William Blake – 1757 – 1827
Engraver, poet and mystic - one of England’s most important Artists
William Blake created his own mythology and more than two hundred years later he still challenges us to open the eyes of our soul - to look and see.
November 2007 will see the 250th anniversary of Blake’s birth. This is a short introduction to the ideas behind his work.
Blake’s parents were not wealthy and Blake’s education was basic. However, his parents recognized his artistic talents and enrolled him, aged ten years, in Henry Pars’ drawing school where he learned to draw the human figure by copying from plaster casts of ancient statues.
At age 14 he was apprenticed to James Basire, a renowned engraver. In the eighteenth century engraving was the means by which the oil paintings of the masters were made available to a discerning public. Engravings could be pressed out one after the other with few discrepancies between each printing. For Blake engraving became an art form in itself.
At the age of nine he told his parents he had seen “a tree filled with angels”. These “visions” continued throughout his life and his contemporaries regarded his art as profoundly disturbing. As an adult Blake described himself as a medieval ‘craftsman’, artist, poet and visionary. Many of his friends thought him mad, while others dismissed him as a harmless crank!
Blake rejected artists like Sir Joshua Reynolds and the history and portrait painters preferred by the Royal Academy of Art. Reynolds represented everything Blake despised about the materialistic age in which he lived. For inspiration he turned to Buonarroti Michelangelo (1475-1564). Blake’s first work is believed to be Joseph of Arimathaea among the Rocks of Albion dated 1773, the second year of his apprenticeship.
Blake and the Romantics
Although Blake would probably have rejected any attempts to pigeonhole his work, it best fits the artistic school known as the Romantics. The Romantics stressed Nature and man’s relationship to it. Nature was wild and powerful, overwhelming man both physically (as in earthquakes etc) and metaphorically (as in the imaginative contemplation of the beauty of Nature.) The Romantics rejected eighteenth century views of Nature where the landscape is tamed by man to his advantage.
Blake’s Mythology
Blake made his living by making etchings to illustrate his own poems and the work of others. He invented his own mythology where God was renamed Urizen, a character who wreaks havoc on mankind through Jesus who Blake renamed Orc. Urizen appears in the frontispiece to Blake’s poem Europe: A Prophecy sometimes called The Ancient of Days He is portrayed as an old man whom Blake claimed to have seen in a vision and who bears some resemblance to Michelangelo’s portrayal of the Lord in The Creation of Adam.
Technical Ingenuity and Hard Work
Blake was capable of great technical ingenuity bearing in mind the relatively limited means available to him. His wooden rolling-press consisted of a strong framework supporting two hardwood rollers. A heavy flat bed (the “plank”) was run between the rollers. These were driven by Blake hauling on long spokes radiating from a spindle on the upper roller – heavy work indeed!
Two Hundred Years On
Blake was not well-known during his lifetime and it was only after his death that his art and poetry became famous. Toward the end of his life a small group of friends believed in his work and treated him as a kind of “guru”. It was probably their patronage that saved him from starvation.
More than two hundred years later William Blake still fascinates us and challenges us to open the eyes of our soul - to look and see.
