r significance by the 1780's, although a
spurious classicism was still kept alive for genteel consumption and the
romantic picturesque still persisted in interior decoration.

[Illustration]

Thirdly, he looked at life and nature with a fresh eye, without
preconceptions. While his lack of larger vision held him down as an
artist, it contributed to his feeling for natural textures and
story-telling detail. His approach to illustration, therefore, was the
spontaneous expression of an observant but unimaginative nature, coated
with a bitter-sweet sentiment. It was this quality, so homely and common
and yet so charged with integrity, that delivered the shock of
recognition to a mass audience.

Lastly, and perhaps most importantly in the long run, he was fortunate
enough to live at a time when a necessary prerequisite for the physical
appearance of his work, wove paper, was coming into use. Without it he
would soon have had to simplify his line system, returning to older and
less detailed methods, or his work would have remained unprintable. It
was the new paper that allowed him to extract unprecedented subtleties
from the wood block, that made his cuts print clearly and evenly, and
that encouraged the expansion of the wood engraving process. These
factors, taken together, make up the phenomenon of Thomas Bewick.

[Illustration: Figure 15.--Tailpiece by Thomas Bewick, from _History of
British birds_, vol. 2, 1804. (Actual size.)]

U. S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE: 1959

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHY BEWICK SUCCEEDED***

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