Glimpses of Paradise

In the early 1970s, as a young man new to London, I visited the Tate Gallery for the first time. The gallery wasn’t very full on a spring weekday morning, but one middle-aged couple came into the room where I was standing in front of a picture. Obviously, they were intent on doing the whole gallery at a brisk pace as they moved diagonally across the floor, glancing from side to side, like pigeons looking for food. Near the doorway, the woman halted to looked at a painting. She read the label out loud, ‘A Hilly Scene. Samuel Palmer,’ then stood back, and said, ‘My goodness, but it’s so small.’ And then they hurried off into the next room, perhaps to comfort themselves with some huge Victorian landscape.

Now, the Palmer – a deeply romantic, darkly glowing work – is about as big as an A4 sheet of paper. But when I started reading Thomas Bewick’s autobiographical Memoir (published posthumously in 1862) I thought of that woman and wondered what she would have made of an artist many of whose greatest works were only a very few inches square. Thomas Bewick was born in 1753 and died in 1828. His life spanned seventy-five years of great upheaval and change in England, socially, politically and artistically. For some, his origins in Northumberland, his love of the natural world and his contempt for London and all its ways have conjured up the idea of a rustic, uneducated miniaturist, from whose great body of work the same few images are chosen to decorate tea towels and biscuit tins. But the memoir he wrote in the last six years of his life shows a strong-minded, politically radical, highly practical and shrewd artist, who came from a relatively comfortable family background. His father had a farm of only eight acres, but he also owned a small but profitable colliery. His mother had been housekeeper to the local vicar, the Reverend Christopher Gregson. The Bewick family came from a class now almost extinct, the farmers and workers of the English country side whose decay was lamented in Goldsmith’s poem The Deserted Village; a proud peasantry largely swept away by the enclosure of their common land and the rise of industrial cities. Writing his autobiography in his seventies, Bewick fondly remembered the people of his village and the surrounding area: ‘to this day I think I see their broad shoulders and their hardy sun burned looks . . . they always appeared to me to enjoy health and happiness in a degree surpassing that of most other men’. Indeed, the Memoir describes in loving detail the health and happiness of Bewick’s own childhood and youth at his family home of Cherryburn, near Erlingham in Northumberland. The Tyne ran nearby, and the woods were full of the birds and animals that Bewick was later to depict so magnificently. For the first years of his life he was put in the care of an aunt and a doting grandmother, and was ‘royally spoiled and petted’. But idyllic childhood didn’t last long in the eighteenth century and Thomas was soon sent to a day school. The ‘school’ consisted of a single room containing a crowd of boys of all ages. Their instructor, ‘a tall thin man, with a countenance severe and grim . . . walked about the school room with the taws or a switch in his hand’. After one too many beatings. the growing boy struck back: ‘on being seized again, I rebelled and broke his shins with my iron hooped clogs and ran off . . . I went no more to his school, but played truant every day.’ When his truancy was discovered he was soundly beaten, this time by his father, but he was then sent to a more civilized school presided over by the vicar, Christopher Gregson, for whom his mother had worked. Far more importantly, Bewick discovered another activity. He began to draw – at first in the margins of his schoolbooks during lessons and then, finding ‘little to engage my attention’, as interminable Sunday church services rolled over his bent head, on the back of church pews. Luckily a friend of the family, recognizing his gifts, presented the boy with ‘a lot of paper’ on which to paint and draw. His subjects were those he knew and loved: ‘the beasts and birds . . . of my native hamlet’, then, more ambitiously, hunting scenes. ‘I now, in the estimation of my rustic neighbours, became an eminent painter, and the walls of their houses were ornamented with an abundance of my rude productions, at a very cheap rate.’ To be a semi-professional painter, however rude, at the age of 11 or 12 is quite an achievement. It was not that he was underemployed in other ways. In the depths of winter he looked after a flock of sheep on the snow-covered fells. His summer adventures included taming a wild horse by riding it bareback to exhaustion across fields and streams. Bewick described himself as a boy whose ‘whole time at school and at home, might be considered as a life of warfare’. The vicar, at his wits’ end what to do with such a boy, on whom beatings and other punishments seemed to have no effect, had the novel idea of inviting him to dine with him, and spoke man to man about his behaviour. Bewick had the wit to accept a sort of truce, and Gregson ‘never more had occasion to find fault with me’. All his life, he read seriously and thought deeply, but he remained sceptical of education: ‘If children were allowed to run wild by the sides of burns – to fish, to wade in – they would soon find their minds intently employed . . . and would never forget the charms of the country . . . such as very few, or none, brought up in the town, ever know.’ He was never a religious man in any conventional way; he believed that God was manifested in the natural world, and that the destruction of that world by the incessant greed of rich landowners and industrialists was a desecration. At 14, he went off to Newcastle upon Tyne, to be apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, an engraver of everything from dog collar name tabs to fine glass. ‘I liked my master, I liked the business, but to part from the country . . . I can only say my heart was like to break.’ At first he endured ‘the wearisome business of polishing copper plates and hardening and polishing steel seals . . . till my hands became as hard and enlarged as those of a blacksmith’. Fortunately for the apprentice, his master was not particularly skilled in wood cuts, and was pleased to pass any such work over to Bewick. Most expensive books used copper engravings for illustration; woodcuts were a cheap and for the most part a crude alternative, literally cut or gouged out of the wood. Bewick’s ability meant that the paper transfers he drew gave a far more complex image when transferred to the woodblock to be used for printing. He engraved the hard, cross-grained end of the wood, rather than going with the grain, and used the burin and other tools of copper engravers to produce a far finer and more detailed image. Later he mastered that subtlety of light and atmosphere that had a direct influence on the great wood engravers of the first half of the twentieth century. Of course, Bewick’s early work was not fully formed, but even as an apprentice he attracted a growing reputation for his illustrations in children’s books. Here were the first signs of the themes he was to develop in his visions of a world in microcosm: children at play, farmers out in all weathers, the woods whose different trees were so carefully and accurately drawn, the soldiers, the seasons, the wild and tame animals, and always the streams and rivers of Northumberland. At the end of his apprenticeship he returned to spend the winter at Cherryburn. With the advent of summer, he became restless. He set out to explore Scotland, walking virtually its whole length, subsisting on the kindness of crofters – those still clinging on after the clearances of the Highlands by the English. When he eventually got back to Newcastle, he boarded a ship to London. He loathed the place. His work was much sought after but he couldn’t bear the city for longer than a few months and in June 1777 he returned to Newcastle. There he opened his own engraving business, but he continued to visit Cherryburn every weekend, regarding the twelve-mile walk along the Tyne from Newcastle as part of a fitness regime that sounds rather alarming:

On setting out I always waded through the first pool I met with and had sometimes the river to wade at the far end. I never changed my clothes, however they might be soaked till I went to bed . . . always sleeping with my windows open, where a thorough air, as well as the snow blew through my room – in this I lay down, stripped to bare buff except being rolled in a blanket, upon a mattress as hard as I could make it . . . I continued to live this way, until, when married, I was obliged to alter my plan.

I should jolly well think so. The whole of the memoir is well worth reading, but it is the telling of his childhood and young manhood that is the most charming and entertaining. The best edition, and most easily available, is entitled My Life, published by the Folio Society in 1981 and finely illustrated with engravings, drawings and watercolours. It contains many fascinating descriptions of contemporaries and trenchant comments on art and what he saw as the endemic corruption of the governments of his day, but it’s clear that his life was dominated by his work. A friend wrote about Bewick, then in his seventies, ‘he often sits at work at a small table, while his friends are drinking wine, and enjoys their conversation while cutting his blocks’. The amount of work was quite staggering. For his two-volume History of British Birds, Bewick first painted watercolours of each bird, then transferred the drawings into black and white, before undertaking the actual engraving, all the while refining and improving the image. The engravings of the birds are very fine, but what we prize now are the vignettes and tailpieces showing the events of everyday country life that had possessed Bewick as a child and that never left him. What Bewick wanted for those looking at his visions of Nature was to ‘whet them up to an ardent love of all her works’. Let’s leave the artist at his bench in 1806 working on British Birds: ‘These publications were brought forth after many a long night’s labour, for the greater part of the cuts was done by candlelight, when left in my workshop alone.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 87 © William Palmer 2025