All about william blake
William Blake (1757–1827), one of the greatest poets in the English language, also ranks
among the most original visual artists of the Romantic era. Born in London in 1757 into a
working-class family with strong nonconformist religious beliefs, Blake first studied art as a boy,
at the drawing academy of Henry Pars. He served a five-year apprenticeship with the
commercial engraver James Basire before entering the Royal Academy Schools as an engraver
at the age of twenty-two. This conventional training was tempered by private study of medieval
and Renaissance art; as revealed by his early designs for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts
(Nature revolves, but Man advances), Blake sought to emulate the example of artists such as
Raphael, Michelangelo, and Dürer in producing timeless, “Gothic” art, infused with Christian
spirituality and created with poetic genius.
In 1782, Blake married Catherine Boucher (1762–1831), an impoverished grocer’s daughter
who would become his studio assistant. Blake now threw his energies into developing his career
as an engraver, opening a short-lived print shop with a fellow Basire apprentice (James Parker)
in 1784, before striking out on his own (Job, a Historical Engraving). The great advance in
Blake’s printmaking occurred in 1787, following the untimely death, probably from tuberculosis,
of the artist’s beloved younger brother Robert, who had been living with William and Catherine
since 1784. Blake reported discovering his wholly original method of “relief etching”—which
creates a single, raised printing surface for both text and image—in a vision of Robert soon after
his death. Relief etching allowed Blake to control all aspects of a book’s production: he
composed the verses, designed the illustrations (preparing word and image almost
simultaneously on the same copper printing plate), printed the plates, colored each sheet by
hand (where necessary), and bound the pages together in covers. The resulting “illuminated
books” were written in a range of forms—prophecies, emblems, pastoral verses, biblical satire,
and children’s books—and addressed various timely subjects—poverty, child exploitation, racial
inequality, tyranny, religious hypocrisy. Not surprisingly, these works rank among Blake’s most
celebrated achievements (17.10.42; The Ancient of Days; Los, his Spectre; and Enitharmon
before a Druid Temple).
Blake’s technical experiments of the 1790s culminated in a series of large color prints notable
for their massive size and iconic designs. Unaccompanied by any text, they comprise his most
ambitious work as a visual artist. No commission or public exhibition is recorded, and the
intended program of the group remains uncertain: of the twelve known designs, many of the
subjects—drawn from the Bible, Shakespeare (58.603), Milton, and other sources
(Newton)—function as pairs.
Blake described his technique as “fresco.” It appears to be a form of monotype: using oil and
tempera paints mixed with chalks, Blake painted the design onto a flat surface (a copperplate or
piece of millboard), from which he pulled the prints simply by pressing a sheet of paper against
the damp paint. He finished the designs in ink and watercolor, making each—rare—impression
unique.
For Blake, the Bible was the greatest work of poetry ever written, and comprised the basis of
true art, as opposed to the false, pagan ideal of classicism. He found a sympathetic patron in
Thomas Butts (1757–1845), a prosperous Swedenborgian (a member of the Protestant sect
founded by the eighteenth-century Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian, and visionary
Emanuel Swedenborg). Butts amassed a small fortune as a clerk in the office of the Muster
Master General, and became Blake’s most loyal patron and closest friend. During the decade
1799–1809, Butts commissioned from Blake a series of illustrations to the Bible that included
about fifty tempera paintings (51.30.1) and more than eighty watercolors (14.81.2). These focus
on Old Testament prefigurations of Christ, the life of Christ, and apocalyptic subjects from the
Book of Revelation, although the series’ exact program and its intended display remain unclear.
For the rest of his life, Blake continued to develop his art on an inward-looking, imaginative
trajectory. Whereas notable contemporaries such as J. M. W. Turner and John Constable found
the subjects of their art in the landscape, Blake sought his (primarily figural) subjects in journeys
of the mind. (Indeed, he never traveled outside of Britain and, aside from a brief period on the
southern coast of England—where he worked for the poet William Hayley in Felpham from 1800
to 1803—spent his entire life in London.) In addition to the Bible and his own writings, Blake
drew on other texts—most notably, Dante (Beatrice addressing Dante from the Car)—and found
a seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration in his own fertile mind (The Ghost of a Flea).
