Canada Illustrated: The Art of Nineteenth-Century Engraving

Gerald Noonan was Associate Professor of English at Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, and co-editor of A Public and Private Voice.

From the bold lines of historic woodcuts, chiselled into relief by artists a hundred years ago, a century-old Canada looks back at you in black and white. The three score and twelve (i.e., 72) views of landscape and cities, seaside and prairie seem to grow, as you gaze at them, hauntingly solid and clear.

Maybe the haunting quality comes because the Canada of 1882, so different from today, “felt a great measure of confidence in its future, satisfaction in its present and pride in its past.” The confidence and independence were based, the text tells us, on “the belief in an unlimited future of development and prosperity.” Perhaps the fullness of belief somehow engendered a restraint of line and colour. By contrast, restraint in today’s art world, I think, refers most often to funding.

In any case, the artists who contributed woodcuts

to the weekly news magazine, the Canadian Illustrated News, from 1869 to 1884, and to Picturesque Canada, “the culmination and the best accomplishment of engraved illustration in this country,” from 1882 to 1884, have their faith fulfilled in part by the reprint, and intelligent appreciation, of their work in Canada Illustrated. The joy of woodcuts is that they were specifically prepared for presentation in books and can now be inked over and offered once more “in very much the same way that they were originally intended to be seen.”

Thus, this work enables us to observe the Canada of the late nineteenth century as it was depicted then, and “at the same time to experience one of the high points of a largely forgotten popular art.” Because of the precision and coherence of the accompanying text, the untutored reader is able to understand readily the general history of woodcut and reproduction technology.

In addition, the charity of the prose pinpoints for us insights into century-old perceptions of the picturesque and the sublime, and the varying attitudes toward the grandeur of nature and, in counterpoint, toward the grand exploits of man. The 16 pages of introduction and historical perspective are accompanied by 12 plates of scenes from the Atlantic Provinces, 18 from Quebec, 30 from Ontario, and 12 from the west. In every case, information about the work (artist, engraver, size, date, published source) is conveniently beneath, along with an insightful interpolation that gives us a guide to the emotions of the 1880s — and to our own.

The demands for mass production led to shortcuts and assembly-line engraving, and soon the rapid advance of photographic technology led to the halftone screen, which made it possible “to produce, on a printing surface, a usable reproduction of a photographic original.” The intermediary of wood engraving was no longer needed. It’s kept alive today only by artists and craftsmen working in small shops. They, and this book, are a direct link with the artists and engravers who created the first pictorial record of Canada and whose influence shapes the standards even yet for the visual interpretation of this country in art and literature.