Biography of Herbert Bourne
Herbert Bourne was the fourth of seven children born to Samuel and Eliza Bourne. Herbert's exact birth date is currently unknown, but he appears to have been born in 1825 at Stoke Upon Trent, northwest of London. Available records suggest Herbert's family was quite artistic. His father, Samuel Bourne, was a painter as was first-born son Samuel. One brother was a potter and modeler and his youngest brother was a copper plate engraver.
Herbert Bourne took to engraving quite early. At age 16, while still living at home, he was already listed in the census as an historical line engraver.
He ultimately moved to Camden, on the west side of London, near the great St. Pancras train station. The first art print that I can accurately date is The Crown of Hops published in 1851 while Bourne was a bachelor lodger in Camden. Ten more highly-skilled engravings followed within four years, during which time he met Rebecca Ann Berry. They married in about 1855 and together they bore and raised four daughters and two sons over the next fourteen years.
Little is known of daughters Eva (1856), Helena (1857), Kate (1859) and Edith (1870), although the youngest is known to have married a stock broker by the name of William George Pearce Banner (or Bantner). The two boys, Herbert George (1862) and Harold (1864) possessed artistic talent because, by their teens, both were recorded as engravers in the 1881 census. It is unproven, but conceivable that one or more of the prints attributed to 'H. Bourne' might have originated with his children.
An advertisement in the Saturday, March 31, 1888 issue of Hampstead & Highgate Express, indicated that artists' proofs engraved by Harold Bourne were going to be sold at Enfield House Studio and the Constitutional Club. The subject was a portrait of Sir H. T. Holland.
By 1891, son Herbert George was out of the engraving business and was employed as a stamp dealer. The whereabouts of his brother Harold in 1891 and thereafter are unknown, but he also seems to have sought other employment (possibly in the curtain business.)
Meanwhile, Herbert Bourne continued working for several printing and engraving companies in and around London. The basic idea was to make engraved reproductions of popular art work that could be sold to an art-hungry public on a subscription basis. To that end, Bourne produced numerous art prints in the 1860s and 1870s.
Fitting in perfectly with the growing British appreciation of fine art in the late 1860s came the tremendously popular French illustrator, artist and sculptor Gustave Doré. At the time, the French saw Doré primarily as an illustrator and were essentially unsupportive of his artistic skills. The British had no such preconceptions and made Doré a top-tier celebrity.
In order to feed the burgeoning hunger for accessible art, Bourne and eleven other highly-skilled portrait James Fairless and George Beeforth retained engravers to convert several Doré paintings into salable products. Among the paintings, Doré's Biblical subjects were the most popular. Between between 1872 and 1881, Bourne engraved about a quarter of the large Doré prints produced for Fairless and Beeforth. At least one print was reported to have taken two years to engrave.
The Doré prints are in a class by themselves, both because of their sizes and subjects. Doré's art, even from it's earliest days, had been heavily populated with human forms which played right into Bourne's greatest skill as a portrait engraver. While Doré had painted in color, we must remember he came to fame as an illustrator in black and white. It is not surprising that his works translated to the black-and-white steel plate medium perfectly. Doré prints found a large and ready market throughout Europe.
It is interesting to note that several of Doré's prints are known with autographs of both Doré and Bourne. Although undated, one must suspect both men signed the engravings during the peak of popularity of the Fairless and Beeforth exhibition in the mid- to late-1870s.
Even during the period of heavy involvement with Doré's prints, Bourne continued to produce other fine art engravings. There seems to have been a two-year gap between finishing Doré's Andromeda Chained to the Rock in 1881 and the appearance of Isabella in 1883. One can imagine he was busy with stamp portraitures during that period, but I have found no confirmation.
The beautifully executed Knuckle-Bone Player appeared in 1884, followed in 1888 by The Tambourine produced for the Art Journal when he was 63 years old. The Tambourine is of unassailable quality and represents, in my opinion, the pinnacle of Bourne's long and productive career.
Problematically, there are several other engravings from this same general period (King Alfred Inciting the Anglo Saxons', Charles II in Disguise... and Wycliffe on his Sickened Bed) that exhibit noticeably less skill. They seem almost amateurish by comparison. Being unable to compare the final engravings with Bourne's original source material, it is hard to say whether those particular prints reflect the skills of the engraver or those of the original painter. Perhaps they represent the needs of the publishers. I simply cannot say. It is this strange and inexplicable difference in engraving skill that makes me speculate that at least one of Bourne's sons engraved and signed as 'H. Bourne.'
References in the stamp hobby suggest Bourne worked nearly until his death on November 13, 1907 at age 82. He was still listed as a 'steel engraver' in the 1901 census, but it is hard to know exactly how much work he was still producing by that time. Unfortunately, it is very difficult to establish exact dates when Bourne completed his plates. The latest print for which I can find a date reference is Anno Domini, theoretically completed around 1889, a year after The Tambourine. Bourne could well have worked on numerous stamp portraits after that time.