Editions of Aesop's Fables
The various editions of Aesop's Fables illustrated by Bewick span almost his entire creative life. The first was executed for the Newcastle bookseller Thomas Saint during his apprentice years. This was an edition of Robert Dodsley's Select Fables published in 1776. With his brother John he later contributed to a three volume edition for the same publisher in 1784. Pictures from the 1776 edition fairly obviously reappear there and Bewick's habit of recycling earlier work for later use can be illustrated from both. The picture of "The Crow and the Pitcher" from 1776 was also to become a vignette in the first edition of the History of British Birds (Volume 1: Land Birds, 1797). Earlier on, there was a vignette of a man sleeping beneath a shrub, adapted from the 1784 illustration to "The Bear and the Two Friends", in the first edition of the General History of the Quadrupeds (1790).
A third edition of the fables was the work of Bewick's maturity. While convalescing from a dangerous illness in 1812, he turned his attention to a long-cherished venture, a large three-volume edition of The Fables of Aesop and Others, eventually published in 1818. The work is divided into three sections: the first has some of Dodsley's fables prefaced by a short prose moral; the second has 'Fables with Reflections', in which each story is followed by a prose and a verse moral and then a lengthy prose reflection; the third, 'Fables in Verse', includes fables from other sources in poems by several unnamed authors. Engravings were initially designed on the wood by Bewick, while cutting was carried out by his apprentices under close supervision and refined where necessary by himself. Used in this edition was the method that Thomas had pioneered, called 'white-line' engraving, a dark-to-light technique where the lines to remain white are cut out of the woodblock. Boxwood cut across the end-grain is hard enough for such fine engraving, allowing greater detail than in normal woodcutting.
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Famous quotes containing the words editions of, editions and/or fables:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become a fiction of the past,—as it is to some extent a fiction of the present,—the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)