Sounds plausible. A the start of the photo era, the state of the art for illustrations was for them to be drawn by an artist and then engraved on a wood block,

Sounds plausible. A the start of the photo era, the state of the art for illustrations was for them to be drawn by an artist and then engraved on a wood block, manually, that was then used as a printing plate. There was a period when no method was available to convert photos to printing plates, so from that period you find prints of photos where someone has manually copied it to a wood engraving for publication.