Title: The Ghost of a flea 1819
Title: none
Burial stone of William Blake
Blake, William
* London, 28 Nov 1757; † London, 12 Aug 1827). English printmaker,
painter and poet. His reputation as a visual artist increased during the 20th
century to the extent that his art is as well known as his poetry. Yet in his
own mind Blake never completely separated the two, and his most original
work is to be found in hand-printed books of prophecy, which developed a
personal mythology of limitless intellectual ambition. In these books, text
and design are completely integrated in what he called ‘illuminated’ printing.
He also made many pen and watercolour drawings, prints in various media
and a small number of tempera paintings, but even in these his broader aims
were primarily theological and philosophical: he saw the arts in all their
forms as offering insights into the metaphysical world and therefore
potentially redemptive of a humanity he believed to have fallen into
materialism and doubt.
1. Early years.
The son of a Soho hosier, Blake was trained as an engraver and continued
to practise as one until almost the end of his life. The unusual nature of his
ambitions and achievement owes much to this fact. At the age of ten, he
entered the drawing school of Henry Pars c. 1733–1806) in the Strand;
between 1772 and 1779 he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire
I, learning traditional techniques that fitted him for a modest career in
etching and engraving prints and book illustrations after the designs of
others. His profound political and theological radicalism was largely derived
from his London artisan background, but, unlike many of his
contemporaries who rose from similar circumstances to become established
artists, he never sought to escape from it. His training as an engraver also
meant that a livelihood was assured or so he thought), even if he failed to
find customers for his imaginative works. As a consequence he felt himself
free of the need to compromise with the prevailing demand for landscape,
portraits and classical subject-matter. It also meant that his attitude towards
his art was, in a social sense, quite alien to those found in the Royal
Academy, which he entered briefly after his apprenticeship; many of its
senior members were nonetheless remarkably willing even in later years to
give credit to his gifts. He continued throughout most of his life to exhibit at
the Royal Academy, and his pursuit of an art of high seriousness is not far in
intention from that of Joshua Reynolds, whom Blake professed to despise
as indicated in his annotated copy London, BL) of Reynolds’s
Discourses, 2/1798). By the mid-1780s Blake was reasonably successful,
exhibiting watercolours of historical and biblical subjects, most notably the
series of three watercolours of the Story of Joseph exh. RA 1785;
Cambridge, Fitzwilliam). He was admired both as an artist and as a poet by
some contemporaries, especially John Flaxman, who was partly responsible
for financing publication of his first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches
1783). A note of submerged radicalism can be discerned in his choice of
apocalyptic and British historical subjects, which foreshadow some of his
prophetic themes of the 1790s; but his artistic vocabulary was still
dominated by the work of Royal Academy painters such as James Barry
and Benjamin West, though he seems never to have attempted to paint in
oils.
2. The illuminated books.
During 1787–8 there was a complete change in Blake’s work, and by the
end of the decade he had perfected his method of illuminated printing. This
required an intense period of experimentation, almost certainly provoked by
the tragic death in February 1787 of his favourite brother Robert Blake b
1767), a talented artist, who had lived with him as a pupil from 1784 and
whose spirit, Blake claimed, had helped him solve the problems of the new
printing techniques. The other contributory factor was a religious crisis that
led him nominally to take up the doctrines of the Swedenborgian Church.
Blake’s objective in developing his method of illuminated printing was to
combine text and design on one plate in a way that was not possible with
the usual methods of intaglio engraving and letterpress printing. His concern
on the one hand was to unify his poetry and painting, a desire that reflected
his dissatisfaction with such works as the unfinished narrative poem Tiriel
c. 1786–9; London, BL), which was to have included illustrations—12
sepia drawings survive e.g. New Haven, CT, Yale Cent. Brit. A.). On the
other hand he was also seeking a means of bringing the production of
illustrated texts under his own control so that he could become his own
publisher, independent of commercial publishers and letterpress printers.
His solution to both problems was to develop between 1787 and 1789 a
unique method of ‘relief etching’, enabling him to produce durable
copperplates that could be printed off in his own workroom in as few or as
many copies as he liked. The Approach of Doom c. 1787–90; London,
BM) is probably one of his first experiments in the technique. This method
was not fully elucidated until the 1940s by Ruthven Todd and others. Blake
combined the techniques of etching and relief printing, drawing his designs
probably in reverse in stopping-out solution on the surface of the copper,
so that the parts of the copper that were not to be printed were eaten away
by the acid. The method, although ingenious, had some disadvantages: it
was extremely difficult to control the acid and thus ensure even biting and a
clean outline; and as Blake invariably added pen and wash to the final
printing, as well as colour, the method is unlikely to have saved him much
labour.
Blake’s earliest experiments in illuminated printing are three small and
incomplete prose tracts: All Religions Are One, There Is No Natural
Religion and a third whose title is lost. In these he sought to demonstrate
the logical impossibility of ‘natural religion’, which he tendentiously reduced
to a purely empirical explanation of the universe. He first achieved complete
success with his new printing method in the Songs of Innocence title-page
dated 1789), a series of poems addressed to children, which are also
complex meditations on the presence of the divine in the state of childhood.
In 1794 they appeared jointly with Songs of Experience; the latter, by
contrast, are meditations on the fallen state of the material world. The
illuminations to each poem in Songs of Innocence usually consist of an
illustration to the text; but Blake also added decorative borders and
interlinear designs, often with tiny or barely legible figures and scenes that
counterpoint the text. Almost every known copy has been delicately
painted in watercolour by Blake himself, or possibly by his wife Catherine
whom he married in 1782); the colouring varies from the spare tinting of
early copies to the medieval-style opulence of those coloured in the 1820s.
The designs reveal not only the influence on Blake of medieval illumination
but also conventions of 18th-century music printing.
As with his two books of Songs, the delicately illuminated poem The
Book of Thel 1789) is pastoral in genre, but Blake could apply himself
equally to epic themes. The dramatic progress of the French Revolution in
the years after 1789 excited his sympathies and led to his association with
the radical circle of the publisher Joseph Johnson 1738–1809). This circle
included Henry Fuseli and Mary Wollstonecraft, and in 1791 Blake
illustrated the second edition of Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from
Real Life, a progressive book on the bringing-up of children. In 1790 or
1791 he began a poem entitled The French Revolution, apparently
completing only a fragment of what was intended to have been a much
larger work. In 1791 Johnson printed Book I but did not publish it only
one set of proofs is known: San Marino, CA, Huntington Lib.). Blake also
began an immense epic, or series of epics, in which the Revolution would
be seen as arising inevitably from the troubled history of the human spirit
and as an apocalyptic stage in the redemption of mankind. Some of these
ideas are foreshadowed in his illuminated book The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell see fig. 1), an ironic mixture of parable, aphorism and prophecy,
towards the end of which pl. 24) Blake proclaimed ‘I have also: The Bible
of Hell: which the world shall have whether they will or no’. This seems to
be a reference to the series of prophetic books of varying lengths that
emerged in 1793–5. Some look more to the present and future—America:
A Prophecy 1793), Europe: A Prophecy 1794) and The Song of Los
1795); others—The [First] Book of Urizen 1794), The Book of
Ahania 1795) and The Book of Los 1795)—look back to the early
history of Man and the original divisions leading to his mental and physical
enslavement.
As physical objects, these prophetic or ‘Lambeth’ books named after
the London suburb where Blake lived at the time) are unique. The meanings
of both text and design seem opaque at first: Blake evidently intended them
to be seen as mysterious objects that would yield their meaning only after
prolonged and sympathetic study which, even within his own circles, few
were prepared to give at the time). The illuminations are not always related
to or integrated with the text, yet the general effect is of a liberating
sublimity, in which visions of horror and beauty vie with one another. In
addition to relief etching, Blake used the compatible technique of white-line
engraving and a form of monotype colour printing, probably applied by
copperplate and then finished with pen and watercolour. This he seems to
have associated symbolically with primeval and fallen worlds, although he
colour-printed a great many of his designs, even such engravings as his
exultant Albion Rose ‘Glad Day’, c. 1800; e.g. London, BM), as samples
of his method.
Each of the prophetic books of the 1790s is best understood as a
psychomachia, in which the main characters represent aspects of the human
mind. At the same time these books make up a syncretic myth, drawing
together elements from the Bible, Greek mythology and British legend. The
old and corrupt order is realized in Urizen, a tyrannical god embodying
aspects both of Jehovah and Jupiter as well as of the repressive British
state. Urizen’s dominance is challenged in America, which describes the
outbreak of the American Revolution as the emergence of Orc, the
embodiment of energy, who stands for both destructive and creative
aspects of revolution. The third major figure of these books is the
eponymous Los, who represents the creative artist. His desperate task, like
that of Urizen and Orc, is to give form to the inchoate forces of the
universe, and, like the artist in any age, he is doomed to be imprisoned in
his own creations. ‘The strife of blood’ making up the action of Blake’s
prophecies seems to parallel, in ways not easy to discern, the unfolding
tragedy of the French Revolution and the increasingly belligerent British
response to it.
Despite the uncertainties concerning the chronological order of these
books, they seem to reveal an increasing emancipation of pictorial elements
at the expense of text, and a greater use of colour printing. In The [First]
Book of Urizen, for instance, about a third of the 28 plates are without text
some copies have as few as 24 plates), and in another third the design
predominates. In The Song of Los the text is closed in by the magnificent
and densely printed illuminations, while The Book of Los and The Book of
Ahania, both small books, show Blake preferring intaglio to relief-etching
for his printing of the text. The series of 12 large monotypes known as the
‘Large Colour Prints’ 1795 and c. 1804), which are without any
accompanying text, seem strikingly purposeful in technique when compared
with the prophetic books of 1795, though their overall theme, if there was
one, has never been satisfactorily elucidated. Much of their subject-matter
is derived from the Bible e.g. Elohim Creating Adam; see fig. 2), but
some is from Milton and Shakespeare e.g. Hecate, c. 1795; London,
Tate) or illustrates ideas from Blake’s own prophecies. One example of this
is the extraordinary representation of the supposed arch-rationalist
Newton, seated naked in his cave, absorbed in reducing the universe with
his compasses to a mathematical diagram see fig. 3).
3. Patronage and commissions.
For Blake, the years 1788–95 had provoked a sustained burst of creative
energy, stimulated mainly by external events. In 1796 or 1797 he began
work on an epic later abandoned), which survives as a much revised
manuscript known as Vala or the Four Zoas London, BL). He also
started a series of 537 watercolour illustrations for the text of Edward
Young’s poems Night Thoughts, to be published in four volumes. One
volume appeared 1797), using only 43 plates of the 156 designs for that
section of the text London, BM). They are among the least inspired of
Blake’s designs, but in the course of making them he realized the potential
for using visual illustration to comment critically upon a text, by reinforcing
its truths and ‘correcting’ its errors. They are, therefore, the forerunners of
his great series of watercolour illustrations of later years for the Bible and
the works of Thomas Gray, Milton, John Bunyan and Dante. Despite his
political radicalism, Blake achieved modest success and some prosperity
during the 1790s; by the end of the decade he had secured a loyal patron,
Thomas Butts 1757–1845), a minor civil servant, as well as commissions
from others.
Butts commissioned 50 small biblical paintings from Blake about 35
survive). Blake executed these in a defective glue-based ‘tempera’
technique of his own devising, which he misleadingly called ‘fresco’. The
series was conceived as a typological cycle and appears to have placed a
strong emphasis on Christ’s role in the redemption of man. It also shows an
unexpected openness to the influence of earlier European painting,
especially of the Italian Renaissance, examples of which Blake would have
seen in the Orléans collection displayed for sale in London in 1798–9. Butts
followed up this commission, which seems to have been completed in
1800, with a more open-ended one, for Blake to make watercolours, when
he was able, of biblical subjects at a price of one guinea each. Until c. 1809
he continued to supply Butts with watercolours; these provide a useful
index to his stylistic development and reveal a determination on Blake’s
part to tackle abstract and symbolic subjects thought since the Middle
Ages, at least) to lie beyond any artist’s powers. This is especially true of
the remarkable designs for the Book of Revelation e.g. Philadelphia, PA,
Rosenbach Mus.), in which he attempted to give a coherent form to such
ineffable beings as the ‘Great Beast’, while at the same time suggesting the
immensity of the crowds that bow down before him. One group of
watercolours illustrating the mourning over the dead Christ e.g. London,
V&A) is notable, however, for their solemnity and rigorous symmetry of
composition, suggesting a renewed appreciation of Gothic sculpture.
Nevertheless, the generous commission from Butts did not prevent Blake
from experiencing financial difficulties, mainly caused by a decline in
engraving commissions. He decided to accept a post, obtained for him by
John Flaxman, as assistant to the poet William Hayley in Felpham, Sussex,
moving there in September 1800 and remaining exactly three years. His
employment was largely menial it included decorative interior work for
Hayley’s house), and Hayley, at Flaxman’s urging, seems to have
deliberately discouraged Blake who described his employer as ‘a
corporeal friend and spiritual enemy’) from the pursuit of imaginative work.
Even so, the Felpham period was to prove seminal for the great works of
his later years: while there, Blake began conceiving his final illuminated
books, Milton and Jerusalem. At the same time, his letters reveal a sense
of personal alienation, which was to intensify almost to insanity in the years
after his return to London.
Blake’s three-year break at Felpham perpetuated his inability to pick
up engraving work, and he entered a period of increasing poverty. This was
not helped by his growing irascibility, vividly expressed by scurrilous verse
in his Notebook London, BL) and by bitter annotations in books by
others, especially Reynolds’s Discourses. Butts remained loyal and, in
addition to watercolours of biblical subjects, commissioned illustrations of
Milton’s poems. The series of Milton watercolours 1801–c. 1816),
illustrating Paradise Lost and several other poems, are usually of 12
designs; there are often two sets for each series, one commissioned by the
Rev. Joseph Thomas and the other by Butts. It has become clear that these
illustrations, built on the basis of a literal rendering of the original text, are in
fact complex commentaries on Milton’s life and art, which Blake believed
had been full of unresolved conflicts. This can be seen in Paradise Lost
e.g. Boston, MA, Mus. F.A.; San Marino, CA, Huntington Lib.) and more
clearly in L’allegro and Il penseroso c. 1816; e.g. New York, Pierpont
Morgan Lib.), in which Milton’s pastoral poems are transformed into a kind
of spiritual biography, beginning with his carefree youth and continuing
through troubled manhood to contemplative old age.
4. ‘Milton’, ‘Jerusalem’ and the exhibition of 1809–10.
Between 1805 and 1810 Blake worked on more ambitious projects than
ever, including a large painting of the Last Judgement untraced), which he
did not complete, though a detailed description by Blake in his Notebook)
and several drawings survive e.g. Washington, DC, N.G.A.). He also took
up work in earnest on two final prophetic books. The first, Milton: A
Poem title-page dated 1804), consisting initially of 45 illuminated pages,
was probably not completed until 1809. It tells of Blake’s spiritual struggle
with the inheritance of Milton, the greatest of English poets, and how this
period of psychological combat brought him the strength to continue his
own redemptive mission. Milton was the prelude to his richest and most
complex work, Jerusalem 100 pages in its final form), which occupied
him until the early 1820s. Baldly stated, the theme of Jerusalem is Man’s
fall to his present divided state, and it ends with a vision of redemption.
Unlike the prophecies of the 1790s, Jerusalem is more unified in structure
through its central symbols: Albion, standing for humanity, and Jerusalem,
representing the British nation alienated from the spirit. Albion is in thrall to
Vala goddess of Nature) and dominated by his own wayward children the
people of Britain), who pursue the false gods of materialism; he seeks
redemption through the mercy of Christ and freedom from the dominant
spectre of reason, achieving these in the exultant vision of the poem’s last
pages. Nevertheless, the final plate suggests Blake’s belief that much
remains to be done towards the building of Jerusalem.
The text of Jerusalem is interspersed with a great variety of designs,
ranging from full-page plates to border and interlinear designs. In some
cases their meaning in relation to the text is relatively clear, but in others
they remain resistant to interpretation. This is so particularly in the case of
the beautiful and mysterious scenes that act as headpieces to each of the
four chapters. Both Milton and Jerusalem contain direct references to
Blake’s own life and mental struggles, and they also reflect his increasing
sense of rejection by others, including his friends. A number of
misunderstandings concerning commissions occurred at this time. The most
notable was with Robert Hartley Cromek 1770–1812) over a series of
engravings to illustrate a new edition of Robert Blair’s The Grave.
Publication in 1808, after Luigi Schiavonetti had engraved Blake’s designs,
was followed by a scornful attack in The Examiner 7 Aug 1808) by
Robert Hunt. This led Blake to make public his artistic ideas: he organized a
retrospective exhibition of his work, held from May 1809 to the summer of
1810 in the house in which he had been born then occupied by his brother
James). This exhibition was accompanied by A Descriptive Catalogue of
72 pages containing his own invaluable accounts of some of his most
notable paintings, including the tempera Canterbury Pilgrims Glasgow,
Pollok House). Although full of idiosyncratic attacks on other artists, it
includes a cogent defence of his concern with vision rather than with the
representation of the exterior world. He also made a strong case for the
primacy of outline ‘the hard, wirey line of Rectitude’) over colour, and his
work of 1809–10 e.g. the Milton illustrations) shows a more emphatically
linear approach than at any other period. Predictably, the exhibition was a
failure, although it was visited in April 1810 by Henry Crabb Robinson,
who reported on it for the first issue of Vaterländisches Museum, a
Hamburg magazine. It marked the beginning of a period of obscurity for
Blake that was to last until 1818. He seems to have had just enough
engraving work to keep him from absolute destitution, although his
production of imaginative work continued unabated. He worked in his
rooms in South Molton Street on Milton and Jerusalem, and also on the
Last Judgement. In 1815 George Cumberland the younger, the son of his
lifelong friend, remarked ‘he has been labouring … till it is nearly as black
as your Hat’. Blake also continued to perfect his watercolour technique,
achieving in L’allegro and Il penseroso a radiance of colour and sensitivity
to natural light that suggests he gradually became less dogmatic in his
insistence on the primacy of outline.
5. Last years.
In 1818 George Cumberland the younger introduced Blake to John Linnell;
he in turn introduced him to a circle that included Samuel Palmer, George
Richmond and Edward Calvert. To this group, who later called themselves
the Ancients, Blake was a heroic figure who had proclaimed the necessity
for a spiritual art in a materialistic age—one that they hoped had now
ended. In their protective friendship he found a group of people who had
real sympathy for his vision. Linnell bought one copy of Jerusalem priv.
col.) and encouraged Blake to publish his own designs in line-engraving,
without etching, in the early Italian manner. He also found commissions for
Blake, including one for 17 tiny wood-engravings of pastoral life. This was
for a school edition of Robert Thornton’s The Pastorals of Virgil known
as ‘Thornton’s Virgil’), first published in 1812. Blake’s wood-engravings
were published in the edition of 1821, and they became a major influence
on Palmer. Although landscape as a genre was, in a theoretical sense,
anathema to Blake, he seems to have preserved an easy relationship with
the landscape painters in Linnell’s circle, confining to a prophetic voice his
strictures upon those including Wordsworth) who sought God through
nature.
In the 1820s Blake began two major works. Both were commissioned
by Linnell: 22 engravings of the Book of Job, published in 1826 see
Engraving, fig. 8), and the series of 100 watercolours of Dante’s Divine
Comedy see fig. 4). These, with other engravings, remained unfinished at
Blake’s death. The Job engravings were worked up from a set of
watercolours of 1805–10 New York, Pierpont Morgan Lib.), which
remained in the possession of Butts, with the addition of freely engraved
borders containing complementary designs and texts. Their ‘gothic’ style of
engraving made them appear quaint to contemporaries, but to others they
must have seemed a return to order after the complexity of his illuminated
books. In fact, thematically, their underlying narrative has parallels with
Jerusalem: Job is an Everyman who begins by defining his universe in terms
of a satanic, vengeful conception of Jehovah yet, by artistic celebration of
the divine, ultimately achieves redemption through recognition of the Christ
within himself. The Dante series is perhaps more difficult to interpret
because it remains substantially unfinished and also because Blake’s attitude
towards Dante was equivocal, as it was also towards Milton. Dante, in
Blake’s view, was open to several charges: that he was more concerned
with the world than the spirit; that the Divine Comedy was an act of
vengeance, not of Christian forgiveness; and that the end of his quest was a
return to the Catholic Church. Despite these problems, the watercolours
are remarkable for their atmospheric depiction of Hell, Purgatory and
Heaven and show a freedom of handling that suggests Blake had learnt
from the British watercolour school.
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