WILLIAM BLAKE 1757-1827

British most poet, painter, and printmaker famous for his paintings of mythology characters.

 

William Blake (November 28, 1757-August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Though largely unrecognised during his lifetime, today Blake's work, produced in partnership with his wife Catherine, is widely known. According to Northrop Frye, who undertook a study of Blake's entire poetic opus, his prophetic poems form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the [English] language". Others have praised Blake's visual artistry, in particular his engravings: "[Blake] is far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced". In recent years, a memorial was erected for him and his wife.

Blake was born at 28a Broad Street, Golden Square, London into a middle-class family. He was one of four children (an older brother died in infancy). His father was a hosier and his mother was chiefly in charge of her son's education. The Blakes were Dissenters and are believed to have belonged to the Moravian sect. The Bible was an early and profound influence on Blake, and would remain a crucial source of inspiration throughout his life.

 

From a young age Blake claimed to have seen visions. The earliest certain instance was when he was at the age of about eight or ten in Peckham Rye, London, when he reported seeing a tree filled with angels "bespangling every bough like stars." According to Blake's Victorian biographer Gilchrist, he returned home and reported this vision, and only escaped a thrashing from his father by the intervention of his mother. Though all the evidence suggests that Blake's parents were supportive and of a broadly liberal bent, his mother seems to have been especially supportive; several of Blake's early drawings and poems decorated the walls of her chamber.

 

On another occasion, Blake watched the haymakers at work, and thought that he saw angelic figures walking among them. It is possible that other visions occurred before these incidents: in later life, Blake's wife Catherine would recall to him the time he saw God's head "put to the window". The vision, Catherine reminded her husband, "set you ascreaming" (543, Blake Record, ed. Bentley Jr., Oxford, 1969).

 

William Blake began engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities purchased for him by his father (a further indication of the support Blake's parents lent their son), a practice that was then preferred to real-life drawing. Within these drawings Blake found his first exposure to classical forms, through the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, Marten Heemskerk and Albrecht Dürer (Blake Record, 422). His parents knew enough of his headstrong temperament that he was not sent to school but was instead enrolled in drawing classes. He read avidly on subjects of his own choosing. During this period, Blake was also making explorations into poetry; his early work displays knowledge of Ben Jonson and Edmund Spenser.

 

In 1779, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House, near the Strand. The terms of his study required him to make no payment; he was, however, required to supply his own materials throughout the six-year period. There, he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens, championed by the school's first president, Joshua Reynolds. Over time, Blake came to detest Reynolds' attitude to art, especially his pursuit of 'general truth' and 'general beauty'. During an address given by Reynolds in which he maintained that the tendency to abstraction is "the great glory of the human mind", Blake reportedly responded "to generalise is to be an idiot; to particularise is alone the distinction of merit". Blake also disliked Reynolds' apparent humility, which he held to be a form of hypocrisy. Against Reynolds' fashionable oil painting, Blake preferred the Classical exactness of his early influences, Michelangelo and Raphael.

 

These riots were in response to a parliamentary bill designed to advance Roman Catholicism. This disturbance, later known as the Gordon Riots after Lord George Gordon (whose Protestant Association incited the riots) provoked a flurry of legislation from the government of George III, as well as the creation of the first police force.

 

Even close to death, Blake's greatest mental occupation was in his art. He worked furiously on the illustrations to Dante's Inferno, and one of the very last shillings in his possession was spent on a pencil to allow him to continue sketching (Blake Records, 341).

 

Blake was an important proponent of imagination as the modern western world currently defines the word. His belief that humanity could overcome the limitations of its five senses is perhaps one of Blake's greatest legacies. His words, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite", (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell) were seen as bizarre at the time, but are now accepted as part of our modern definition of imagination. This quote was the source of the names for both The Doors musical group and Aldous Huxley's book The Doors of Perception.

 

On the day of his death Blake remained relentlessly working on the Dante series. Eventually, it is reported, he ceased working and turned to his wife, who was in tears by his bedside. Beholding her, Blake is said to have cried "Stay Kate! Keep just as you are - I will draw your portrait - for you have ever been an angel to me." Having completed this portrait (now lost), Blake laid down his tools and began to sing hymns and verses; it is reported also that he spoke to his wife, telling her that he would remain with her always (Ackroyd, Blake, 389). At six that evening, he died. Gilchrist reports that a female lodger in the same house, who had been present at his expiration, said "I have been at the death, not of a man, but of a blessed angel" (Gilchrist, The Life of William Blake, London, 1863, 405). Blake is now recognised as a saint in Ecclesia Gnostica Catholica. The Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his honour in Australia in 1949.

 

Gallery pictures: William Blake - Blake's Red Dragon 1803-05, William Blake - Sepulcher 1805, William Blake - The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve c. 1825, William Blake - Michael Binding Satan, William Blake - Satan Inflicting Boils Upon Job, William Blake - Good and Evil Angels, William Blake - Elohim Creating Adam, William Blake - Pity, William Blake - Count Ugolino and his Sons in Prison, William Blake - God Judging Adam, William Blake - The Blasphemer, William Blake - Newton

 

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