Nature's Engraver (eBook)

It's a combination of precision allied to an uncluttered vision, and an exquisite sensibility, that makes Jenny Uglow the perfect biographer for this artist who spent his entire life in love with nature. ... Jenny Uglow is a publisher as well as a writer, who understands how important it is that a study of 'nature's engraver' should please the ey as well as satisfy the mind. Together with Ron Costley, Faber's design director, she has produced a book which beautifully combines the written word with examples of some of Bewick's finest work. It provides a worthy tribute to Thomas Bewick and a delicious treat for readers.

Bewick was more than just an engraver. He was a fascinating human being whose life, told by the gifted biographer Jenny Uglow, in this beautifully illustrated little book, embodies the philosophical and political cross-currents of his times. ... Uglow already has a justifiable reputation as one of the country's best biographers; this fabulous book will only enhance it.

Uglow's biography is as poignant, shapely and incisive as Bewick's woodcuts. Grounded in the countryside he came from, this marvellous book takes its structure from the River Tyne and explores the patterns of its subject's life organically, working outwards from within, tracing the inner play of force and feeling so that the outlines stand out crisply as each tiny detail falls into place.

A fascinating story told in the riveting style one has come to expect from Jenny Uglow. Hugely enjoyable!

Jenny Uglow's exceptional biography demonstrates (the cuttings) artistic richness and social resonance, and restonres their maker to his rightful place amongst the great self-taught artists of the late 18th century, and indeed, amongst the Romantics. ... Uglow's greatest gift is to imagine the movent of Bewick's feelings from the minute particulars of the countryside into those subtle, precise but profoundly sympathetic markings on his wood blocks. She sees details in his vignettes that most of us, numbed by countless humdrum reproductions, miss.

As befits a book about craftmanship, Uglow minutely describes the processes whereby Bewick drew, cut and printed his images, many of which are reproduced in the text. She also evokes the bustle of Georgian Newcastle and the often harsh rural life beyond its walls, using a large amount of original research material to provide the reader with plenty of nice little vignettes of her own.

Jenny Uglow's gift is to help us read (Bewick's) dramatic vignettes, and to see how they grew out of his experience of the countryside. She writes beautifully and sympathetically of his life.

Perhaps future biographies (of requisite quality) celebrating a certain kind of unshowy Georgian figure could be called 'Uglow's Lives' after the woman who has made the genre her own. ... Jenny Uglow has captured her own man with just such skill. This is a lovely book, not just in the quality and sympathy of the writing but in the care of its design and illustration. She has turned a rich but undramatic life into a vignette as full of interest and detail as one of Bewick's own woodcuts.

A vivid depiction of the life of the 18th-century illustrator Thomas Bewick

Jenny Uglow, who has already published prizewinning biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell and William Hogarth, succeeds in bringing the character of Bewick to life, weaving in a wealth of biographical detail without making the subject cumbersome and swamped by facts.

Jenny Uglow's life, the first full-length biography to use the extensive holdings of Bewick material in Newcastle and the business records of the workshop Bewick ran with Ralph Beilby, beautifully mirrors the ambition of its subject, so that her book, too, can be read in more than one way. If on one level it is what she calls an old-fashioned, 'cradle-to-grave' telling of a neglected life, on another it is much more. Uglow's previous work has shown her interest in the lives of groups, in provincial life and in those she calls, with obvious political intent, 'ordinary'. This book brings all these interests together and the result is a heartfelt recreation, not just of Bewick's own life, but of the world of eighteenth-century provincial artisans, whose political beliefs and associative culture were every bit as sophisticated and rich as those of the kinds of people who have dominated eighteenth-century biography for the last decade: aristocrats, courtesans, politicians and actors. The result is not only a witty, readable life, beautifully illustrated with Bewick's cuts, but a kind of alternative history that is, quietly, both ambitious and polemical.

Bewick, Hogarth's heir in his passion for drawing from life, was the greatest engraver Britain had produced. Jenny Uglow's earlier study of Hogarth is the blueprint for its natural successor, a book that is as delightful to look at as to read. Hogarth's life enabled this marvellous biographer to evoke the teeming, rackety world of London in the early 18th century. Bewick, born in 1753, nine years before Hogarth's death, offers different opportunities. ... Uglow's gorgeous book does rich justice both to the man and his art.