The 1912 illustration of the house at 28 Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) where Blake was born and lived until 1782. The house was destroyed in 1965.
Connections
Wife: Catherine Sophia Blake
Catherine Sophia Blake, Blake's wife, portrayed by her husband
Friend: John Linnell
Self-portrait of John Linnell, William Blake's friend and colleague
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: A Facsimile in Full Color
(The book is both a humorous satire on religion and morali...)
The book is both a humorous satire on religion and morality and a work that concisely expresses Blake's essential wisdom and philosophy, much of it revealed in the 70 aphorisms of his "Proverbs of Hell." Reproduced from a rare facsimile, the edition invites readers to enjoy the rich character of Blake's own hand-printed text along with his deeply stirring illustrations, represented by 27 full-color plates.
William Blake was a 19th-century English poet, engraver, and painter. One of the most eminent and original representatives of the Romantic Age, both as visual artist and poet, he created a complex mythical universe comparable with Dante's Divine Comedy in its depth, which reflected the contemporary culture and society at the same time. Among his best known lyrics today are The Lamb, The Tyger, London, and the Jerusalem lyric from Milton.
Background
Ethnicity:
Blake's father came from an obscure family in Rotherhithe, across the River Thames from London, and his mother was from equally obscure yeoman stock in the straggling little village of Walkeringham in Nottinghamshire.
William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, in Soho, London, United Kingdom. He was the third child from six kids in a quite well off working-class family of James Blake, an owner of a hosiery shop, and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake. Two of William's siblings died in infancy.
Education
William Blake learned to read and write at the conventional school till the age of ten, and then was educated at home by his mother. Copying drawings of Greek antiquities was his favorite hobby. Through the activity, Blake discovered the art of Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck and Albrecht Dürer.
When in 1767 Blake expressed a wish to become a painter, his parents sent him to Henry Pars' Drawing school in the Strand, London. While there, he read a lot and began writing poetry, probably inspired by Ben Jonson, Edmund Spenser, and the Psalms.
From August 4, 1772 to 1779, William Blake studied engraving in the workshop of James Basire, of Great Queen Street, who specialized in prints depicting architecture. He became so proficient in all aspects of his craft that Basire allowed him to go on his own to Westminster Abbey to copy the marvelous medieval monuments for one of the greatest illustrated English books of the end of the 18th century, the antiquarian Richard Gough's Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain. The trip played an important role in the formation of Blake's artistic style and ideas.
On 8 October 1779, Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy. During six years of studies, he had been opposing the Academy's first president, Joshua Reynolds, who admired the art of such fashionable artists as Rubens. Blake also met John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland while at the institution.
On the completion of his apprenticeship in 1779, William Blake began to work vigorously as an independent engraver. His most frequent commissions were from the great liberal bookseller Joseph Johnson. At first most of his works copied the designs of other artists, such as the two fashion plates for the Ladies New and Polite Pocket Memorandum-Book. He also engraved important plates for the Swiss writer Johann Kasper Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (vol. 1, 1789), for the English physician Erasmus Darwin's Botanic Garden (1791), and for his friend John Gabriel Stedman's violent and eccentric Narrative of a Five Years' Expedition Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796).
Blake became so well known that he received commissions to engrave his own designs. These included 6 plates for Original Stories from Real Life, a collection of narratives for children by Johnson's friend Mary Wollstonecraft, and 43 folio plates for part one of Edward Young's poem Night Thoughts, with a promise, never fulfilled, for a hundred more. Blake's style of designing, however, was so extreme and unfamiliar, portraying spirits with real bodies, that many reviews treated the style absurd. Such were the engravings for Robert Blair's poem The Grave, published with the éclat.
It should be noted that Blake published engravings of his own designs mostly in very small numbers. One of the best known is Glad Day, also called Albion Rose, depicting a glorious naked youth dancing upon the mountaintops. More publicly visible were his enormous design of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, his 22 folio designs for the Book of Job, and his 7 even larger unfinished plates for Dante. Later important Blake's commissions included plates for William Hayley's biography of the poet William Cowper, for sculptor John Flaxman's illustrations for the Iliad and the works of Hesiod, and for the Wedgwood ware catalogue.
The death of Blake's beloved brother, Robert (Richard at birth), from tuberculosis in 1787 found expression in his epic poem Vala or The Four Zoas and Milton, which plates 29 and 33 featured figures, labeled "William " and "Robert." The "illuminated printing" technique was also used for the first time after that sad event. The method made it possible for Blake to be his own compositor, printer, binder, advertiser, and salesman for all his published poetry thereafter, from Songs of Innocence to Jerusalem.
While pursuing his career as an engraver, William Blake's greatest ambition was as an artist. His materials were watercolors and paper, not the fashionable oil on canvas, and he painted subjects from the Bible and British history instead of the portraits and landscapes that were in vogue. And increasingly his subjects were his own visions. During his studies at the Royal Academy of Arts, he exhibited a few pictures there, in 1780, 1784, 1785, 1799, and 1808.
Blake's first really important commission, which he received in about 1794, was to illustrate every page of Edward Young's popular and morbid long poem Night Thoughts, a total of 537 watercolors. The work was largely ignored or deplored, and its commercial failure had profound consequences for Blake.
Upon this commercial failure, Blake accepted an invitation from a poet William Hayley to move to the little seaside farm village of Felpham in Sussex and work as his protégé. Blake's work there would include making engravings for Hayley's works and painting tempera portraits of literary notables for Hayley's library and miniature portraits for his friends. Blake worked industriously on the projects, particularly his Designs to a Series of Ballads, and Hayley's biography of the poet William Cowper.
There were few opportunities for a wider public to view Blake's watercolors and temperas. The works showed at the exhibition of the Associated Painters in Water-Colors (1812) and the pictures presented at the Royal Academy of Arts were greeted with silence. Blake's most determined effort to reach a wider public was his retrospective exhibition of 16 watercolors and temperas, held above the Blake family hosiery shop and home on Broad Street from 1809 to 1810. The most ambitious picture in the exhibition, called The Ancient Britons and depicting the last battle of the legendary King Arthur, had been commissioned by the Welsh scholar and enthusiast William Owen Pughe. Only a few persons saw the exhibition, perhaps no more than a couple dozen and many destructive reviews have appeared in print. Blake was devastated, and withdrew more and more into obscurity. From 1809 to 1818 he engraved few plates, his commissions for designs were mostly private, and he sank deeper into poverty.
Most of his large commissions thereafter were for watercolors rather than engravings. Of all such commissions, only illustrations for Job (1826) and Dante (1838) were engraved and published. The rest were visible only on the private walls of their unostentatious owners. Blake's art and his livelihood were thus largely in the hands of a small number of connoisseurs whose commissions were often inspired as much by love for the man as by admiration for his art.
William Blake's profession was engraving, and his principal avocation was painting in watercolours. But even from boyhood he wrote poetry. In the early 1780s he attended the literary and artistic salons of the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, and there he read and sang his poems. Anthony Stephen Mathew, and Blake's friend John Flaxman had some of these poems printed in a modest little volume of 70 pages titled Poetical Sketches, with the attribution on the title page reading simply, "By W.B."
After experimenting with tiny plates to print his short tracts There Is No Natural Religion (1788) and All Religions Are One, Blake created the first of the poetical works for which he is chiefly remembered, Songs of Innocence, with 19 poems on 26 prints. The poems are written for children and they represent the innocent and the vulnerable, from babies to beetles, protected and fostered by powers beyond their own.
Most of Blake's poetry embodies myths that he invented. In the 1789 Book of Thel, the first of his published myths, Blake took the inquiry about the nature of life.Familiar with the current ideas about the early history of Britain, or Albion, he also used legends such as the story of Joseph of Arimathea in building up his own myths. He refused to draw from models or to "copy nature."
Blake's next work in illuminated printing, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, has become one of his best known. It is a prose work in no familiar form; for instance, on the title page, no author, printer, or publisher is named. It is in part a parody of Emanuel Swedenborg, echoing the Swedish theologian's Memorable Relations of things seen and heard in heaven with Memorable Fancies of things seen and heard in hell.
William Blake's last years, from 1818 to 1827, were made comfortable and productive as a result of his friendship with the artist John Linnell. Through him, Blake met the physician and botanist Robert John Thornton, who commissioned Blake's woodcuts for a school text of Virgil (1821). He also met the young painters George Richmond, Samuel Palmer, and Edward Calvert, who became his disciples, and reflected their teacher's inspiration in their art. All of them all later achieved fame. Linnell also supported Blake with his commissions for the drawings and engravings of the Book of Job (published 1826) and Dante (1838).
(William Blake combined text and imagery on a single page ...)
2001
drawing
Elisha In The Chamber on The Wall
1820
illustration
The First Book of Urizen
(A white haired man in a long, pale robe who flees from us...)
1794
The Ancient of Days
1794
Dante's Divine Comedy
1795
A Negro Hung Alive by the Ribs to a Gallows
1796
Job and his Daughters
1800
Milton's Paradise Lost
1807
Milton's Lost Paradise
1808
The Casting of the Rebel Angels into Hell
1808
The Temptation and Fall of Eve
1808
Milton's On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
1809
Milton's On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
1815
The Night of Peace
1815
The Shrine of Apollo: Milton's Hymn on the Morning of Christ's Nativity
1815
Satan Addressing his Potentates
1818
Christ Tempted by Satan to Turn the Stones to Bread
1819
A Sunshine Holiday
1820
Angels Ministering to Christ
1820
Christ Refusing the Banquet Offered by Satan
1820
Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso
1820
Milton's Paradise Regained
1820
Milton's Mysterious Dream
1820
Mirth
1820
Night Startled by the Lark
1820
painting
Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing
1786
The Marriage of Heaven & Hell
1793
Glad Day or The Dance of Albion
1794
And Elohim Created Adam
1795
The Night of Enitharmon's Joy
1795
Isaac Newton
1795
Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab
1975
Satan Exulting over Eve
1795
The Nativity
1800
The Soldiers Casting Lots for Christ's Garments
1800
Christ Nailed to the Cross The Third Hour
1803
Satan Calling Up his Legions
1804
The Angel of Revelation
1805
The Great Red Dragon and the Beast from the Sea
1805
The Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed with the Sun
1805
Jacob's Ladder
1806
Archangel Raphael with Adam and Eve
1808
Christ as the Redeemer of Man
1808
Last Judgement
1808
The Angels Appearing to the Shepherds
1809
The Great Red Dragon and the Woman clothed with the sun
1810
Andrew, Simon Peter Searching for Christ
1819
Melancholy
1820
print
Nebuchadnezzar
1795
Los
1820
Los Entering the Grave
1820
Religion
William Blake was christened, married, and buried by the rites of the Church of England, but his creed was likely to outrage the orthodox. In A Vision of the Last Judgment he wrote that "the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being," whom Blake called variously Nobodaddy and Urizen, and in his emblem book For the Sexes: The Gates of Paradise, he addressed Satan as "The Accuser who is The God of This World."
A religious seeker and nonconformist at once, strongly influenced by the Bible in an early childhood, Blake didn't accept any form of institutionalized religion. He perceived Jesus as the symbol of relationship and unity between the divine world and humanity, and believed in close link between spirituality and art. For him, true worship was private communion with the spirit, that's why he never attended church.
William Blake claimed that he had visions from early childhood, such as God who "put his head to the window" or a tree with angels. He also stated that, during his artistic practice at Westminster Abbey, he saw Christ with his Apostles and a great procession of monks and priests, and heard their chant. Generally, such visions were a kind of the base of his art.
Politics
William Blake followed the events of the French and American Revolutions and supported many of their ideals. However, he strongly opposed Robespierre's accession to power, the Reign of Terror in France, and was against slavery and the abuse of class power, as stated in David Erdman's publication Blake: Prophet Against Empire: A Poet's Interpretation of the History of His Own Times. The consequences of both rebellions were reflected through symbolic allegories in his poems.
Not involved in any political party, Blake was in contact with some of the major radical minds contemporary to him, including the political activist Thomas Paine and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. The extent of Blake's adherence to the dissident religious ideas of the most extreme opposers of the monarchy during the English Civil War is described by a British historian E.P. Thompson in his 1993 volume Witness Against the Beast: William Blake.
Views
In creative process, William Blake attributed a primary role to imagination and the inner visions, contrary to the predominant concept in the 18th-century neoclassicism, which privileged the observations of the surrounding nature. The philosophical and mystical sub context of his works, misunderstood or even rejected by his contemporaries, was highly appreciated by the following generations.
Blake published his poetry in the unusual way revealed to him, as he claimed, by his deceased brother Robert in a vision. He drew his poems and their surrounding designs on copper in a liquid impervious to acid. He then etched them and, with the aid of his wife, printed , colored and stitched them in rough sugar-paper wrappers.
He was influenced by such philosophers and mystical writers as Paracelsus, Böhme, and Swedenborg, whose thoughts and concepts brought some darkness to his own style of composition.
Quotations:
"Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death."
"The great and golden rule of art, as well as of life, is this: that the more distinct, sharp, and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art; and the less keen and sharp, the greater is the evidence of weak imitation, plagiarism, and bungling."
"[...] Excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand."
"The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself."
"This world of imagination is the world of eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the vegetated body. This world of imagination is infinite & eternal, whereas the world of generation, or vegetation, is finite & temporal."
"I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create."
"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."
"To see the world in a grain of sand, and to see heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hands, and eternity in an hour."
"No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings."
"In the universe, there are things that are known, and things that are unknown, and in between, there are doors."
"If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite."
"Great things are done when men and mountains meet."
"All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel. Antiquity preaches the Gospel of Jesus."
Personality
William Blake kept his stubborn nature throughout his adult life. It was probably such stubbornness that led to his conflict with a drunken dragoon named John Schofield, perhaps tipsy, who refused to leave Blake's garden in August 1803. Schofield charged his offender with trial for sedition, and Blake had to stand trial the following year. He was acquitted with the help of a poet William Hayley.
William Blake learned Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Italian himself, so that he could read classical works in their original language.
Quotes from others about the person
Jonathan Jones, art critic: "Far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced."
William Michael Rossetti, writer and critic: "Glorious luminary [...] a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors."
Catherine Sophia Blake, the poet's wife: "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company; he is always in Paradise."
Interests
Ancient Greek art
Philosophers & Thinkers
Paracelsus, Jakob Böhme, Emanuel Swedenborg
Connections
William Blake married Catherine Boucher, a daughter of an unsuccessful market gardener, on August 18, 1782, in her family's church, Saint Mary's, Battersea. As Catherine was illiterate, Blake taught her reading, writing, and draftsmanship. Catherine fully believed in the talent of her husband, supported him in all his undertakings and helped him with his designs. The couple had no children.
A Blake Dictionary: The Ideas and Symbols of William Blake
In this volume, first published in 1965, S. Foster Damon, father of modern Blake studies and a professor at Brown University until his death, has assembled all references to particular symbols or aspects of Blake’s work and life, so that readers can see the entire spectrum of Blake's thought on a variety of topics.
The Life of William Blake
The book by one of the greatest Victorian-era biographies, Alexander Gilchrist, plays a key role in the history of Blake's work and its influence on other writers and artists. The first standard text on Blake and a cornerstone of the extensive scholarship on his life and work, it not only delivered its subject from unjust obscurity but also dispelled the notion of Blake's insanity and established his genius as a visionary artist and poet.
2017
William Blake
An authoritative look at William Blake's life and enduring relevance as a prophetic artist, poet, and printmaker.
The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake
This illustrated biography of the great English artist, poet and mystic brings us very much into Blake's company, presenting, often in the words of his contemporaries, everything that is known of his life and times.
2001
Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake
This brilliant outline of Blake's thought and commentary on his poetry comes on the crest of the current interest in Blake, and carries us further towards an understanding of his work than any previous study.
1969
William Blake: The Gates of Paradise
On the 250th anniversary of Blake's birth, master storyteller Michael Bedard brings this Renaissance man and his times to vivid life in this biography that is lavishly illustrated with Blake's work.
2006
William Blake Now: Why He Matters More Than Ever
In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes readers on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.
2019
William Blake
In this remarkable and sensitive biography, G. K. Chesterton addresses the question of whether Blake's genius was tainted by madness or whether his peculiar outlook on the world was the key to his success.