One of the great delights of this volume is the number and quality of the pictures Donald reproduces: the illustrations alone are worth the price. In her fascinating new study, Diana Donald looks again at Bewick’s rich contribution to natural history and visual art and asks what his illustrated volumes meant . . . Like knowing your Bible, knowing Bewick was a mark of both sound education and sensitive humanity. This book enables one to know Bewick differently, to look more closely as his engravings invite us to do at the habits and habitat of a rara avis who possessed the common touch.
The Weekly Standard
We no longer nowadays salute Nature with the unhesitating confidence invested in the concept by Audubon or by writers such as William Wordsworth, another of Bewick’s numerous admirers. And yet Diana Donald’s impressive recent study, The Art of Thomas Bewick, demonstrates the surprising resilience of the American visitors assessment. At the end of her scrupulous inquiry into the political, religious, and cultural circumstances in which Bewicks work was undertaken, the Northumbrian natural historian still stands, however we interpret him, as an innovator rather than an imitator, and as an artist who worked, as much as any artist can, from freshly won experience rather than by cleaving to cultural precedent.
New York Review of Books
Donald sets out to analyse Bewick’s art in its artistic, cultural and political context. In doing so she illuminates the complexities of the man and the ambivalence expressed towards him even by those who professed to be among his greatest admirers . . . Throughout this stimulating and wide-ranging book, the Bewick that emerges is a more complex and conflicted man than we have come to expect.
Burlington Magazine
In The Art of Thomas Bewick, Diana Donald reviews his art in a broad context of the artistic and scientific culture of his age a fascinating approach. The work of Bewick is examined alongside that of other contemporary illustrators in this beautifully illustrated book which will be of interest to historians of science, art and country life as well as ornithologists and birdwatchers.
BTO News
Throughout her carefully researched book Donald emphasises the complexities in Bewick’s thinking about the natural world and how this was expressed in his art. The spread chords of her chapters show how densely woven were the scientific, artistic, and moral dimensions of Bewick’s work, while her engaging style simultaneously unpicks these elements for us as far as possible. I particularly enjoyed Donald’s use of Bewick’s daughter Jane’s testimony to tease out the meanings of the vignettes. The layout of the book is exemplary.
Archives of Natural History
This is a first-rate study on Bewick and on his impact in the nineteenth century both as a naturalist and as a wood engraver. Diana Donald is well known for her major contributions to the history of graphic art and to the interrelation between the visual arts and scientific enquiry in the nineteenth century. She draws on both these strengths here to produce a study of major importance that will surely help to re-establish Bewick as a figure of central cultural importance.
William Vaughan, Emeritus Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London