Thomas Bewick is generally credited with inventing of wood-engraving - that is, of making a woodcut on the end of a piece of boxwood rather than on the side of a board, a technique that allowed much finer detail. Whether or not he invented the technique he certainly made it much more popular. His best-known illustrations, and the first to use this technique to any extent, were for “General History of Quadrupeds’ (1790). Bewick combined techniques of variable-width white lines, of lowering the surface of the block (away from the paper) to preserve finr details, and even had the press operators clean the blocks between impressions.
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Thomas Bewick and wood-block printing, at the Natural History Museum, UK.
