From my archive of fantastic wood-engravings comes this gem, an amazing full-page folio antique original wood engraving from J.G. Wood's epic work 'Animate Creation'.
This gorgeously drawn, impressive image of an Osprey with her young is meticulously engraved in finest detail.
It's a wonderful, epic, big-sheet image of impeccable engraving quality from a publication that famously celebrated life on earth, hand-engraved in large format.
The Volumes:
This epic work of the finest natural history prints offers a vast compendium of information from leading American biologists and an outstanding presentation of art depicting life on earth. The volumes have beautiful chromolithographs by Louis Prang mounted on separate pages, full-page wood engravings & many wood engravings throughout the text. Published by Selmar Hess & issued by subscription in individual parts or fascicles from 1885–1898. Subscribers would collect all the parts over years & have them bound into large books by volume. The full page plates from these volumes are classics, superb renderings by some of the best natural history artists, engraved & lithographed meticulously.
The Artist:
Gustav Ludwig Heinrich Mützel (December 7, 1839 – October 29, 1893) was a German artist, famous for his mammal and bird paintings, including the illustrations for the second edition of Alfred Edmund Brehm's Thierleben and Richard Lydekker's The Royal Natural History.
Gustav Mützel was the son of the painter Heinrich Mützel and his wife Luise Pauline Friedrichs. He attended the French high school in his hometown. Subsequently, Mützel began to study at the Academy of Art at age 18 and was, amongst others, a pupil of the painter Eduard Daege.
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.
These wood engraving blocks could also be converted to copperplates by electroplating directly onto the wood, a process used to reproduce the engraving in durable metal.
Condition:
Excellent condition, nearly pristine as these go. Minor age-toning to the paper, faint stain to bottom edge not effecting image. Please peruse the photos.
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 a cover-page from one of the volumes, it's for reference & not part of the listing.
Size: 12-1/2" x 9-1/4" 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.
Thanks for Visiting!
Please note: The information I've included in this listing is based on my best research & observations as an enthusiast of these works, not a professional historian of antiquarian books & prints. I do like to offer some background information readily available to me but make no claims or representations of total accuracy. Any corrections or further information anyone might offer would certainly appreciated! The scans in the images are my best efforts to accurately show the item. Antique prints & old paper are notoriously tricky to scan accurately. In my experience, scanners tend to be thrown off by the off-whites & gradations in age-toned paper. If the scanner produces a scan that's too dark or too brown, etc, I'll often try to reasonably color-correct to represent the print as accurately as possible. I'm not a professional in color-correcting images yet I try my best to show the print as close to the original as I can. I also find that different monitors show colors differently, & eBay's system can sometimes throw off the colors a bit in the uploaded JPEG images as they appear on their site. Thank you!