William Blake

Blake was bound apprentice to the engraver James Basire on 4 August 1772, aged fourteen, and served seven years in Basire's Great Queen Street workshop. Reproductive engraving after other men's designs, for booksellers and antiquarian publishers, was the trade that fed him for the rest of his life; painting and poetry were what he did with what was left over. Basire sent his apprentice to Westminster Abbey from 1774 to draw the medieval royal tombs and effigies for engravings destined for Richard Gough's Sepulchral Monuments in Great Britain, and Blake's years spent copying Gothic monumental sculpture at close range left a permanent mark on the flattened, linear, sharply outlined figure style he used for the rest of his career.

He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1779 and briefly trained as a painter and engraver in the Academy's own system under Keeper George Michael Moser, but never accepted its Reynoldsian hierarchy of the arts or its preference for oil painting and soft modelling in colour over line. He supported himself for the next four decades chiefly by engraving other artists' designs for the print and book trade, work he described in private as drudgery, while writing and etching his own books almost entirely unpaid.

Around 1788 Blake developed relief etching, a method of his own invention that let him combine text and image on a single copper plate and print them together. He wrote his text in mirror-image directly onto the plate with a pen and brush in an acid-resistant medium, drew the design around it in the same substance, then bathed the plate in acid so that the untreated copper was eaten away and the text and design were left standing up in relief, printable like a woodblock rather than incised like a conventional engraving. Blake told friends, including the artist and patron John Linnell, that he learned the method from a vision of his dead brother Robert, who had died in 1787.

He then printed each sheet himself, in a range of coloured inks, and went over the pull individually by hand in watercolour, pen and ink, and on his finest late work, gold. His wife Catherine, whom he had taught to read, write, draw and colour after their marriage in 1782, worked alongside him at every stage, printing and hand-finishing plates in a partnership that made the couple's own house, wherever they were renting at the time, the entire production line: author, engraver, printer, colourist and publisher were the same two people. No two pulls of the same plate are identical, because each was a separate finishing act rather than a run off a fixed edition. Sotheby's specialist Selby Kiffer, cataloguing one of the finest surviving copies of Songs of Innocence and of Experience in 2024, put the number of Blake's own lifetime copies of that single title at about twenty-four, printed between 1789, when Songs of Innocence first appeared, and 1827, the year Blake died; only six of those copies are recorded as still in private hands, the rest having passed into institutions. Fine Books & Collections gives a different figure for the same census, about twenty-six copies over the same 1789-to-1827 span, plus a further sixteen copies printed from Blake's original plates after his death; the two specialist counts of the same body of material do not agree, and this record states both rather than picking one.

On 14 April 1789 Blake and Catherine attended the First General Conference of the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church, held over four days at a chapel in Maidenhead Lane off Great Eastcheap in the City of London. A circular letter of 7 December 1788 had called believers in the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg to a meeting to found a church distinct and separate from the established denominations; at the conference itself Blake and Catherine signed the minute book alongside the other attendees present, subscribing to forty-two propositions affirming that Swedenborg's doctrines were genuine truths revealed from heaven and that a New Jerusalem Church ought to be established. It is the only meeting of any organised body that Blake is known to have attended in his life, and the signature is a documented fact, not an inference from his art.

The break came almost immediately. If the date Blake later wrote on his own copy of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is accurate, he was already working on that book within a year or two of signing the conference minutes, and it is a sustained attack on the very writer he had just subscribed to. Blake renamed Swedenborg's claimed Memorable Relations of his travels in the spirit world as Memorable Fancies, a title that strips them of the authority Swedenborg claimed for them, and wrote plainly: "Now hear a plain fact: Swedenborg has not written one new truth. Now hear another: he has written all the old falsehoods." Elsewhere in the same book he casts Swedenborg as a minor figure rather than a prophet: "Swedenborg is the angel sitting at the tomb: his writings are the linen clothes folded up." The scholar Robert Rix reads this as Blake's rejection of Swedenborg as a singular authority on which to build a system of belief, and as Blake's turn toward a more radical, less institutional reading of the visionary tradition the Swedenborgians had opened up for him. Both the signing and the attack are documented; what is argued, by Rix and others, is exactly what drove the reversal so quickly.

From the early 1790s Blake began writing what scholars call his prophetic books, populated by an invented pantheon of his own: Urizen, a cold, law-giving, self-enclosing reason; Los, the blacksmith of imagination and time; Los's female counterpart Enitharmon; the wrathful, energetic Orc; and, in the two longest late works, Milton and Jerusalem, the sleeping giant Albion, who stands for a fallen, divided humanity and for England at once. Blake never published a key to this system and scholars, notably Northrop Frye and S. Foster Damon in the twentieth century, built one from close reading of the poems themselves; this record treats their identifications of who each figure is and how they relate as argued scholarship, not as something Blake wrote down as a glossary.

What is Blake's own documented statement of intent is a line spoken by Los in Jerusalem: "I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans; I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create." It is Los's speech within the poem, not a signed prose manifesto, but it is the line Blake scholarship returns to more than any other to describe why he built a private mythology instead of working within an inherited one, whether classical, biblical or Miltonic. Reading it as Blake's own credo is the near-universal scholarly convention rather than a claim this record makes unassisted.

Blake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, records that Blake saw his first vision as a child, of eight or ten years old by Gilchrist's own hedge, walking on Peckham Rye: he looked up and saw, in Gilchrist's words, "a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars," and on repeating the story at home only his mother's intervention saved him from a beating from his father, who took it for a lie. Blake maintained throughout his life, in company and in writing, that he continued to see and converse with visionary figures, and late in life, from about 1818, the watercolourist and astrologer John Varley encouraged him to sketch these figures directly during a series of late-night sessions at Varley's house on Great Titchfield Street, producing the group of drawings now called the Visionary Heads, intended to illustrate Varley's own Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy. Blake's Ghost of a Flea, worked up as a small tempera panel around 1819 to 1820 from one of these sketching sessions, is the best known result: Blake told Varley the flea's spirit had explained to him that fleas housed the souls of bloodthirsty men, kept small so that, sized as horses, they could not drink the country dry of blood.

This record reports the claim as a claim. Nothing in the sources consulted attempts to adjudicate whether Blake experienced these episodes as hallucination, as a deliberate visionary idiom he adopted for artistic purposes, or as something else; what is documented is that he said so repeatedly, that contemporaries who knew him well, including Varley, took the claims at face value and organised working sessions around them, and that at least one specific finished work survives with a first-hand account, from Blake himself, of what a given vision told him.

Blake had almost no market beyond two men. Thomas Butts, a senior civil servant who served as chief clerk to the Commissary General of Musters, began buying from Blake around 1799 and over the following decade, and again from about 1820 to 1827, assembled the largest collection of Blake's work ever formed by a single patron: more than two hundred biblical tempera paintings and watercolours, illustrations to Milton, colour-print drawings, illuminated books and engravings, bought at a pace that at times committed as much as a sixth of Butts's income to a single artist. Butts asked for little beyond the pictures themselves and appears to have bought largely because he wanted the work to exist and to be paid for, rather than to build a fashionable collection.

John Linnell, a younger and more commercially successful painter, took over as Blake's principal support in the 1820s. It was Linnell who financed the engraving of the Illustrations of the Book of Job, borrowing back an earlier set of watercolours Blake had made for Butts around 1805 to 1806, funding a second watercolour set in 1821, and then paying for Blake to cut twenty-one copperplate engravings plus an engraved title page between 1823 and the book's publication in 1826. The Job engravings, in the conventional intaglio technique Blake had learned as Basire's apprentice rather than his own relief method, were both his own summation of a lifetime's biblical illustration and a rare commercial and critical success in his own lifetime. It was also Linnell who commissioned, in 1824, the year Blake turned sixty-seven and three years before his death, the 102 watercolour designs illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy that Blake was still working on when he died.

In 1809 Blake mounted his only one-man exhibition, in a room above his brother James's hosiery shop on Broad Street, showing thirteen works, per the account given in the source consulted for this event, including The Ancient of Days-related designs and accompanied by a lengthy printed catalogue arguing for his own theory of art. Almost nobody came. The show was kept open well past its intended closing date and, so far as the sources consulted record, not a single picture sold.

It received one press notice. Robert Hunt, writing in his brother's paper The Examiner on 17 September 1809, called Blake "an unfortunate lunatic, whose personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement," and dismissed the catalogue itself as "a farrago of nonsense, unintelligibleness, and egregious vanity, the wild effusions of a distempered brain." There is no evidence any other paper reviewed the show at all. Hunt's review is the single most quoted contemporary verdict on Blake precisely because it was, for decades, close to the only verdict there was: it set the terms, eccentric bordering on mad, mostly ignored, in which Blake's own century discussed him.

Blake died on 12 August 1827 at his lodgings in Fountain Court off the Strand and was buried, without a headstone, in the Dissenters' burial ground at Bunhill Fields. Catherine survived him by four years and inherited his manuscripts, copperplates, drawings and remaining stock; she supported herself in part by continuing to print and hand-colour surviving copies of the illuminated books from the original plates, a documented fact established by close technical study of paper and ink rather than by report. When Catherine died in October 1831, the young sculptor Frederick Tatham, one of the circle of young admirers around Blake in his last years later called the Ancients, took possession of what remained. The scholar Joseph Viscomi notes plainly that Tatham did not inherit in a strict legal sense: no will by Catherine survives leaving the material to him, and the painter John Linnell contested the transfer, arguing the effects should have passed instead to Blake's surviving sister. Tatham himself went on to print further posthumous copies of several illuminated books between 1831 and 1832, using different paper and ink from either Blake's or Catherine's, a distinction technical examination has since used to separate his printings from the couple's own.

Shortly afterward Tatham joined the Irvingite sect, and the bibliographer G. E. Bentley Jr. assembled documentary evidence, collected across decades of research into Blake's surviving papers and the memories of those who had known him, that Tatham destroyed a substantial quantity of Blake's manuscripts in the conviction that they were the work of the devil. The exact contents and scale of what was burned were never inventoried by anyone before it happened, so the loss can be documented as a real event, argued for at length by Bentley from surviving testimony, without any surviving list of what exactly it took with it.

The Blake market has produced two distinct and well-documented categories of fake, neither of them a modern forger inventing a picture from nothing. The first is Frederick Tatham's own posthumous printing practice catching out later scholarship: his copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience catalogued as Copy e was printed with forty of its fifty-four plates in sepia ink, a colour neither Blake nor Catherine is known to have used but which Tatham did, and the sheets were subsequently hand-coloured by an unidentified nineteenth-century colourist working from another copy as a model. The book was acquired by the collector J. Pierpont Morgan in 1901 and was treated as an authentic Blake-period copy for years before the printing and colouring were correctly separated out from Blake's own work.

The second is an honest restoration that later collectors mistook for the genuine article. The collector A. G. Dew-Smith bought a copy of America a Prophecy, catalogued as Copy B, in 1868, missing two of its plates. He commissioned photolithographic facsimiles of the missing plates 4 and 9 to complete his set, apparently to have a whole book to read rather than to deceive anyone. When Copy B was sold on in 1870, the facsimile plates went with it as though original, and nobody identified them as reproductions until 1978, a gap of a little over a century in which the copy was catalogued, studied and presumably valued as more complete than it actually was.

Blake presents almost none of the attribution problem this house usually documents in early paintings: nothing here rests on connoisseurship trying to separate an autograph hand from a workshop's, because Blake worked alone with his wife and signed his intentions into the printing process itself. The real bibliographic problem is different: identifying which specific surviving sheet is which, since the same design recurs across a family of hand-finished impressions produced over decades. The standing reference for that census is G. E. Bentley Jr.'s Blake Books, published by Oxford in 1977 with a supplementary volume in 1995, which assigns each surviving copy of each illuminated title a letter, so that a given copy of Songs of Innocence and of Experience is referred to as, for example, Copy J or Copy Z rather than by a single title alone. The William Blake Archive, an ongoing digital project associated with editors including Morris Eaves, Robert N. Essick and Joseph Viscomi, maintains and updates this census online and is the closest thing Blake studies has to a living authority, in continuous revision rather than closed the way an authentication board can close.

For Blake's separate, non-illuminated graphic output the standing catalogues are David Bindman's The Complete Graphic Works of William Blake (Thames and Hudson, 1978), covering the engraved and etched designs as a body, and Robert N. Essick's The Separate Plates of William Blake: A Catalogue (Princeton University Press, 1983), which specifically excludes the illuminated books and the Job and Dante series to catalogue only the prints Blake issued as free-standing plates. Blake's paintings, watercolours and drawings are catalogued separately again, by Martin Butlin, in The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre, 1981), the first attempt at a complete catalogue across all three media. No one of these three replaces the others; between them they cover different halves of a single working life.

On 12 August 1803, while living at Felpham on England's south coast under the patronage of the poet William Hayley, Blake found a soldier, Private John Scolfield, in his garden and, on his refusal to leave, marched him off the property by the elbows to the local inn. Scolfield and a fellow soldier retaliated by swearing before their commanding officer that Blake had said, among other things, "Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves." Blake was indicted for sedition and assault, a True Bill found against him at the Petworth quarter sessions on 4 October 1803, and stood trial at Chichester on 11 January 1804 at the height of the invasion scare of the Napoleonic Wars, when a sedition conviction against a private citizen was a genuinely dangerous prospect. The jury acquitted him quickly, to applause in the courtroom, and a contemporary newspaper noted that the fabricated character of the soldiers' evidence was obvious enough on its own to produce the acquittal. Blake left Felpham for London within the year. It is the one point in his life at which the ordinary business of being a difficult, outspoken tenant came close to a criminal conviction, and it survives only because the indictment and trial record were kept.

Blake was buried at Bunhill Fields, the principal burial ground for Dissenters outside the established church, in a public grave he shared with several other burials and no headstone of his own; Catherine was buried in the same plot in 1831. The exact position of the grave within the burial ground was lost for well over a century, since parts of Bunhill Fields were later laid out as gardens and the original numbered grid of plots fell out of use. In 2006 Luis and Carol Garrido, members of the Blake Society, spent roughly a year cross-referencing archival burial records against historical plans of the ground and located the specific plot. The Blake Society raised funds by public subscription for a memorial stone, carved by the letter-cutter Lida Cardozo, which was unveiled on the plot on 12 August 2018, the 191st anniversary of Blake's death, before a crowd of several hundred. For nearly two centuries, in other words, the man buried under one of the most reproduced images in English art had no marker at all.