In the early 20th century, a cluster of British artists rediscovered the venerable technique of wood engraving. Although Georgian artists such as Thomas Bewick and William Blake had used it to create images of both delicacy and expressive power, it was a type of printmaking that had come to seem quaintly old-fashioned. Where etching and engraving, which offered greater refinement and tonal variety, were seen as an art, wood engraving was looked down on as being merely a craft.
However, in the years after the First World War, many artists – shocked by what they had experienced of the carnage wrought by the modern machine age – felt the lure of the traditional techniques and subjects they had once keenly sought to distance themselves from. They rejected the avant-gardism of the first decade of the century in search of something more stable to hold on to: the trend became known as the “return to order” and even Picasso, the founder of cubism, the most radical modern art movement, was drawn to it.
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