William Blake, long misunderstood, is today regarded by many as one of the greatest British artists of all time.
He combined his poems with splendid illustrations, and has been celebrated as much as a poet as a painter and engraver.
For two centuries Blake’s genius has inspired later generations, from the Pre-Raphaelites to the pop culture of the twentieth century.
Care to discover him with me?
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William Blake: his life and his idea of art
William Blake, an English artist who lived between 1757 and 1827, was born in London and, from childhood, claimed to have visions: he said he had seen a tree full of angels at Peckham Rye and the face of God at the window. No surprise, then, that he held all his life the idea of art as a totality, a pure spiritual activity far from materiality.
He trained as an engraver, an apprentice of the master James Basire from 1772, and studied briefly at the Royal Academy, whose academicism he detested. In 1788 he devised a technique of his own, relief etching (or “illuminated printing”), which let him engrave text and image together on the same copper plate and then hand-colour each page: this is how his famous illuminated books were born, such as the Songs of Innocence and of Experience (with The Tyger and The Lamb) and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
His creations always have very transparent, watercolour-like tints, and his poems must be read together with the illustrations to be fully understood. He drew inspiration from Dante, Homer, Milton and the Bible, many passages of which he illustrated, believing they held the true divine message.
In his lifetime he was almost ignored: at his death he had sold fewer than thirty copies of his most famous work. He was always supported by his wife Catherine Boucher, who learned to print and colour the plates and worked alongside him. Blake died in London in 1827 and was buried in the dissenters’ cemetery of Bunhill Fields.
Blake’s contemporary hero: Newton
Newton is one of the works that best captures his poetics, tied to the “Romantic” sublime of his time and to the idea of the heroic Michelangelesque titan. It is one of the great colour prints of 1795 and is today held at Tate Britain in London.
The figure of Newton is not portrayed with the scientist’s real features, but as a great classical hero, nude and powerful like the figures of Michelangelo, tense in the effort of the search for truth. The man is folded in on himself, as if to show the impossibility of the rational mind to grasp reality and to reach towards the infinite. He pays no attention to the dark sky (or is it the darkness of a sea floor?) and ignores the rocks he sits on, wholly absorbed in measuring with his compass a different truth, one that is nonetheless very hard to reach.
The figure is alone, cut off from the world, prostrate like an Atlas who must bear the weight of a knowledge that man, by his own means, will never fully possess.
William Blake’s symbolism
In Blake there is a very strong inclination to symbolism, which would influence many later artists, and a sharp critique of his contemporaries: Enlightenment society had made science its foundation, and precisely for this, Blake believed, the artist had to be an exceptional creature, able to go beyond the limits of rationality and to grasp what scientific knowledge alone cannot explain.
We see it clearly in Nebuchadnezzar (1795): the king of Babylon, punished by God with madness, is reduced to a beast crawling on the grass, with wide eyes and taloned nails, a terrible image of man who has lost every spiritual dimension.
Blake’s mythology: Urizen, Los and Elohim
Blake did not merely illustrate the Bible: he invented a personal mythology peopled with symbolic figures. There is Urizen, the law-giving god of reason and rules, often depicted with a compass as he “measures” the world (as in the famous The Ancient of Days); and there is Los, the blacksmith-poet who stands for imagination and creative force, his eternal adversary.
Even when he paints biblical episodes, as in Elohim Creating Adam (1795), Blake reinterprets them in his own way: the creation of man is not a moment of joy but an almost painful act, in which Adam is already entangled by the serpent of sin and of the material world.
William Blake’s famous quotes
Blake was also a formidable aphorist. Here are some of his most famous lines:
- “Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion.”
- “Imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.”
- “Men are admitted into Heaven not because they have curbed and governed their passions or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.”
- “Those who restrain desire do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained.”
- “If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite.”
This last line, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, inspired the name of the band The Doors and the title of Aldous Huxley’s essay The Doors of Perception: a small example of how Blake still speaks to the most distant generations.
Where to see William Blake’s works
Blake’s works are found above all in London, and the good news is that the main museums are free:
- Tate Britain holds the great colour prints of 1795 (Newton, Nebuchadnezzar, Elohim Creating Adam, Pity, The Ghost of a Flea) and many watercolours;
- the British Museum keeps a vast collection of his engravings, prints and illuminated books;
- the watercolours for the Divine Comedy (commissioned by John Linnell in 1824-27 and left unfinished) are divided between the Tate, the Ashmolean in Oxford and other museums around the world.
A curiosity: in front of the British Library in London stands a large bronze sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi depicting Blake’s very Newton, seated with his compass. A modern tribute to an artist whom, in his lifetime, almost no one had understood.
And you, looking at his Newton bent over the compass, do you see the celebration of science or its condemnation?
