The Publication:
The Illustrated London News was the world's first illustrated weekly newspaper. On the 14 of May, 1842, This pictorial periodical burst upon a world that had never seen anything quite like it. From the very first issue, for sixpence, readers acquired sixteen pages covered with thirty-two fantastically detailed, hand-engraved wood engravings, large and small, accompanying forty-eight columns of news. 

From a great description of the story of the Illustrated London News with it's incredible hand-cut wood engravings for a periodical, a bit about one of the first of the engravings attempted of enormous size:

"...Artist C. F. Sargent then made the drawing onto sixty boxwood engraving blocks, each about 5” square, that had been drilled and fitted together with long brass bolts to make one huge block, after which eighteen men, working under the direction of Ebenezer Landells, painstakingly engraved the drawing..."

We now take for granted the many full-page pics & illustrations that dominate newspapers & magazines, with their fast, easily produced dot-screened photos from photo-etched offset litho plates. But in the beginning, starting with this publication, these full-page, dramatic images were printed from wooden blocks which were carved by hand, sometimes from a photograph, in this case clearly from drawings. 

The success of the form of large images included in a periodical which The Illustrated London News founder Herbert Ingram innovated, would eventually define other major pictorial publications such as Harpers in NY & 'Illustrierte Zeitung' in Germany, which also produced magnificent, epic wood-engraved newspaper illustrations of their own.

The Artist & Engraver:
Harrison William Weir RI (5 May 1824 – 3 January 1906), known as "The Father of the Cat Fancy", was a British artist.

He organised the first cat show in England, at the Crystal Palace, London, in July 1871. He and his brother, John Jenner Weir, both served as judges in the show. In 1887 Harrison Weir founded the National Cat Club and was its first President and Show Manager until his resignation in 1890. 

Weir was educated at Albany Academy, Camberwell, until 1837 when he became apprenticed to George Baxter, the colour-printer. Weir worked in every branch of Baxter's business, his main work being printing off the plates. From Baxter he learned to engrave and draw on wood and taught himself during his spare time to draw birds, mammals, and other subjects from nature. in 1842 Herbert Ingram founded The Illustrated London News and employed Weir as a draughtsman on wood and engraver from the first issue and for many years thereafter. 

Weir was a natural history artist and provided some of the illustrations for the Rev John George Wood's Illustrated Natural History (1853), served as chief illustrator for Charles St John's Wild Sports and Natural History of the Highlands, and designed all of the illustrations for George Fyler Townsend's Three Hundred Æsop's Fables (1867). He also provided illustrations for many of the books of the natural history author Sarah Bowdich Lee.

Weir was enormously prolific and popular as a book illustrator and worked not just for The Illustrated London News, but for many illustrated papers, including the Pictorial Times, The Field and Pictorial World. In some cases, such as The Poetry of Nature (1867), he compiled the books he illustrated. He was both author and illustrator of Every Day in the Country (1883) and Animal Studies, Old and New (1885). In literary society, Weir's close friends included Douglas Jerrold, Henry Mayhew, Albert Smith, and Tom Hood the younger, and Weir knew Thackeray and other eminent literary men. 

The Plates & Technique:
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique in which an artist cuts an image into the endgrain block of very hard wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. To carve a woodblock, you had to cut away everything but the part you wanted to print. The areas of the design that show ink when printed are those left uncut on the surface of the wood block. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result of the relatively lower pressure used to print, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and may have a distinctive white-on-black character. 

Thomas Bewick developed the wood engraving technique in Great Britain at the end of the 18th century. His work differed from earlier woodcuts in two key ways. First, rather than using woodcarving tools such as knives & gouges, Bewick used an engraver's burin (graver). With this, he could create thin delicate lines, often creating large dark areas in the composition. Second, wood engraving traditionally uses the wood's end grain—while the older technique used the softer side grain. The resulting increased hardness and durability facilitated fantastically detailed images. 

By the mid-19th century, many wood engravings rivaled copperplate engravings in their detail. A further innovation was the transfering of photographs carved by hand into the wood, known as 'Photoxylographs'. Before the advent of photolithography, newspapers used wood engravings to make photographic reproductions, where an artist "meticulously traced the photograph upon the surface of a block of boxwood or other suitable tree, then used a sharp tool to cut out the troughs (the white part of the photo) from the wood. The remaining lines for the black ink stayed 'type high.' A workman rolled or daubed a layer of ink over the incised surface, laid a sheet of paper on it, pressed it down with a roller, pulled the paper away from the sticky substance," and the result was a printed image.

A later advancement of this technique I've read about, was to apparently coat the wood block in emulsion, & expose the negative film directly onto the block, & carve it all by hand from there. 

Condition:
Excellent condition, almost pristine, faint typical antiquarian artifacts, overall an exceptionally well-preserved plate.

These prints are very old & may have minor imperfections expected with age, such as some typical age-toning of the paper, oxidation of the old original watercolors, spots, text-offsetting, artifacts from having been bound into a book & handled, etc.  Please examine the photos & details carefully.

Text Page(s): This one comes without original text pages. I've included a scan of the cover-page of this publication, it's for reference & not part of the listing.

Size: 23-1/2" x 17-1/4" approximately.

Combined Shipping:
Yes! Multiple prints can be combined into one package. Larger prints may need to be shipped in tube. eBay should auto-combine your items if you put all of your selections into your shopping cart & check out all together as one order. If you purchase them individually, eBay charges shipping on each, which I then will need to refund after. If you're assessed multiple shipping charges for one combined package, I will endeavor to refund any overage asap.

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