ABSTRACT
GRAPHIC ARTS The Victorian graphic arts may be classified
according to audience: lithography and woodblock printing provided an unprecedented mass audience with cheaply reproduced images; the middle classes favored steel engravings and other handsomely reproduced images of famous or popular paintings; and connoisseurs collected etchings and other prints in small editions. From the time of the pioneering Thomas Bewick (1753-1828) until the photomechanical techniques of the 1890s, the woodblock reigned as the only method of cheaply printing pictures with text in a single pressing, and woodblock printers, working from drawings by correspondents, were able to provide for a mass audience the immediacy of today's photojournalism. The Illustrated London News, beginning in 1842, pioneered the format of picture magazines. Most woodblock printing thus falls within the category of popular culture and journalism rather than the fine arts.
