page_title: Thomas Bewick
section_title: Tributes and portraits
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Bewick / Tributes and portraits
caption_attribution_description: English: Woodcut by Robert Elliot Bewick of the swan named after his father by William Yarrell. The bird did not appear in the first edition of Thomas Bewick's A History of British Birds; it was named by William Yarrell after Thomas Bewick's death. This image is scanned from the 1847 edition, which was the last "live" edition of the book.
context_page_description: Thomas Bewick was an English wood-engraver and natural history author. Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving cutlery, making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books. He gradually turned to illustrating, writing and publishing his own books, gaining an adult audience for the fine illustrations in A History of Quadrupeds.
  His career began when he was apprenticed to engraver Ralph Beilby in Newcastle upon Tyne. He 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.
  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. The book was the forerunner of all modern field guides. He notably illustrated editions of Aesop's Fables throughout his life.
  He is credited with popularising a technical innovation in the printing of illustrations using wood.
context_section_description: Poetical tributes came to Bewick even during his lifetime. William Wordsworth began his anecdotal poem “The Two Thieves”, composed in 1798, with the line “O now that the genius of Bewick were mine”, in which case he would give up writing, he declared.
  In 1823, Bewick's friend the Reverend J. F. M. Dovaston dedicated a sonnet to him with the lines
  Xylographer I name thee, Bewick, taught
  By thy wood-Art, that from rock, flood, and tree
  Home to our hearths, all lively, light and free
  In suited scene each living thing has brought
  As life elastic, animate with thought.
  Four years after his death, his sixteen-year-old admirer Charlotte Brontë wrote a poem of 20 quatrains titled “Lines on the celebrated Bewick” which describe the various scenes she comes across while leafing through the books illustrated by him. Later still, the poet Alfred Tennyson left his own tribute on the flyleaf of a copy of Bewick's History of British Birds found in Lord Ravenscroft's library:
  A gate and field half ploughed,
  A solitary cow,
  A child with a broken slate,
  And a titmarsh in the bough.
  But where, alack, is Bewick
  To tell the meaning now?
  Each in their own way is making the same point, that Bewick's work is more than mere illustration. Its liveliness and truth to experience appeals to the imagination of the reader and calls forth an individual response that goes beyond the text.
  As noted at the end of the article on him in the Dictionary of National Biography, there is a rich collection of Bewick portraits, beginning with that of Newcastle painter George Gray (1758–1819), from about 1780 and long owned by Bewick's family, that is now in the Laing Art Gallery. Several are by James Ramsay, including the one at the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne, in which he sits holding spectacles, one in middle-age, held by the Natural History Society of Northumbria, and one in old age in the National Portrait Gallery. Bewick also appears among the figures on the left in Ramsay's "The Lost Child" (1823), where he is standing next to Ramsay and his wife in the street leading up to St Nicholas' Church. John Henry Frederick Bacon was to draw on this small figure to create his 1852 print of Bewick, in which he has been transferred from the urban to a rural setting, with the city and the Tyne in the background.
  Other portraits include one by William Nicholson dating from 1814 in which Bewick sits with a pencil in his hand and a dog beside his chair; the one at his birthplace; and the full-length seated portrait of 1827 by Thomas Sword Good (see above). Another painting by Sword in the National Portrait Gallery is now no longer thought to be of Bewick. An unsigned painting supposedly of him in the Yale Center for British Art is equally dubious.
  A marble portrait bust of Bewick was commissioned from Edward Hodges Baily in 1825 by the Literary and Philosophical Society, of which there are several copies beside the one still at the Society itself. According to Jenny Uglow, his recent biographer, when he came to sit for the sculptor, he “stoutly refused to be portrayed in a toga. Instead he wore his ordinary coat and waistcoat with neckcloth and ruffled shirt, and even asked for some of his smallpox scars to be shown." Baily was so taken with him that he presented Bewick with a plaster model of the finished bust. A bronze copy now rests in a niche of the building that replaced his workshop in the churchyard of Saint Nicholas (see above) and still another is at the British Museum. There is also a full length statue of him at the top left of the former chemist's shop designed by M.V.Treleaven at 45 Northumberland Street in the city.
caption: Woodcut by Robert Elliot Bewick of the swan named after his father by William Yarrell
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