27 July 1849, and is buried in Ovingham churchyard.
[Memoir of Thomas Bewick, &c.]
BEWICK, THOMAS (1763–1828), wood engraver, was born in August 1753, at Cherryburn House, on the south bank of the Tyne,
in the parish of Ovingham, Northumberland. Part of the old cottage still exists as 'byre' or cowhouse to a more modern Cherryburn, yet occupied by his descendants. His father, John Bewick, was a small farmer, who also rented a land-sale colliery (i.e. a colliery the coals of which are sold on the spot to persons in the neighbourhood) at Mickley, close by his mother, John Bewick's second wife, came of a Cumberland family. Her maiden name was Jane Wilson. She bore John Bewick eight children, of whom Thomas was the eldest, and John [see Bewick, John] the fifth. Another son, William, and five daughters completed the family. Young Bewick first went to school at Mickley. Then, two successive preceptors there having died, he was placed under the care of the Rev. Christopher Gregson of Ovingham, whose church and rectory, though in the same parish as Cherryburn, lay on the opposite or northern side of the Tyne. His schooldays were undistinguished; but he seems to have acquired some little knowledge of Latin, and better still of English. In the characteristic autobiography published by his eldest daughter Jane in 1862, and hereafter referred to as the 'Memoir,' is a good account of his boyhood. He there appears as a fairly mischievous but not vicious lad, delighting in all sorts of youthful escapades. Already, however, he gave evidence of two tastes which strongly coloured his after life, a love of drawing, and a love of nature. Like Hogarth's, his 'exercises when at school were more remarkable for the ornaments which adorned them, than for the exercise itself.' After exhausting the margins of his books, he had recourse to the flagstones and hearth of his home, or the floor of the church porch at Ovingham, which he covered with devices in chalk. He studied the inn signs and the rude knife-cut prints then to be found in every farm or cottage, records of victories by sea and land, portraits of persons famous or notorious,
ballads, pasted on the wall,
Of Chevy Chace and English Moll,
Fair Rosiimond. and Robin Hood,
The little Children in the Wood.
Then, by the kindness of a friend, after a probation of pen and ink and blackberry-juice, he passed to a paint brush and colours, and began to copy the animal life about him. 'I now, in the estimation of my rustic neighbours, became an eminent painter, and the walls of their houses were ornamented with an abundance of my rude productions, at a very cheap rate. These chiefly consisted of particular hunting scenes, in which the portraits of the hunters, the horses, and of every dog in the pack, were, in their opinion, as well as my own, faithfully delineated ' (Memoir, pp. 7, 8). Meanwhile the love of nature, which was born in him, grew and gathered strength. Some of the most delightful pages of his autobiography are those which recall his delight in the change of seasons, with their varied feathered visitors, in angling and field-sports, in the legends, tales, and strange characters of his birth-place. Then came the rude breaking-up of all the pleasant country life. His taste for drawing determined the choice of his calling, and on 1 Oct. 1767 he was apprenticed to a Newcastle engraver, Mr. Ralph Beilby [q. v.] The 'Memoir' describes the parting with Cherryburn in a characteristic passage: 'I liked my master; I liked the business; but to part from the country, and to leave all its beauties behind me, with which I had been all my life charmed in an extreme degree—and in a way I cannot describe—I can only say my heart was like to break; and as we passed away I inwardly bade farewell to the whinny wilds, to Mickley bank, to the Stobcross hill, to the water banks, the woods, and to particular trees, and even to the large hollow old elm which had lain perhaps for centuries past on the haugh near the ford we were about to pass. and which had sheltered the salmon fishers while at work there from many a bitter blast' (p. 51).
In 1767, when Bewick went to Newcastle as an apprentice, the art of wood engraving had fallen into comparative disuse. For a long time previously, in truth, it can scarcely be said to have existed, except in its ruder forms. Tasteless emblematical ornaments and tail-pieces, diagrams and rough designs for magazines, illustrations of an elementary character for a few books like Croxall's 'Fables of Æsop,' together with the coarse knife-cut prints and broadsides already referred to, made up the chief examples. In 1760 Hogarth had attempted to substitute wood for copper in engraving the last two plates of the 'Progress of Cruelty;' but the attempt, though exceedingly meritorious, was not successful financially. So low, in short, was the condition of tie art, that Walnole, writing about 1770 of Papillon's recently published 'Traité historique et pratique de la Gravure en Bois,' expressed a doubt whether that author would ever, as he wished, 'persuade the world to return to wooden cuts.
