45 Facts About Thomas Bewick

Thomas Bewick gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds.

Thomas Bewick's career began when he was apprenticed to engraver Ralph Beilby in Newcastle upon Tyne.

Thomas Bewick became a partner in the business and eventually took it over.

Apprentices whom Bewick trained include John Anderson, Luke Clennell, and William Harvey, who in their turn became well known as painters and engravers.

Thomas Bewick is best known for his A History of British Birds, which is admired today mainly for its wood engravings, especially the small, sharply observed, and often humorous vignettes known as tail-pieces.

Thomas Bewick notably illustrated editions of Aesop's Fables throughout his life.

Thomas Bewick is "usually considered the founder of wood-engraving" as "the first to realize its full potentialities", using metal-engraving tools to cut hard boxwood across the grain, producing printing blocks that could be integrated with metal type, but were much more detailed and durable than traditional woodcuts.

Thomas Bewick's parents were tenant farmers: his father John had been married before his union with Jane, and was in his forties when Thomas, the eldest of eight, was born.

Thomas Bewick did not flourish at schoolwork, but at a very early age showed a talent for drawing.

In Beilby's workshop Thomas Bewick engraved a series of diagrams on wood for Charles Hutton, illustrating a treatise on measurement.

Thomas Bewick seems thereafter to have devoted himself entirely to engraving on wood, and in 1775 he received a prize from the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce for a wood engraving of the "Huntsman and the Old Hound" from Select Fables by the late Mr Gay, which he was illustrating.

Thomas Bewick returned to his beloved Newcastle as soon as he could, but his time in the capital gave him a wider reputation, business experience, and an awareness of new movements in art.

Thomas Bewick possessed great personal courage and in his younger years was not slow to repay an insult with personal chastisement.

Thomas Bewick was noted as having a strong moral sense and was an early campaigner for fair treatment of animals.

Thomas Bewick objected to the docking of horses' tails, the mistreatment of performing animals such as bears, and cruelty to dogs.

Thomas Bewick had at least 30 pupils who worked for him and Beilby as apprentices, the first of which was his younger brother John.

In preparation for this Thomas Bewick spent several years engraving the wood blocks for Land Birds, the first volume of A History of British Birds.

Thomas Bewick was unable to control his feelings and resolve issues quietly, so the partnership ended, turbulently and expensively, leaving Thomas Bewick with his own workshop.

Thomas Bewick found the task of managing the printers continually troublesome, but the book met with as much success as the first volume.

Thomas Bewick was fond of the music of Northumberland, and of the Northumbrian smallpipes in particular.

Thomas Bewick especially wanted to promote the Northumbrian smallpipes, and to support the piper John Peacock, so he encouraged Peacock to teach pupils to become masters of this kind of music.

Thomas Bewick died after a few days' illness on 8 November 1828, at his home.

Thomas Bewick was buried in Ovingham churchyard, beside his wife Isabella, who had died two years earlier, and not far from his parents and his brother John.

Thomas Bewick's art is considered the pinnacle of his medium, now called wood engraving.

Thomas Bewick made use of his close observation of nature, his remarkable visual memory, and his sharp eyesight to create accurate and extremely small details in his wood engravings, which proved to be both a strength and a weakness.

The quality of Thomas Bewick's engravings attracted a far wider readership to his books than he had expected: his Fables and Quadrupeds were at the outset intended for children.

Thomas Bewick ran his workshop collaboratively, developing the skills of his apprentices, so while he did not complete every task for every illustration himself, he was always closely involved, as John Rayner explains:.

The tail- or tale-pieces, a Thomas Bewick speciality, are small engravings chosen to fill gaps such as those at the ends of the species articles in British Birds, each bird's description beginning on a new page.

Thomas Bewick's bookplates were illustrations made from engravings, containing the name or initials of the book's owner.

Thomas Bewick went on to produce a third edition of the fables.

Beilby and Thomas Bewick had difficulty deciding what to include, and especially on how to organise the entries.

The book's coverage is erratic, a direct result of the sources that Thomas Bewick consulted: his own knowledge of British animals, the available scholarly sources, combined with George Culley's 1786 Observations on Livestock and the antique John Caius's 1576 On English Dogs.

Thomas Bewick had to hand the Swedish naturalist Anders Sparrman's account of his visit to the Cape of Good Hope on Cook's expedition of 1772 to 1776, and animals from the Southern Cape figure largely in the book.

Thomas Bewick was helped by his intimate knowledge of the habits of animals acquired during his frequent excursions into the country.

Many of the illustrations that have most frequently been reproduced in other books and as decorations are the small tailpieces that Thomas Bewick had placed at the bottoms of the pages of the original.

Thomas Bewick appears to have had a faultless sense of exactly what line was needed, and above all where to stop, as if there were no pause for analysis or reflection between the image in the mind and the hand on the wood.

William Wordsworth began his anecdotal poem "The Two Thieves", composed in 1798, with the line "O now that the genius of Thomas Bewick were mine", in which case he would give up writing, he declared.

Four years after his death, his sixteen-year-old admirer Charlotte Bronte wrote a poem of 20 quatrains titled "Lines on the celebrated Thomas Bewick" which describe the various scenes she comes across while leafing through the books illustrated by him.

In 1825, the Literary and Philosophical Society commissioned Edward Hodges Baily to sculpt a marble portrait bust of Thomas Bewick; there are several copies beside the one still at the Society itself.

Thomas Bewick's fame faded as illustration became more widespread and more mechanical, but twentieth-century artists such as Gwen Raverat continued to admire his skill, and work by artists such as Paul Nash and Eric Ravilious has been described as reminiscent of Bewick.

Thomas Bewick's illustrated books, admired since they first appeared, gave him some celebrity in his own lifetime.

Thomas Bewick's Memoir, published a generation after his death, brought about a new interest and a widening respect which has continued to grow ever since.

The attraction to his contemporaries of Thomas Bewick's observations lay in their accuracy and amusement.

Thomas Bewick's works are held in collections including the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Thomas Bewick is memorialised around Newcastle and Gateshead with streets named after him, and plaques mark his former homes and workshops.