Another important feature in the discovery was the possibility of reducing a drawing to any size required, thus fitting it exactly to the necessities of the printed page. Before these discoveries, as you well know, from the time of Albert Dürer down to Linton and engravers of his school, the original drawing of the painter was redrawn by the use of lead-pencil, Chinese white, and India-ink washes upon the wood itself, giving as close an imitation as possible of the original. Some painters--illustrators, if you please, in those early days--in fact, made their original designs direct upon the wood. The effects of light and dark were then cut out in lines, curved or otherwise, with suitable cross-hatchings, as the necessity of the drawing required, or left comparatively untouched.
It is not my purpose to discuss here the different merits of the different schools. There are varieties of opinion regarding the excellence of the line compared with the technic in the modern school of engravers. By the modern school I mean the work of such men as Cole, Yuengling, Wolff, French, Smithwick, and others. I refer to them that I may accent the stronger the medium which is the subject-matter of this talk, namely, charcoal, in the hope that those of you who propose to make reproductive illustrations your life-work may be tempted to make use of charcoal as a medium through which to express your ideas and ideals.
But before embarking on this phase of my subject it may be interesting for a moment to go a little deeper into the earlier stages of this marvellous change from boxwood to zinc. I remember distinctly the beginnings of an organization well known in New York, and perhaps to many of you, as the Tile Club, to which organization I can conscientiously say as much credit is due for this revival in wood-engraving as to any other. Not that good wood-engravers did not exist before its time, and not because it contained wood-engravers, for the club did not have the name of one among its membership, but as containing a group of painters who for the first time in aid of the art of wood-engraving in this country lent their names and brushes to an illustrated magazine. Up to that time there had been a wide gulf existing between the ordinary draftsman on wood and a painter. This did not proceed from the prevalence of a certain disease among the painters, known at the present time as an "enlarged head," but from the fact that no artist accustomed to free-hand drawing and at liberty to wander all over his canvas at will would bring himself down to working through a magnifying-glass, a necessity, often, in transferring a drawing to wood.