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jochristian's review against another edition
5.0
the most beautiful book I have read in a long time, feel bereft now I have finished it
sammilittlejohns's review against another edition
4.0
Feel as if im slightly biased to this book as I'm from/live in the area described in this book, so everything feels really familiar and I can picture everything/understand where things are and how they look irl.
This book is still really well written, but I feel at times it becomes bogged down with a lot of maybe irrelevant or just too much detail and so many names. However, still a great an interesting read. Really covers everything you may need to know and in a really easily understood style. An informative read regardless if you know who thomas bewick is or not, and really good for understanding a bit of history that not a lot of people are aware of but DEFINITELY will have seen.
This book is still really well written, but I feel at times it becomes bogged down with a lot of maybe irrelevant or just too much detail and so many names. However, still a great an interesting read. Really covers everything you may need to know and in a really easily understood style. An informative read regardless if you know who thomas bewick is or not, and really good for understanding a bit of history that not a lot of people are aware of but DEFINITELY will have seen.
grubstlodger's review against another edition
4.0
Jenny Uglow knows how to write a biography. Whether it’s a group one like The Lunar Men or focusing on one person like Hogarth, she knows how to gather, select and marshal data, presenting it with the readability of a novel and the precision expected of a work of non-fiction. As Nature’s Engraver is the life of a man who illustrated many books, this one is full of examples of his illustrations and images which put his achievements front and centre.
If there is one problem with the book, it’s that although Thomas Bewick was a man of great artistry and achievement, with an interestingly passionate temper, his life story doesn’t make the most gripping one. Unlike Hogarth, who also trained as an engraver, he didn’t have to claw from the background of a bankrupt family in debtor’s prison, not did he have Hogarth’s desire to prove himself. Thomas Bewick was from a rural middle-class family who apprenticed into an urban middle-class trade and was completely happy to be the best at what he did. Even Bewick’s big projects, like his books on birds, were expressions of his love of nature and revelled in his love of his craft done well. While severely hit by the death of his parents and later, his brother (as anyone would be) his path was a fairly smooth one.
If anything, his story reminded me of the kind of story told in the eighteenth-century designed to encourage apprentices to work hard. His was a wild youth, he bunked off school, doodled on the church pews and even sailed friends down river on a chunk of ice. This thoughtless youth was then apprenticed, where he knuckled down and became a success with a loving family, lots of friends and oodles of respect.
This is not to say he was a boring person exactly, but he was a person of passion who channelled those passion into useful ventures. A lover of animals, he still has participated in bloodsport as a youth and was only prepared to speak out against bloodsports enjoyed by the poor and not those that paid him to engrave their silver plate. I found it darkly amusing that his book celebrating British birds, launching many a keen naturalist over the centuries, was the result of a lot of dead birds. He was a man of simple pleasures, enjoying a gruelling walk, the monotony of fishing and musicality of whistling - which he felt one of the truly neglected musical traditions.
If anything, his loucher brother, John seemed more my type of person. He went to London where he grubbed away at children’s book illustrations before catching TB and going back up to Newcastle to die. He seemed jollier, looser and more prone to laughter. Even Jenny Uglow described his relationship with his wife to be loving ‘in his grave way’.
But the art is wonderful and the story behind it extremely well told and the book was a relief after the doom and gloom I’ve been reading recently.
If there is one problem with the book, it’s that although Thomas Bewick was a man of great artistry and achievement, with an interestingly passionate temper, his life story doesn’t make the most gripping one. Unlike Hogarth, who also trained as an engraver, he didn’t have to claw from the background of a bankrupt family in debtor’s prison, not did he have Hogarth’s desire to prove himself. Thomas Bewick was from a rural middle-class family who apprenticed into an urban middle-class trade and was completely happy to be the best at what he did. Even Bewick’s big projects, like his books on birds, were expressions of his love of nature and revelled in his love of his craft done well. While severely hit by the death of his parents and later, his brother (as anyone would be) his path was a fairly smooth one.
If anything, his story reminded me of the kind of story told in the eighteenth-century designed to encourage apprentices to work hard. His was a wild youth, he bunked off school, doodled on the church pews and even sailed friends down river on a chunk of ice. This thoughtless youth was then apprenticed, where he knuckled down and became a success with a loving family, lots of friends and oodles of respect.
This is not to say he was a boring person exactly, but he was a person of passion who channelled those passion into useful ventures. A lover of animals, he still has participated in bloodsport as a youth and was only prepared to speak out against bloodsports enjoyed by the poor and not those that paid him to engrave their silver plate. I found it darkly amusing that his book celebrating British birds, launching many a keen naturalist over the centuries, was the result of a lot of dead birds. He was a man of simple pleasures, enjoying a gruelling walk, the monotony of fishing and musicality of whistling - which he felt one of the truly neglected musical traditions.
If anything, his loucher brother, John seemed more my type of person. He went to London where he grubbed away at children’s book illustrations before catching TB and going back up to Newcastle to die. He seemed jollier, looser and more prone to laughter. Even Jenny Uglow described his relationship with his wife to be loving ‘in his grave way’.
But the art is wonderful and the story behind it extremely well told and the book was a relief after the doom and gloom I’ve been reading recently.
dancarey_404's review against another edition
This just wasn't about a subject I particularly cared about.
harryr's review
4.0
Jenny Uglow wrote the excellent The Lunar Men, about the Lunar Society that included Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and Matthew Boulton. Nature's Engraver is a biography of the wood engraver Thomas Bewick who, born in 1753, was just about contemporary with those men. He worked in Newcastle at a time when it was just starting to turn from a small provincial town into a major industrial city, but his subject matter is overwhelmingly rural. His masterpiece was his History of British Birds, which, quite apart from its artistic merits, was a landmark in the development of British ornithology.
The sensitivity with which he manages to reproduce feathering in an awkward medium like woodcut is remarkable. But the incredibly fine detail is even more apparent in the little decorative vignettes he produced which were used to fill gaps in the text of books. Engraved into the cross section of pieces of box wood, they are rarely more than 3″ across, but they are staggeringly finely worked. Nature's Engraver has these vignettes distributed throughout.
The book is almost worth reading for the pictures, but Uglow also does a great job of evoking the period: the life of a provincial craftsman; the growth of interest in natural history that coincides, not perhaps by chance, with the coming of industry; radical politics and the response to the American and French Revolutions.
The sensitivity with which he manages to reproduce feathering in an awkward medium like woodcut is remarkable. But the incredibly fine detail is even more apparent in the little decorative vignettes he produced which were used to fill gaps in the text of books. Engraved into the cross section of pieces of box wood, they are rarely more than 3″ across, but they are staggeringly finely worked. Nature's Engraver has these vignettes distributed throughout.
The book is almost worth reading for the pictures, but Uglow also does a great job of evoking the period: the life of a provincial craftsman; the growth of interest in natural history that coincides, not perhaps by chance, with the coming of industry; radical politics and the response to the American and French Revolutions.
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