IF Dr Johnson was right to claim that weariness with London portended weariness with life, then Thomas Bewick should have thinned away round about 1777. He was in his mid-twenties at the time, having been born 250 years ago this month, in August 1753, on a smallholding at Cherryburn in the Tyne Valley, west of Newcastle upon Tyne. Good for little but drawing as a child, he was apprenticed to an engraver in that city, and then took ship to London to start a professional life among a group of fellow Northumbrians.
It didn’t last. Nine months was enough and Bewick returned the way he had come, vowing that he would sooner herd sheep at five shillings a week than be tied to live in London. So he rejoined his old master as partner in the business and over the next 50 years achieved universal renown for his boundless skill as an engraver on wood.
His most famous work, seen in the Histories of Quadrupeds (1790) and British Birds (two volumes: 1797 and 1804), owed much to his zeal for accuracy, working from life as much as possible, and from stuffed specimens where not. But his precisely delineated figures were accompanied by vignettes, sometimes called “tale-pieces”, scattered through the books: tiny, brilliantly executed scenes of country life, many encapsulating a little narrative of human behaviour: boys riding upon grave-stones as if they were hobby-horses, or a traveller swimming the Tyne to avoid a toll-bridge but losing his hat.
By way of marking the anniversary, Northumbria has been organising modest celebrations of its most famous son (who being a man of rather sober temperament would surely not have wished it otherwise). The Bewick Society has organised various events; Newcastle City Library is displaying some treasures and has published a pretty little 60- page booklet; and the Hancock Museum, home of the Natural History Society of Northumbria, has prepared a quaintly original exhibition called The Many Faces of Bewick.
And that is indeed what you get. A single gallery is devoted to a display not of the work but of the master’s visage, as portrayed mostly by local contemporaries such as William Nicholson and James Ramsay. Bewick was the subject of more than a dozen portraits, that were copied or adapted to make prints or illustrations for books and magazines. Some of these were excerpted from a large narrative painting, The Lost Child, by Ramsay, where Bewick figures in a crowd outside St Nicholas Church, looking like a prosperous bookie in top hat and tail-coat.
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As a modest essay in iconography, the show makes clear how revered a figure Bewick was — a man of character rather than beauty. He certainly didn’t thin away after leaving London, and all the portraits and copies (even those stigmatised by his daughter Jane, the guardian of his reputation, as “vile caricatures”) bring out the bluffness of his features: the high forehead, the slab-like cheeks, the penetrating eyes. You can imagine him walking 500 miles around Scotland, as he once did, but it is harder to match this “tall stout man” with a quid of tobacco in his underlip with the creator of such delicate minuscule wood-engravings.