William Blake

William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, or "Author & Printer", as he signed many of his books. He is now widely recognised as a genius of English letters, and one of the foremost (arguably the foremost) visionary artists of the modern age; it is now fashionable in certain circles to criticise his art as simplistic. It is fair to state that Blake's visual art, if only for being so closely wedded to his verse, will outlive such criticism.

Early career

Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London into a middle-class family. He was from earliest youth a seer of visions and a dreamer of dreams, seeing "Ezekiel sitting under a green bough", and "a tree full of angels at Peckham", and such he remained to the end of his days. His teeming imagination sought expression both in verse and in drawing. At ten years old, he began engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities, a practice that was then preferred to real-life drawing. Four years later he became apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire. After two years Basire sent him to copy art from the Gothic churches in London. At the age of twenty-one Blake finished his apprenticeship and set up as a professional engraver.

Related Topics:
London - Engraving - Greek - Drawing - Gothic - Church

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In 1779, he became a student at the Royal academy, where he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style of fashionable painters such as Rubens. He preferred the Classical exactness of Michelangelo and Raphael.

Related Topics:
1779 - Royal academy - Rubens - Michelangelo - Raphael

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In July, 1780, he was at the head of a rampaging mob that stormed Newgate Prison in London. The mob were wearing blue cockades (ribbons) on their caps, to symbolise solidarity with the insurrection in the American colonies. This disturbance, later known as the Gordon riots, provoked a flurry of paranoid legislation from the government of George III, as well as the creation of the first police force.

Related Topics:
1780 - Newgate Prison - Cockade - Gordon riots - George III

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In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become his patron. In the same year he married a poor, illiterate girl named Catherine Boucher, who was five years his junior. Catherine signed her wedding contract with an X. Blake taught her to read and write and even trained her as an engraver. At that time, George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, became an admirer of Blake's work.

Related Topics:
1782 - National Gallery

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Blake's first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published circa 1783. After his father's death, William and brother Robert opened a print shop in 1784 and began working with radical publisher Joseph Johnson. At Johnson's house he met some of the leading intellectual dissidents of the time in England, including Joseph Priestley, scientist; Richard Price, philosopher; John Henry Fuseli, painter whom he became friends with; Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist; and Thomas Paine, American revolutionary. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, Blake had great hopes for the American and French revolution and wore a red liberty cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries, but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror in the French revolution.

Related Topics:
Poetical Sketches - 1783 - 1784 - Joseph Priestley - Richard Price - John Henry Fuseli - Mary Wollstonecraft - Thomas Paine - William Wordsworth - William Godwin - Robespierre - Reign of Terror

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Mary Wollstonecraft became a close friend, and Blake illustrated her Original Stories from Real Life (1788). They shared similar views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage. In the Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793 Blake condemned the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.

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In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with relief etching, which was the method used to produce most of his books of poems. Blake wrote in a letter that the method was revealed to him in a dream, by his dead brother, Robert. The process is also referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the design standing. The pages printed from these plates then had to be hand-colored in water colors and stitched together to make up a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works: the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and '. Each of his illuminated books was thus a unique work of art and a radical break with not only traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting poetic and philosophical discourse. Blake seems to have believed, or rather hoped, that self published books could liberate the artist and author from the tyranny of censorship by Church and State but its time consuming nature meant that his most personal and prophetic works reached a minute audience in his lifetime.

Related Topics:
1788 - Illuminated manuscripts - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

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