III.

Blake as Artist

As was to become his custom, Blake illustrated the Songs with designs that demand an imaginative reading of the complicated dialogue between word and picture. His precise method of illuminated printing is not known. The most likely explanation is that he wrote the words and drew the pictures for each poem on a copper plate, using some liquid impervious to acid, which, when applied, left the text and illustration in relief. Ink or colour wash was then applied, and the printed picture was finished by hand in watercolours.

Blake has been called a pre-Romantic because he rejected Neo-Classical literary style and modes of thought. His favourite tenet was that “all things exist in the human imagination alone”. He loathed Isaac Newton and John Locke—both heroes of the Enlightenment—and in his painting, too, he shunned 18th-century conventions. His style made great use of the line: in repudiation of the painterly academic style, Blake referred back to the medieval tomb statuary he copied as an apprentice. It is perhaps this insistence on strong linear patterning in his work that attracted some of the artists in the Art Nouveau movement to his work at the end of the 19th century. The influence of Michelangelo also is identifiable in Blake’s radical foreshortening and exaggerated muscular form in one of his best-known illustrations, popularly known as The Ancient of Days, the frontispiece to his poem Europe, a Prophecy (1794). In 1791 he designed and engraved six plates to “Original Stories for Children” by Mary Wollstonecraft. At weekly dinners he met the leading radicals and freethinkers of his age, including Wollstonecraft, Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, William Godwin, Henry Fuseli, and Thomas Paine, but although Blake ardently espoused their political views, and walked around London in the revolutionary bonnet rouge, he did not sympathize with their religious beliefs at all.

Much of Blake’s painting and engraving was on religious subjects: illustrations of the work of John Milton, and The Life of Cowper, undertaken for his friend and patron William Hayley between 1804 and 1808. Milton was Blake’s favourite poet (although he rejected Milton’s Puritanism). In 1793 the Blakes had moved to Lambeth and Blake set about the 537 illustrations for Night Thoughts by Edward Young, only 43 of which were published. A commission from Robert Hartley Cromek for engraved illustrations to Robert Blair’s poem, The Grave, was abandoned before completion by Cromek, and Blake, who was not paid for the work he had done, found that his designs had been engraved by an inferior craftsman without his permission.

Such frustrations and disappointments marked Blake’s later years. Despite his extraordinarily hard work, he achieved very little recognition for his painting, engraving, or his poetry in his own day, although he did have several devoted followers: the watercolourist Samuel Palmer, for example, and the painter John Linnell, who commissioned Blake in 1821 to illustrate the Book of Job. Blake and his wife were living in increasing poverty, and Linnell’s commission rescued them for some years. Inventions to the Book of Job, 21 illustrations now among Blake’s most famous work, were published in 1826. At the end of his life, Blake was engraving illustrations to Dante’s La Divina Commedia; he had completed only seven when he died on August 12, 1827. Not long before he died, he wrote to his friend George Cumberland: “I have been very near the gates of Death & have returned very weak & an Old Man feeble & tottering, but not in Spirit & Life, not in The Real Man The Imagination which Liveth for Ever. In that I am stronger & stronger as this Foolish Body decays.” His wife outlived him.