – no doubt calligraphy as such, and teaching commitments, were proving a sufficient tax on his never-abundant energy. Gill’s engraving developed steadily into a major part of his output, especially after his and Johnston’s mutual friend Hilary Pepler had started the St Dominic’s Press at Ditchling. Though he never taught engraving formally Gill was always a powerful example, articulate in his view of the medium and encouraging to others. Noel Rooke was a tutor in book illustration at the Central School from 1905, but overcame unaccountable opposition to the teaching of wood engraving only in 1912. Two years later he became Head of Book Production, which no doubt restricted his own output but was a position from which he could exert unrivalled influence. The mark of his teachings can be seen in the work of many wood engravers who emerged over the next generation. One of the earliest and most energetic, Robert Gibbings, seems first to have mooted the idea of a group which would draw together the somewhat scattered activities of artists working in the medium. But the catalyst for its realisation was Philip Hagreen, self-taught as an engraver though his early work suggests Rooke’s influence. On the initiative of these two the Society of Wood Engravers was formed in 1920. Rooke and Gill being at once invited to membership. Hagreen’s encounter with Eric Gill transormed his artistic outlook – he worked at Ditchling Common then and much later, becoming among other things an engraver of lettering too little appreciated even now.
A further circle, as it were, was completed when Gibbings took over the Golden Cockerel Press in 1924, commissioning engravings (as well as a proprietary typeface) from Gill. The summit of their collaboration, the Four Gospels of 1931, is a supreme realisation of that ideal of ‘the Book Beautiful’ which had inspired Cobden-Sanderson, and Johnston’s association with him, years earlier. Around 1930 Johnston was working on typefaces, and Gill was engraving, for Count Kessler’s Cranach Press; both were involved in Kessler’s editions (German and English) of Hamlet with woodcuts by another pioneering figure, Gordon Craig. About this time, too, the young Reynolds Stone, fresh from Cambridge and the University Press (where Stanley Morison’s typographic authority ensured that Johnstonian principles were honoured) met Gill and was effectively launched on his own engraving career. He was to demonstrate further that, in Johnston’s words, the engraver with a knowledge of letters ‘may give fresh beauty to their forms’.
Reynolds Stone was also one of those who kept wood engraving in the public eye when the excitements of the ‘revival’ – actually of course an entirely new movement – cooled down. The principles enunciated by its founders had sometimes been carried to extremes but a body of original and vigorous work had been created. Noel Rooke taught at the Central School until 1947, being succeeded by another distinguished ex-pupil, John Farleigh, founder in the same year of the Crafts Centre of Great Britain. In a lecture shortly before his retirement Rooke foresaw the developments – changes in fashion and the uses of graphic media, in art education and printing technology – which would combine to make the future of wood engraving again problematical. Symptomatic and maybe symbolic was the decline of the Society of Wood Engravers, even to apparent extinction in the 1970s – and its rebirth in 1984 (it was good that one of its principal founders, Philip Hagreen, should have lived long enough to receive the news of this). Continuity has been maintained, new talents continue to come forward and the spirit of exploration is alive and well. In this renewed vitality there is still a fundamental debt to the perceptions of Edward Johnston and those he inspired a hundred years ago.
FOOTNOTES
1 Writing and Illuminating, and Lettering, pp 189-193.
2 Ibid, pp 328-330.
3 Lessons in Formal Writing, ed. Heather Child and Justin Howes, 1986, pp 96-7.
4 Edward Johnston’s Work Diary, held at the Crafts Study Centre, Farnham, Surrey.
5 Quoted in ‘Noel Rooke: the early years’ by Justin Howes, Matrix 3, 1983.