Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick , born in August 1753 with Cherryburn close to the Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the Northumberland and dead the November 8th 1828, is a engraver and a British Ornithologue .

Biography

His/her father is coalman with Mickleybank and it makes its studies with Mickley. Thomas was poor but watch, as of his young age, a great talent for the drawing without, for, to have followed the least artistic formation as much. At 14 years, it takes in training in an engraver of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Ralph Beilby. There, Bewick engraves a series of engravings on wood to illustrate a treaty of Dr. Hutton. It seems, thereafter, to be entirely specialized in this technique and receives, in 1775, a price of the Society for the Encouragement off Arts and Manufactures for an engraving of Huntsman and the Old Hound . In 1776, it becomes associated in the company with Beilby. Its engravings for Select Fables (1784) are of a quality higher than all that was made before. The Quadrupeds which appears in 1790 is a great success of Bewick, its name being associated with this work like for the British Birds , published between 1797 and 1804. Bewick is helped in its work by its own knowledge which it acquires by traversing its area and by making many observations there. Even if Bewick does not contribute truly to advanced of knowledge, it takes part, like Gilbert White (1720-1793) with her Natural History and Antiquities off Selborne (1789) to popularize the observation of the birds.

Among other work which made it famous, it is necessary to quote engravings for the Traveller and Deserted Village of Oliver Goldsmith (1728 or 1730-1774), for Hermit of Thomas Parnell (1679-1718), for Chase of William Somervile for the collection Fables off Aesop and Others . Bewick has many pupils, several became engravers of reputation, and among those his/her son and Robert Elliott.

Bewick carries engraving on wood to a summun. This is undoubtedly by the method which it uses: it privileges the wood hard which it engraves of the direction of the grain using fine tools, similar to those used for engraving on metal. It is what one calls engraving on wood of end (or upright ), where wood is cut perpendicularly within the meaning of fibers, in opposition to traditional engraving on long wood , where the engraver is confronted with the direction of fibers. He is the initiator of this technique which is a great success since it mainly will be employed during all the 19th century in the illustration, as well in original engraving as that of reproduction (it is, before the invention of the photoengraving, about the only means used to reproduce and print the photographs).

Its autobiography, Memoirs off Thomas Bewick, by Himself , appears in 1862 little time before its death. John James Audubon (1785-1851) dedicates the to him Troglodyte of Bewick, Thryomanes bewickii , in 1829.

Anecdotes

In the first chapter of the novel of Charlotte Brontë, the young person Jane Eyre reads the Histoire of the birds of Great Britain of Thomas Bewick. Here an extract of its impressions: I begun again my book the History of the Birds of Great Britain of Bewick. Generally, I was concerned little with his text, and yet, any child who I was, there were certain pages of the introduction which I could not exempt to me to read: those which describe the dens of the birds of sea, the “solitary rocks and headlands ” that they are alone to live, the coast of Norway, strewn since its southernmost end, the course Lindeness or Naze, to the Northern Cape. Source: Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre , ED. the Book of Pocket (translation of Charlotte Maurat).

Works digitized and available on Internet

has history British birds off: on Internet Files, edition of 1885: volume 1 (terrestrial birds) and volume 2 (water birds).

Sources

Michael Walters (2003). has Concise History Ornithology off. Yale University Close (New Haven, Connecticut): 255 p.
Chronology of the life of Tgilas Berwick

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