Early in his career he took on all kinds of work such as engraving cutlery, making the wood blocks for advertisements, and illustrating children's books.

Apprentices whom Bewick trained include John Anderson, Luke Clennell, and William Harvey, who in their turn became well known as painters and engravers.

Bewick is best known for his A History of British Birds, which is admired today mainly for its wood engravings, especially the small, sharply observed, and often humorous vignettes known as tail-pieces.

He is "usually considered the founder of wood-engraving" as "the first to realize its full potentialities",[1] using metal-engraving tools to cut hard boxwood across the grain, producing printing blocks that could be integrated with metal type, but were much more detailed and durable than traditional woodcuts.

Bewick was born at Cherryburn,[2] a house in the village of Mickley, Northumberland,[3] near Newcastle upon Tyne on 10 or 11 August 1753, although his birthday was always celebrated on the 12th.

[4][a] His parents were tenant farmers:[5] his father John had been married before his union with Jane, and was in his forties when Thomas, the eldest of eight, was born.

[3][8] In Beilby's workshop Bewick engraved a series of diagrams on wood for Charles Hutton, illustrating a treatise on measurement.

He returned to his beloved Newcastle as soon as he could, but his time in the capital gave him a wider reputation, business experience, and an awareness of new movements in art.

[15] At that period in his life he was described by the Newcastle artist Thomas Sword Good as "a man of athletic make, nearly 6 feet high and proportionally stout.

Given his detailed knowledge of the birds of Northumberland, Bewick prepared the illustrations, so Beilby was given the task of assembling the text, which he struggled to do.

[21] It may be proper to observe, that while one of the editors of this work was engaged in preparing the Engravings, the compilation of the descriptions was undertaken by the other, subject, however, to the corrections of his friend, whose habits led him to a more intimate acquaintance with this branch of Natural History.

[21] Before its publication, Bewick illustrated Arnaud Berquin's Looking-Glass for the Mind in 1792 and J. H. Wynne's Tales for Youth in 1794 for the printer Elizabeth Newbery[22] and in 1795 a anthology on the study of character in the Kings and Queens of England.

Bewick, still lively at age 74, showed him the woodcut he was working on, a dog afraid of tree stumps that seem in the dark to be devilish figures, and gave Audubon a copy of his Quadrupeds for his children.

One of these pupils was Thomas's son, Robert, whose surviving manuscript tunebooks give a picture of a piper's repertoire in the 1820s.

This is due both to his skill and to the method, which unlike the woodcut technique of his predecessors, carves against the grain, in hard box wood, using fine tools normally favoured by metal engravers.

[35] Bewick made use of his close observation of nature, his remarkable visual memory, and his sharp eyesight to create accurate and extremely small details in his wood engravings, which proved to be both a strength and a weakness.

It also created a problem for Bewick's readers; if they lacked his excellent eyesight, they needed a magnifying glass to study his prints, especially the miniature tail-pieces.

[37] The quality of Bewick's engravings attracted a far wider readership to his books than he had expected: his Fables and Quadrupeds were at the outset intended for children.

[38] Bewick ran his workshop collaboratively, developing the skills of his apprentices, so while he did not complete every task for every illustration himself, he was always closely involved, as John Rayner explains:[39] some blocks would be drawn by one brother and cut by the other, the rough work would be done by pupils, who would also, if they showed aptitude, draw and finish designs—on the same principle as the schools of Renaissance painters; and we cannot ... be sure in all cases that the engravings ... are the work of Thomas Bewick from first to last, but he had a hand to a great extent in nearly all, and certainly had the last word in all of them.

The first was created for the Newcastle bookseller Thomas Saint during his apprentice years, an edition of Robert Dodsley's Select Fables published in 1776.

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.

This edition used a method that Bewick had pioneered, "white-line" engraving, a dark-to-light technique in which the lines to remain white are cut out of the woodblock.

They liked the combination of vigorous woodcuts, simple and accurate descriptions, and all kinds of exotic animals alongside things they knew.

He also recounts information passed to him by acquaintances and local gentry, and that obtained in natural history works of his time, including those by Thomas Pennant and Gilbert White, as well as the translation of Buffon's Histoire naturelle.

[53] Adrian Searle, writing in The Guardian, describes the tiny work as "A visual equivalent to the sorts of authorial gags Laurence Sterne played in Tristram Shandy, it is a marvellous, timeless, magical joke.

William Wordsworth began his anecdotal poem "The Two Thieves", composed in 1798, with the line "O now that the genius of Bewick were mine", in which case he would give up writing, he declared.

[59] A bronze copy now rests in a niche of the building that replaced his workshop in the churchyard of Saint Nicholas (see above) and still another is at the British Museum.

[62] The critic John Ruskin compared the subtlety of his drawing to that of Holbein, J. M. W. Turner, and Paolo Veronese writing that the way Bewick had engraved the feathers of his birds was "the most masterly thing ever done in woodcutting".