the "nineties" and the first decade of this century, are not represented in this volume of Contemporary English Woodcuts, though some of them have continued their work to the present day. The selection is intended, rather, to convey an idea of the variety of talent and accomplishment possessed by a younger generation, which shares in that impulse to use the wood-block with knife or burin, as the means of expression, which has spread all over Europe in the last few years, and especially during and since the War. The extensive exhibition arranged last January in the Pavilion de Marsan at Paris by the Société de la Gravure sur Bois Originale afforded a better survey than any other which has yet been held of the wide range of contemporary wood engraving, though the Teutonic and Slavonic nations were hardly at all represented. It is regrettable that English artists did not respond more largely to the invitation to participate in this exhibition. The few isolated groups of British work failed to make much effect amid the great mass of French, Italian and Belgian woodcuts. This anthology may claim, in such measure as its limited scope admits, to make amends for the omission, and to show that the younger English artists of to-day are capable of holding their own when judged by a European standard. Some of them, I suppose, are in touch with the contemporary work of Parisian artists and consciously influenced by it, but for the most part their work is a native growth of English or Irish soil. Scottish artists, who have distinguished themselves so much in etching, have not, so far, worked much in other processes; Strang and Bryden are the only Scots who have achieved much on wood, and their work belongs to the past. It must be understood that here, and throughout this survey of recent and contemporary wood-engraving, I confine myself to the discussion of black-and-white work done by traditional European processes and printed with oil-colour. The Japanese method of wood-cutting on the plank and printing with water-colour from several blocks, introduced about 1895 by Mr. Batten and Mr. Morley Fletcher, is still in active use and practised by a number of artists in Edinburgh as well as London, but the woodcuts produced by this process cannot be printed in the typographic press or used for book illustration. Mr. Sydney Lee, the senior of the contributors to this volume, is, I think, the only artist of the group who has used this method as well as the European process, and the Japanese method is purposely omitted, without any disparagement of its merits being intended, from the scope of this introduction.
Many of our contributors, including Mr. Sydney Lee, belong to the Society of Wood Engravers which was founded in 1920, or to the group
