Thomas Bewick: The Redbreast, 1797 – Porcelain Art Mug

Thomas Bewick cut this robin into the end grain of a block of boxwood, working the picture in white lines out of solid black — a way of engraving on wood he brought to a pitch nobody had reached before him. It was printed in 1797 in the first volume of A History of British Birds, the book Charlotte Brontë later put into Jane Eyre's hands on the opening page of the novel.

The bird stands on a snow-covered stone. Behind it: a paling fence, bare trees, a farmhouse under snow, the flat light of a winter afternoon. Bewick set his birds in the countryside he knew, the Tyne valley where he had grown up, and the robin is the one that stays through the winter — he drew it accordingly.

The block printed in black. Bewick himself washed watercolour over his own drawing for this cut, and that sheet survives in the British Museum; the colour here follows it — the flat orange of the breast, the olive of the back, the cold blue lying in the snow. To be clear about what this is: the lines are Bewick's, taken from a printed impression; the colouring was done for this edition and is ours, not his. It is not a historical hand-coloured print and is not offered as one.

Fine Porcelain — 10 oz. Dishwasher and microwave safe.

Thomas Bewick, The Redbreast, wood engraving, first published in A History of British Birds, vol. I, Newcastle 1797. The impression reproduced here is from the Newcastle edition of 1847, digitised by the Wellcome Collection, London. Public domain. Colouring added for this edition after Bewick's own watercolour drawing for the block, British Museum 1882,0311.1270.

Selected by Dr. Walther Fuchs for the Tazzarte collection.