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Major Publications
A General History of Quadrupeds
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Bewick's first major independent publication was printed and published in 1790 in Newcastle upon Tyne. The single volume had been nine years in the preparation. It contains 199 figures illustrating brief descriptions of the animals, their habits and habitats. Most of the engraving was done in the evenings after a day's work in the workshop. Some of the descriptions are short, say half a page, and others quite lengthy - the Elephant has 11 pages of text. There is room for argument about how much of the text was written by Bewick and how much by Ralph Beilby. The title page does not give details on the writing, mentioning only 'the figures engraved on wood by T. Bewick.' Although some of the original drawings are still extant, they are mainly of the figures without the backgrounds, which were added directly to the woodblock in the process of engraving. In addition to many purely ornamental vignettes designed as simple space fillers (and often repeated), there are also 39 illustrative vignettes used mainly as tailpieces, the first such appearing on p. 63, an image of a pack horse. Several of these feature human figures involved in activity almost amounting to a story. Bewick referred to these as his 'tale-pieces.' For some reproductions of these vignettes in a separate section, click here. Below is a small selection of the figures; in each case you can click on the link to get a full screen version of the image.

The Giraffe, or Cameleopard (page 91)

It is not likely that Bewick had ever seen a real giraffe. The curvature of its neck in this image suggests a flexibility which is not quite possible, and the 'large spots of yellow over the whole body' are actually far too small - too much like leopard's spots - to be recognisable as typically giraffe to the modern eye, which has access to colour film and video representations. But the figure is only one element of the engraving. What was unusual to Bewick's contemporaries, who had no better representation of a giraffe to compare it with, is the added detail of the background: the trees, the two small giraffes browsing in the copse, the two small human figures on the left. This imagined back-ground is the Bewick trademark. The engraving is an example of how Bewick, the artist above all of direct observation, could deal imaginatively with a subject he had no direct experience of.