Wood engraving

Wood engraving is a relief (letterpress) printing technique in which the image is cut into the end grain of a hard wood, most often boxwood, rather than the side or plank grain used in a traditional woodcut. In a woodcut the artist gouges away the background so that the drawn line stands up in relief; in wood engraving the fine tool, or burin, incises the line itself into a smooth, dense surface, and the untouched areas print as solid black. The compact end grain allows the engraver to achieve extremely fine, precise lines and a rich range of tonal values, which made the medium ideal for detailed reproduction in print. The technique was refined and popularised in late eighteenth-century England by Thomas Bewick, whose natural-history illustrations set the standard, and it became the dominant means of book and magazine illustration throughout the nineteenth century. In Ukrainian art, engraving on wood reaches back to the printing houses of the seventeenth century, above all the Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra workshop with masters such as Illya and Nykodym Zubrytsky (alongside the copper engraver Leontii Tarasevych). In the twentieth century a brilliant school of Ukrainian xylography emerged around Vasyl Kasiian, Ivan Padalka and the Boychukist circle, who fused folk tradition with a modern graphic idiom.