Wood Engraving Wednesday
As the holiday season approaches, we offer these little wood engravings by American artist Thomas W. Nason, a wood engraver we were unfamiliar with until we came across this little 1961 Christmas keepsake from the publisher Holt, Rinehart & Winston of Robert Frost’s poem The Wood-Pile, printed in New York at Joseph Blumenthal’s Spiral Press. A self-taught artist and wood engraver, fellow New Englander Nason became the principal illustrator for Frost’s works. As American art historian and curator Amanda C. Burdan points out:
Blumenthal recommended Nason to Frost when the poet and his publishers were looking for a new illustrator for Frost’s poetry. Never were Nason’s engravings more closely aligned with poetry than when he illustrated the verse of Robert Frost. Frost’s status as the quintessential rural New Englander, writing in simple, direct, and yet forceful terms about American life makes a ready comparison to Nason’s life and work. Frost’s poems, like Nason’s prints, pay tribute to rural life in familiar terms. While Nason was known as the “poet engraver of New England,” Frost was revered as “the poet farmer of New England.”. . . The works of Nason and Frost parallel each other in their straightforwardness of presentation but also in their traces of underlying despair. By the end of their lives Frost’s and Nason’s reputations were forever intertwined.
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