has mistakenly been credited with being the inspiration of the Pre-Raphaelite designers, the art of wood engraving has never been without its exponents. Since Vogel, Ungelmann, Kretzchmar and H. Müller cut in facsimile Menzel's designs, the light has not gone out. During the great arts and crafts revival in which all that was best and worst in Morris was distorted and plagiarised, Germany has upheld the dignity of wood engraving. A fine-art magazine, Meisterwerke der Holzschneidekunst, was given up to wood engraving to which the best Continental engravers contributed, including Weber of Leipsic, and Hofel of Vienna.
The American school of wood engraving, largely recruited by men who foresaw the bad days of the art in England, instinct with the genius that has made American illustrated magazines of world-wide reputation, took all that was best of Europe and remoulded the constituents into something that is more national in art than anything America has yet produced.
During the eighties some remarkable work appeared. It is mainly interpretative. The number of the engravers is legion. Unfortunately they grew to worship exactitude in their transcripts from old canvases, they copied the brush-marks and even the cracks on the canvas. There is a wood engraving by W. B. Closson after a portrait by Vandyck of Charles I. and Queen Henrietta Maria, in which the dilapidated state of the canvas is most clearly shown as a feature in the wood engraving.
Scattered up and down the American magazines
