William Blake
The poet and visionary.
William Blake was an engraver, poet and painter. He illustrated his own poems and Dante's Divine Comedy with visions of angels and demons.
William Blake was born in London in 1757. His father sold hosiery and fabrics. Even as a child Blake claimed to see visions, such as angels in a tree. He attended drawing school and at fourteen was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire. During his apprenticeship he drew the tombs in Westminster Abbey, and Gothic art became a lifelong inspiration. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy but chafed at its rules.
In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher. She could not write when they married, but Blake taught her, and she became his collaborator at the printing press. Towards the end of the 1780s Blake developed his own method, relief etching, in which text and image were etched on the same copper plate. The prints were then coloured by hand. In this way he published his collections of poems, among them Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1794), which includes the poem The Tyger.
Blake created his own mythology with figures such as Urizen, the stern god of reason. The image The Ancient of Days, in which a bearded figure measures the world with a pair of compasses, is one of his best-known. The colour print Newton (1795) in Tate shows the scientist as a nude figure bent over his calculations. His style features powerful, muscular bodies, flame-like lines and clear colours. He despised oil painting and preferred watercolour and tempera.
Blake was a radical who sympathised with the French Revolution. He lived in poverty for almost his whole life and was seen by many as eccentric or mad. In 1803 he was charged with sedition after a quarrel with a soldier, but was acquitted. An exhibition in 1809 was a failure. In his last years he was supported by a circle of young artists and worked on illustrations to the Book of Job and to Dante's Divine Comedy. He died in 1827 with the Dante pictures unfinished.
After his death Blake was forgotten, but the Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him. Today he is seen as one of England's greatest poets and a unique visual artist. The poem that opens his work Milton became the hymn Jerusalem, and his visions inspired the counterculture of the 1960s.