Blair Rowlands Hughes-Stanton was a major figure in the English wood-engraving revival in the twentieth century. He was the son of the artist Sir Herbert Hughes-Stanton. He exhibited with the Society of Wood Engravers, but was more in sympathy with the philosophy of the English Wood Engraving Society, of which he was a founding member in 1925. He co-directed the Gregynog Press from 1930 to 1933 with his wife, Gertrude Hermes.
Captain Blair Hughes-Stanton in 1942 or 1943
A cattle-truck Journey from Salonika to Germany, 1941 (1944) (Art.IWM ART LD 3838)
Wood engraving is a printmaking technique, in which an artist works an image into a block of wood. Functionally a variety of woodcut, it uses relief printing, where the artist applies ink to the face of the block and prints using relatively low pressure. By contrast, ordinary engraving, like etching, uses a metal plate for the matrix, and is printed by the intaglio method, where the ink fills the valleys, the removed areas. As a result, the blocks for wood engravings deteriorate less quickly than the copper plates of engravings, and have a distinctive white-on-black character.
Leather-covered sandbag, wood blocks and tools (burins), used in wood engraving
The Tench, A History of British Fishes (1835), by William Yarrell
Garb and weapons of the Ku Klux Klan in Southern Illinois, August 1875, photo made into a wood engraving.
This is a large wood engraving on an 1883 cover of Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper. Such images were composed of multiple component blocks, combined to form a single image, so as to divide the work among a number of engravers.