Jerusalem

An Unlikely Genius Who Lived on the Edge of Poverty

Born into a shopkeeper's family, he was an unruly child who never went to school. He was raised among dissenters of the Moravian church, and was deeply influenced by the Bible in his formative years, though in later life he rejected conventional religion. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to an engraver who taught him an outdated approach to the discipline, something which dogged him throughout his lifetime. He married an illiterate woman five years younger, and taught her to read, as well as to engrave and print, and to illuminate his prints with watercolors. She became his loyal helpmate for the rest of his life, though they never had any children. He was an 18th-century proto feminist, condemning enforced chastity and marriage, and defending the rights of women to self fulfillment.

His illustrations for other authors' manuscripts were so powerful and so personal--and often at odds with the sense of the texts--that he lost clients and could barely scrape together a living for himself and his wife. In later life, though he associated with some of London's leading literary and artistic lights, he was generally considered by them to be at best an eccentric, at worst a madman. He lived most of his life on the edge of poverty and died unrecognized. When he was on his deathbed he spent his last coins to buy a pencil in order to continue his sketches for Dante's Inferno. Today this dubious and extravagant poet, painter and engraver is considered one of the most important figures in the history both of art and poetry. Even so, his writing remains "… in proportion to its merits, the least-read body of poetry in the English language," according to critic, Northrop Frye.

It is to this man, William Blake, that the world owes, in large part, the concept of "imagination" which today reigns supreme in the realm of both literature and the visual arts. He said, "The imagination is not a state. It is the human existence itself." Poet, painter, engraver and visionary, in the late 18th century Blake single handedly created bold new modes of expression in both literature and the visual arts, and is regarded today as a singularly powerful and original artist whose legacy looms large over our own times.

The Giant, Albion

Blake Was a Born Visionary

Born in London to a modest hosier in 1757, unlike most of the other writers and artists of his time, Blake grew up in the city, and only saw the countryside on excursions. It was on one of these weekend jaunts, to Peckham Rye, that the 10-year-old Blake saw his first vision: a tree full of angels. This ability to "see" what he imagined was never to abandon him throughout his life. Those who watched him draw imaginary personages affirmed that he had the rare ability to see mental images as if they were outside of his head, and could be regarded as solid figures by walking around them. Both his poetry and his artwork are intensely informed by these palpable visions.

Blake was a rebellious child and, since he had artistic abilities, he was sent to a Mr. Pars' drawing school when he was 10. From there, at the age of 14, he entered into an apprenticeship to the engraver, James Basire. This is not to say that he joined the world of the fine arts, as engraving in those days was considered a trade, simply a way of rendering illustrations for printing presses. During his seven years with Basire, Blake spent a lot of his time in Westminster Abbey, making drawings of tombs and monuments for Basir's project to document the monuments in the Abbey. His time spent there gave Blake a sense of history and its heroes. He also had more visions in the Abbey, one of a great procession of monks and priests, against a background of "the chant of plain-song and chorale." Unfortunately for the apprentice engraver, however, Basire's stiff and formal manner of engraving was outdated, and his training left Blake unfashionable as an engraver.

Newton

Dissatisfaction, Creation

When he completed his apprenticeship in 1779, Blake was admitted to the Royal Academy, where he soon became dissatisfied with the teaching of its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds and the rest of the instructors. He felt that his talents were being wasted trying to recreate Reynolds' sleek, fashionable style of oil painting, preferring the classical work of Dürer, Raphael and Michelangelo. In literature, as well, he admired the Elizabethans (Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser) and the ancient ballads. At this time Blake was also an admirer of the Irish Neoclassical painter, James Barry, for his grand historical paintings. Barry was also an accomplished aquatint printmaker.

The decade 1780-1790 was eventful for Blake. In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher and moved out of his father's house to Green Street, near Leicester Square. In that same year he met John Flaxman, who was to become his first patron. George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, also became an admirer of Blake's work at this time. His first collection of poems was published around 1783. After their father's death in 1784, Blake and his brother, Robert, opened a print shop and did work for the radical publisher, Joseph Johnson. Johnson's house was a meeting place for some of the main intellectual dissidents of the time: the scientist, Joseph Priestly; the philosopher, Richard Price; the early feminist and wife of the philosopher, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft; and the American revolutionary, Thomas Paine. Blake illustrated Wollstonecraft's Original Short Stories from Real Life (1788-1791), and shared many of her advanced views regarding women, publishing his socially and sexually revolutionary Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793, though there is no conclusive evidence that they ever met. It was around the middle of this decade that Blake and his work came to the attention of a small group of artists-including John Flaxman and Henry Fuesli-who respected his perseverance and his vision of his own work.

Blake's beloved younger brother and partner in the print shop, Robert, died in 1787. The poet said afterwards that he saw his brother's spirit rise and pass through the ceiling en route to heaven. Blake also affirmed that it was the spirit of his dead brother which appeared to him "in a vision in the night" with a novel technique for combining image and text on the same printing plate. This was relief etching, a process in which, instead of coating a plate with an acid-proof resist and scratching the image into it, the artist starts with a clean plate and creates the image and text with the resist itself. When the plate is burned in acid the protected parts stand up in relief. Blake's published his first experiments with relief etching in The Songs of Innocence, the first of his illuminated books, which was assembled by hand by his wife. This book, and its successor, Songs of Experience, were totally neglected during Blake's life, neither of these seminal works emerging into the light until 50 years after his death.

A Century and a Half Ahead of His Time

Jacob Bronowski, Blake scholar and author, among other works, of William Blake and the Age of Revolution, refers to these two books as "epoch-making works," and affirms, "… they were as formative for the culture of the 20th century in Europe and America as The Bible and Pilgrim's Progress had been for an earlier age." Bronowski even has an explanation for the lack of interest in Blake's work in his own time and its acute relevance today: "Blake's failure to fire his contemporaries on the one hand and his striking power to fire the 20th century on the other are more than matters of the form and scope of romantic poetry. It is Blake's insight into the dilemmas of civilized city life and into the hierarchies of power among warring states and industrial societies that left his contemporaries cold and seems to speak directly to today." For Blake was a revolutionary. He was only 18 when the Declaration of Independence inspired not only the American colonies, but idealists all over the world. According to Bronowski, he was not only opposed to private property, but also "to any established church, to formal government and the laws of his time, to the machinery of war or any other kind of machinery, which keeps men working 'to polish brass & iron hour after hour, laborious task, kept ignorant of its use.'"

Blake's poem, The French Revolution, was printed in 1891 by Joseph Johnson (the publisher of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man), but was deemed too dangerous to publish at the time. It was a blow to the poet, who began to realize by then that he was destined to remain anonymous during his lifetime. Of course he never had any idea of the importance which his work would acquire for posterity. Not one to give up, however, Blake published his Prospectus, a promotion piece for his recent works. In it, besides a critique of the establishment and of the difficulty for artists to gain recognition when they lacked "the means to propagate such works as have wholly absorbed the Man of Genius," it includes an exhortation for customers to come to his house to buy his illuminated prophetic books, which he continued to produce. The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a prose epic laced with proverbs; The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, an allegory about freedom; and America, A Prophecy, a combination of history and myth; all date from 1793. The following year he published Songs of Experience, as well as Europe, A Prophecy, and The First Book of Urizen, his version of the origins of humanity and the natural world.

O Flames of Furious Desires

You Can Take a Boy Out of the City

In 1800 the Blakes moved to a cottage on the country estate of the poet, William Hayley, in order to illustrate his works. Though this sojourn lasted only two years, as Blake decided that Hayley was not paying him enough and so returned to London. Blake's time in the country had been a refreshing change from London, as he was delighted with the natural beauty which surrounded him. He soon tired of the social life of the country squires, however, and returned to London, affirming that it was the only place where he could "carry on my visionary studies… see visions, dream dreams…" He increasingly used the language of religion to express his indignation with human and social injustice, identifying both the state and the church as prisons in which their subjects suffered both physically and spiritually. His optimism about returning to London was ill founded, as his fortune soon floundered there for a decade and a half, during which he was cheated by a publisher, who commissioned his illustrations for the Canterbury Pilgrims to another engraver. Unable to afford an exhibit in one of the fashionable London galleries, Blake exhibited his own version of the illustrations in his brother's hosiery shop. The show was virtually ignored, except for some cruel reviews, one of which referred to Blake as "an unfortunate lunatic whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement…" It was during this time that he produced his illustrated books, Milton and Jerusalem-which Blake considered to be his finest work- but they did not sell well. Commissions were also lacking as, by 1810, Blake was impoverished and alienated from his friends and patrons. "Art in London flourishes," he wrote, "yet no one brings work to me."

Belated Recognition by the Younger Generation

It was not till he was 60 years old that Blake's illuminated poems began to attract enthusiastic admirers among younger artists such as the watercolorists, John Linnell and John Varley. Linnell not only commissioned work from Blake for himself, but encouraged others to do so. It was Linnell who ordered the series of drawings illustrating the Book of Job and later the engravings of them. In 1825 Linnell commissioned him the watercolor drawings to illustrate Dante's Divine Comedy. Finally, in his 60's, William Blake found the support necessary to do the visionary work which he had always yearned to do, and it was in his last years that he produced his most authentic and most beautiful work. Even so, when his engravings for the Book of Job were published in 1826, the book was a commercial failure. In his final years Blake was too unwell with gallstones to write, but he still colored copies of his books in bed. England's greatest visionary poet and artist died at the age of 69 in a room off the Strand, and was buried in an unmarked grave in the dissenters' graveyard at Bunhill Fields. On the day of his death Blake was still working on his Dante series. Just before he died he set that work aside and drew a portrait of his wife, Kate. He then began to sing hymns and verses, dying at six in the evening. The painter George Richmond (who was to name his son "William Blake Richmond") later wrote: "He died… in a most glorious manner. He said he was going to that country he had all his life wished to see, and expressed himself happy, hoping for salvation through Jesus Christ. Just before he died his countenance became fair. His eyes brighten'd and he burst out singing of the things he saw in Heaven."

For many years after his death Blake was appreciated only by a reduced circle of mainly artists and poets. The poet and painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), bought one of Blake's sketchbooks for 10 shillings, which he later lent to Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, and then to Swinburne in 1868, when he wrote his landmark critical essay on Blake. William Butler Yeats participated in the preparation of an edition of Blake's works in 1893, and in 1920 T.S. Eliot published an essay in The Sacred Wood, which brought the visionary English artist/poet to the attention of the post World War I public. An excellent recent work on Blake and his work is the long essay written in 1997 by Alfred Kazin, An Introduction to William Blake. The full text is full of insightful comment and well worth the trouble to go here and read it. Let's end this brief reflection on a great printmaker by reproducing the portentous Blake quote with which Kazin ends his essay: "Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed & govern'd their Passions, or have no Passions, but because they have cultivated their Understandings."