In recent years, woodcut illustrations have found renewed popularity with graphic artists, designers, illustrators, and craftspeople. Their diversity, crisp black-and-white lines, and adaptability to typography and a wide range of other projects make them an ideal source for a limitless array of craft and design ideas. Now Jim Harter, noted collagist, has compiled a comprehensive sourcebook of 19th-century woodcuts depicting men. Similar in format to his popular previous collection, Women (Dover 0-486-23703-6), the present volume contains over 400 carefully selected illustrations of men in an enormous variety of poses, costumes, attitudes, and activities: playing baseball, dancing, roping steers, mining coal, playing chess, hunting, flirting, courting, wrestling, shoveling, running, reading, talking, praying, thinking, gesturing, fencing, and more.
Spanning a variety of geographical locations and historical periods, these delightfully old-fashioned renderings depict Eskimos in kayaks, medieval knights, Roman gladiators, magicians, firemen, soldiers, miners, beggars, fops, dandies, Prussian generals, shepherds, artists, acrobats, bullfighters, doctors, mythological and religious figures (Laocoon, Buddha, Moses, etc.), monks, prisoners, and more, representing nearly every masculine occupation and activity imaginable.
The material in this book has been chosen to reflect the diversity of the subject, to illustrate the variety of styles of wood engraving, and to be of maximum use to artists and designers. Reproduced from such periodicals as Illustrated London News, La Nature, Leslie's, and Harper's, these engravings will solve a great many illustration problems at a very low cost. All 412 illustrations are in line and immediately usable; many have been silhouetted by Mr. Harter to increase their usefulness. This is an unusually comprehensive and helpful sourcebook that belongs in the working library of every modern artist or illustrator.
Original Dover (1980) publication.