[Illustration: Fig. 89.--Title designed by Moreau le Jeune in 1769 for the publisher Prault.]
The Revolution passed over some among those that it ruined, and, as stated above, they followed the movement, and lost themselves in the school of David. It was Duplessis-Bertaux who, after having furnished to Cazin, the publisher, vignettes for his _Recueil des Meilleurs Contes en Vers_, 1778, and many other books, after having worked for Didot, devoted himself to patriotic engraving and to the reproduction of scenes of the Revolution. When he published his _Tableaux Historiques_, in three volumes folio, adorned with nearly two hundred large plates, it was under the Consulate, that is to say far from the time when the work was begun. Renouvier assures us, with his exclusive disdain for the eighteenth century, that Duplessis-Bertaux was a mystifier, and that his scenes of the Revolution were a hoax, "in the kind of spirit in vogue under the Directory." The truth is that the artist, in place of being a cheerful Callot, as might be thought from his manner of engraving, so like that of the Lorraine artist, was imbued with the emphatic and exaggerated impressions of the first Republic, its _sans-culottes_ in the poses of the Sabines and its _tricoteuses_ apeing Penelope.
The immense artistic advance made in France in the eighteenth century in the manufacture and illustration of the Book made itself felt throughout Europe. In Germany, Chodowiecki, born at Dantzic of a family of apothecaries, developed his talent from ornamenting the boxes of his father, and from 1758 to 1794 he designed numerous plates for books and almanacs, a little heavy in engraving, but singularly clever in composition. There were a few others also designing, and Kilian, Folkema, and Ridinger produced some fine engravings, but the Book did not make so much progress in Germany as in France and England.
In England a vast improvement was manifested. Fine types were cast by Baskerville and Caslon; printing machines were perfected. The illustration of books by engraved plates was in the first half of the century almost entirely done by foreigners, but an English school was arising, which attained perfection in the latter half of the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century. Wood engraving also, which, with the exception of blocks for head and tailpieces, had become almost a lost art, was revived by Bewick, to become later one of the chief adornments of the Book.