William Blake

William Elohim Creating Adam (detail) 1795



Songs of Innocence, Copy F, pl.1, Frontispiece (1789) © Yale Center for British Art, New Haven

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757 in London at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, where his father had a successful hosiery business. Since Blake was an unruly child his parents educated him at home instead of formal school. He spent his youth roaming about London and the countryside on the edge of town. He describes this in a song from his Poetical Sketches which he started writing at the age of thirteen:

How sweet I roamed from field to field
And tasted all the summer's pride

At the age of about ten, Blake said that he saw his 'first vision' when, sauntering along on Peckham Rye, he looked up to see a tree filled with angels. According to the accounts Blake gave of his literary development, he was already reading the works of Milton and Isaiah as a child.


Joseph of Arimathea Among the Rocks of Albion (1773)
© Fitzwilliam Museum

At the age of ten, Blake was sent to Mr Pars' drawing school in the Strand, where he copied plaster-casts of ancient sculptures. His father, unable to afford the cost of placing Blake as the pupil of a leading painter, took the prudent decision to apprentice him to an engraver at the age of fourteen. Blake's master, James Basire of Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn, was engraver to the London Society of Antiquaries. As a result, Blake was sent to Westminster Abbey to make drawings of tombs and monuments. Here he learned to love gothic art. He stood on the tombs to view them better and even made sketches when the grave of Edward I was opened.

In his free time, Blake collected prints of then unfashionable artists such as Durer, Raphael, and Michelangelo. In literature too, he rejected eighteenth-century polish, preferring the Elizabethans (Shakespeare, Jonson and Spenser) and ancient ballads, both authentic (such as Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry), and forged (such as Macpherson's Ossian and Chatterton's Poems of Rowley).



The Penance of Jane Shore(c. 1793) © Tate

In August 1779, Blake was admitted to the Royal Academy (founded by the painter Sir Joshua Reynolds who was then its president). Paying his way by producing engravings for novels and catalogues, Blake drew from casts, life models and corpses, and shared in the dream of founding a new English school of historical painting.

There was, however, friction between Blake and his teachers. Reynolds recommended that he work with 'less extravagance and more simplicity', while George Michael Moser, another teacher there, discouraged Blake's admiration for the 'old, hard, stiff and dry unfinished works' of Raphael and Michelangelo. On the other hand, Blake was inspired by the artist James Barry and his grand historical paintings. He made friends with other young artists and was able to exhibit his own historical watercolours.

Blake married Catherine Boucher at St Mary's, Battersea in 1782. The newly-weds then moved out of Blake's father's house to Green Street, near Leicester Square. In the next year Blake's Poetical Sketches were published, and there was even talk of raising a subscription to send him to study in Rome.
n the summer of 1784, Blake's father died. While the eldest son, James, took over the hosiery business in number 28, Blake and his wife moved into the next-door house at 27 Broad Street. There he set up in business as a print seller in partnership with James Parker. The partnership lasted only three years, and in 1787 Blake moved to a house around the corner in Poland Street. In the same year his beloved younger brother, Robert, died. Blake sat by him during his last illness, and claimed to see his spirit pass through the ceiling on its way to heaven.

Blake said that the spirit of Robert came to him 'in a vision in the night' and revealed the secret technique for combining poem and picture on a single printing plate. In 1788, Blake started work on the first of his illuminated books using this method. His first efforts were in simple, chapbook style, but by 1789, The Songs of Innocence had been completed with Blake and his wife hand-producing the book. In the words of Blake's first biographer Alexander Gilchrist, they did everything 'except manufacturing the paper'.


Europe Title-page (1794)
© Glasgow University Library


Lambeth was still a village when Blake and his wife moved to No. 13 Hercules Buildings in 1791. A much larger house than any Blake had lived in before, it provided the light and space that he needed for his work. Blake now entered upon the most creative and productive period of his life.

Blake's work had become more overtly political after the upheavals in France in 1789. His poem The French Revolution, though printed in 1791 by Joseph Johnson (publisher of Tom Paine's Rights of Man), was deemed too dangerous to actually publish. By this time, Blake already felt himself to be losing out to his contemporaries in the art world, and now he saw the door to public recognition closing. The 1793 co-publication of The Gates of Paradise, an emblem book for children, was Blake's last venture into commercial publishing. In October of the same year, Blake published his Prospectus a public advertisement of his recent works. The Prospectus was also a critique of the establishment and the difficulty of gaining reconition for artists who lacked 'the means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius'. Blake was literally taking matters into his own hands by producing his own work and offering it for sale at his home.

The Prospectus advertised the illuminated prophetic books which had begun to pour forth from his press: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a brief epic interspersed with proverbs, The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, an allegory about freedom, and America, A Prophecy, a mixture of history and myth, all date from 1793.

There was no letting up in 1794, when The Songs of Experience (the pessimistic 'contrary' volume to The Songs of Innocence) was completed. In the same year Blake also published Europe, A Prophecy (an allegory of the political situation in Europe with warnings about the dire consequences of war), and The First Book of Urizen (his account of the origins of mankind and the natural world).

The House of Death (c.1795) © Tate

The illustrations in Blake's Prophetic Books had been growing ever larger and more colourful. It was therefore a logical step for him to adapt his printing-methods to produce full-scale paintings. The year 1795 saw the production of the series of twelve large watercolour prints, including Newton and Nebuchadnezzar and The House of Death (shown here), which biographer Peter Ackroyd calls 'the finest artistic statement of Blake's Lambeth visions'.

In 1796, Richard Edwards, a bookseller, commissioned Blake to illustrate Young's Night Thoughts, a philosophical verse epic immensely popular in the late eighteenth century. Ultimately, however, Edwards lost interest, and finally less than half the poem was published, with only forty-three engravings from Blake's 500 watercolours. Blake's friend, the sculptor John Flaxman, commissioned him to illustrate the poems of Thomas Gray. In addition, Blake's most important patron the civil servant Thomas Butts, commissioned a series of Biblical paintings from him. However, this work was not enough to compensate for price inflation and the depressed art market, caused by the war with France.

Work was scarce and life was hard, so it seemed like a stroke of luck when William Hayley, an eccentric gentleman poet, invited Blake down to live on his estate in Sussex. The Blakes were glad to leave the 'terrible desert of London' for 'sweet Felpham'.

John Milton (1800-1803) © Manchester City Art Gallery

Delighted by the natural beauty around him, Blake embarked on his new life in Sussex with great optimism. Blake received many commissions from his new patron, producing plates for Hayley's ballad Little Tom the Sailor, and engravings for his Ballads on Anecdotes relating to Animals and for his Life of Cowper.

But by 1802, the situation had soured. Blake was tired of the endless stream of trivial commissions from Hayley and his society neighbours. He had no wish to waste his talents painting a series of great poets' portraits for Hayley's new library (see portrait of Milton above), or handscreens for his neighbour, Lady Bathurst. The next year Blake wrote a letter to his patron Butts stating that only in London that he could 'carry on his visionary studies...see visions, dream dreams'.

To make matters worse, in August 1803 Blake had driven a soldier, Private John Schofield, out of his garden, allegedly uttering the treasonous words 'Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.' Scheduled to be put on trial for sedition, Blake moved back to London in late 1803, thoroughly sick of his officious patron, of his damp cottage and of the law. He briefly returned to Sussex in early 1804 and was acquitted to the riotous approval of the court.
Blake's optimism about his return to London was ill-founded. At his new lodgings on the first floor of No. 17 South Moulton Street, he began work on the illuminated books, Milton and Jerusalem. However, commercial work proved even more elusive than it had before. 'Art in London flourishes,' he wrote, 'yet no one brings work to me'.

When the publisher Robert Cromek approached him to both illustrate and engrave the poet Robert Blair's Grave, Blake's luck seemed to have taken a turn for the better. The disappointment was only the more intense, therefore, when Cromek ultimately chose the artist Schiavonetti to engrave Blake's illustrations instead of Blake himself. The Grave proved a success, but Blake received little financial reward. He now became increasingly paranoid and cantankerous, breaking off from most of his friends and patrons.

In 1806, Cromek teamed up with the artist Thomas Stothard to produce a painting and engraving of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims. Blake claimed they had stolen the idea from him and when Stothard's work was exhibited to great acclaim, Blake decided to hold a one-man exhibition centered around his own version of the Canterbury Pilgrims. Unfortunately, he could not afford to show his work in a fashionable part of town, so his exhibition was held in his brother's hosiery shop in May 1809. Almost no one came. The reviews were cruel, mocking Blake as 'an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement', and dismissing his Descriptive Catalogue as 'a farrago of nonsense...and egregious vanity'.

By 1810, Blake was impoverished and estranged from his friends and patrons. Indeed his first biographer entitled the chapter dealing with the period 1810-1817 'Years of Deepening Neglect'. But Blake continued to work, believing his Jerusalem, an epic about war, peace and liberty focused on London, to be his finest work.
As Blake turned sixty, his work at last began to find passionate admirers among younger artists, such as the watercolourists John Linnell and John Varley. It was Varley who encouraged Blake to draw sketches of his 'spiritual visitants', of which the most famous is The Ghost of a Flea. Linnell, meanwhile, despite being over thirty years Blake's junior, commissioned works for himself, and helped Blake secure commissions from others. It was thanks to his influence that Blake made the woodcuts for Robert Thornton's schooltext of Virgil's Pastorals in 1821. And Linnell himself ordered a duplicate set of the watercolours of The Book of Job (originally produced for Thomas Butts) and commissioned the series of drawings from Dante's Divine Comedy in 1824.

In 1821, Blake moved to a couple of rooms in Fountain Court, Strand, from which he could see the Thames. His young admirers called him 'The Interpreter', and confident in the judgement of posterity, he grew into a gentler and less angry man.

In the spring of 1827, Blake fell ill. A friend at his deathbed said he died 'singing of the things he saw in heaven' on August 12 at the age of sixty-nine. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the dissenters' graveyard at Bunhill Fields. One of his last acts had been to draw a picture of Catherine, his loyal wife and helpmate, from his deathbed.

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