The reference to “my lot in the heavens” reflects Blake’s lifelong engagement with religious ideas, albeit in a highly oppositional way. His family were probably Dissenters, Protestants but not members of the established Church of England; there is some evidence, however, that Catherine Blake may have been a Moravian. That sect emphasized interior spirituality but regarded itself as in communion with the Church of England, in which William was indeed baptized (at Saint James’s, Westminster, on December 11).6
As a child, young William alarmed his parents by reporting that he experienced visions. In later life he told his friends that he had seen angels among the haymakers in the fields, which still lay in easy walking distance from Broad Street. When he got home and reported the vision, he barely escaped a thrashing for telling a lie. More disturbingly, his wife once remarked, “You know, dear, the first time you saw God was when you were four years old and he put his head to the window and set you ascreaming.”7 The anecdote surely suggests remarkable anxiety in a small boy.
Since William showed artistic talent from an early age, his parents decided to have him trained as an artist, and were remarkably generous in paying for an extensive collection of prints that he began to acquire. For a boy without much money, however, there was no thought of aiming at a prestigious career in the fine arts. At ten he entered a vocational school in the Strand run by Henry Pars, whose purpose was to produce commercial artists. The school had been founded as part of a campaign to improve British textiles, ceramics, and other luxury goods, and the boys were trained to be “masters of the several arts and manufactures, in which elegance of taste and correctness of drawing are required.”8
Apprentice Engraver
The next step was a formal apprenticeship. At the customary age of thirteen Blake was apprenticed to an engraver named James Basire in Great Queen Street near Covent Garden, less than a mile from home. The apprenticeship lasted for the usual seven years, during which he lived in Basire’s house, usually with one or more other boys. The youths put in thirteen-hour days for a work week of seventy-eight hours, with only Sunday off, and that was usual too.
Basire’s specialty was a humble genre, producing detailed depictions of “antiquities,” medieval churches and monuments. As it turned out, the work appealed to Blake. One of his tasks, which he loved, was to spend long days in Westminster Abbey making accurate drawings of the tombs and monuments there. That experience inspired him with a love of Gothic style that would continue throughout his life. According to one report, he experienced a memorable vision at the abbey: “The aisles and galleries of the old building (or sanctuary) suddenly filled with a great procession of monks and priests, choristers and censer-bearers, and his entranced ear heard the chant of plainsong and chorale, while the vaulted roof trembled to the sound of organ music.”9
Engraving was extremely demanding work, requiring great control of the sharp tools with which lines were incised into copper plates. Robert Essick, an experienced printmaker as well as Blake expert, says that since the graver has to be pushed through the metal “like a plow,” extreme care must be taken to control the width of the groove. “Engraving is the most exacting of all the graphic techniques, requiring considerable physical strength in anyone who works at it for hours on end. But this energy must always be controlled by a well-disciplined hand, eye, and mind.” When the plate was ready for printing, it would be heated over a brazier and dabbed with ink, after which it would be wiped so that ink remained only in the incised lines.10
The illustration reproduced here (figure 1), from an eighteenth-century French manual, shows the process in elegant detail. In the rectangles that are labeled Fig. 1 and Fig. 2, the design is transferred from a sheet of paper to the copper plate, which has previously been coated with varnish hardened over a flame. The reverse side of the paper has a layer of coloring that, as with carbon paper in later times, will duplicate the image as it is traced or (if the design is to be discarded) pricked through with a series of tiny dots. In Fig. 3 the design has been incised into the metal with a burin. Fig. 4 shows the correct way to hold the burin, which in Fig. 5 is being pushed firmly forward in the manner described by Essick. Since it would be extremely difficult to engrave curved lines smoothly, the plate rests on a cushion so that the engraver can turn it as needed. As the burin moves away from him, copper shavings spiral off to the side. In this picture the hands have been rendered with cross-hatching to create a three-dimensional effect, and some lines are more deeply incised than others so that they will hold more ink and appear darker when printed.
1. The art of engraving
Blake took great pride in his skill: “I defy any man to cut cleaner strokes than I do, or rougher when I please.” But he also acknowledged that “engraving is eternal work. . . . I curse and bless engraving alternately because it takes so much time and is so intractable, though capable of such beauty and perfection.” His eyeglasses still exist and show that he was moderately myopic, an advantage for close work.11
At the time, engravers were regarded as mere manual laborers, mechanically reproducing the work of others. Blake greatly resented the “pretended philosophy which teaches that execution is the power of one, and invention of another.” He complained also that “to engrave after another painter is infinitely more laborious than to engrave one’s own inventions.”12 It was his own original works that would preoccupy him all his life.
For a brief time after the apprenticeship ended, Blake was a student at the distinguished Royal Academy, presided over by Sir Joshua Reynolds. He seems to have left after less than a year, deeply offended by what seemed to him the condescension of Sir Joshua and the teachers. There, too, engravers were treated as inferior. Up until the middle of the eighteenth century, painters, sculptors, and architects were likewise regarded as mere craftsmen. That had begun to change, however, and the founding of the academy reflected a new sense that artists deserved higher social standing. But when engravers petitioned to be granted equal status, they were told that the “relative preeminence of the arts has ever been estimated accordingly as they more or less abound in those intellectual qualities of invention and composition, which painting, sculpture and architecture so eminently possess, but of which engraving is wholly devoid.” A century would pass before engravers were finally given full privileges by the Royal Academy.13
During this period Blake formed a number of close friendships with other artists that would prove to be enduring. These included George Cumberland, an insurance clerk, and John Flaxman, whom Blake would later call his “dearest friend.” Thomas Stothard, two years older, was beginning a highly successful career as a designer of book illustrations and when possible would get Blake commissions to engrave them. An etching by Stothard (figure 2) commemorates a remarkable adventure when he, Blake, and a third friend whose identity is uncertain rented a small boat for a sketching expedition on the River Medway southeast of London. This happened in 1780, at the height of Britain’s war with the American colonies and France, and the young artists were oblivious enough to pull up on shore across from the immense naval arsenal at Chatham, where forty gigantic men-of-war were being refitted. The three were promptly arrested under suspicion of spying for France, and detained under arrest while their captors sent to the Royal Academy to verify that they were who they claimed to be. While they waited, Stothard’s daughter-in-law heard, “their provisions were brought on shore, and a tent formed for them of their sails, suspended over the boat hook and oars, placed as uprights in the ground.” Bentley comments that for Blake “the incident must have confirmed what he had always suspected about the arbitrariness of civil and military power.”14
2. An artists’ picnic: Blake and friends
The Engraver’s Work
By the time his apprenticeship ended, Blake was expert in the complex techniques of cross-hatching, dots, and stippling that were used to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth. He continued to employ these skills whenever a publisher commissioned illustrat
ions; a good example is his portrait of Democritus after a painting by Rubens (figure 3), done when he was thirty-two. As Essick observes, the carefully incised patterns “have no similarity to a real face, and only when we ‘read’ them properly do they give the illusion of a face.” Sufficiently magnified they would cease to do even that, just as a computer image becomes a mosaic of pixels.15
Blake had virtually no opportunity to see actual paintings by the great masters. The National Gallery did not yet exist, and most of the masterpieces in England were hidden away in private mansions. At one point a would-be patron undertook to raise funds to send him to Italy, but that project fell through. So his impression of Rubens, or for that matter of Michelangelo, who would become his artistic hero, was based entirely on black-and-white prints, a totally different medium from the originals.
The original Rubens painting of Democritus, now in the Prado in Madrid, shows a relaxed philosopher with a genial smile; in ancient times he was known as the laughing philosopher. Blake’s engraving is very different, since it was made to illustrate a book about physiognomy by Johann Caspar Lavater, a Swiss pastor whose aphorisms he knew and annotated. The intention of that pseudoscience was to deduce character from the shape of the head and face. In Lavater’s opinion Democritus must have been a sarcastic mocker: “Mockery contracts the eyes, and gathers the skin round the eye into wrinkles. . . . Mockery puffs up the cheeks, and gives them a globular form. . . . No one can consider the mouth of our Democritus as beautiful; it is observable that its deformity is chiefly owing to a sneering humour, and that it would be still ugly though it were not opened so wide.”16 Blake undoubtedly remembered this analysis when he mentioned Democritus in his notebook lyric Mock on Mock on Voltaire Rousseau, to be considered later on.
3. Democritus
When he did commercial jobs, Blake was willing to work in a wide variety of styles, many of which don’t look “Blakean” in the least.17 At least four hundred plates by him are known, and many more may exist that have not been identified. But his graphic style was increasingly regarded as dry and old-fashioned, much as his master Basire’s had been, which explains why he got fewer and fewer commissions.
One of them, though, was widely noticed: a 1797 illustrated edition of Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality, originally published in installments in the 1740s by the clergyman Edward Young. Young was one of a number of sententious blank-verse poets who have been described as the larger eighteenth-century ruminants. He himself thought of imagination as escapist fantasy: “In the fairyland of Fancy, Genius may wander wild; there it has a creative power, and may reign arbitrarily over its own empire of chimeras.”18 For Blake they weren’t chimeras, they were images of truth.
If the project had been carried through as originally planned, it would have been massive and lucrative. Blake made no fewer than 537 watercolor designs in preparation for the engravings. For these he was paid a total of £21, at the extremely modest rate of 9½ pence apiece.19 The finished engravings would have provided the real payoff, but the first volume didn’t sell well and there were no others to follow. So only 43 engravings were published, but these give fascinating glimpses of Blake’s implicit criticism of Young’s conventional moralizing. The one reproduced here (figure 4) illustrates the lines in the printed poem that are marked with an asterisk: “Where sense runs savage broke from reason’s chain, / And sings false peace, till smothered by the pall.”
Young took it for granted that it was very wrong to break loose from reason’s chain and that indulgence in pleasure invites the “pall” of death. Blake believed just the opposite. In his picture “sense” is naked and lovely, arms joyously raised and long tresses tossing freely. A small fetter on her right ankle—hardly more than an ankle bracelet—is the sole trace of Young’s chain, and she is walking easily toward the viewer over gently rolling sunlit hills, not running “savage.” What she doesn’t know is that a gigantic figure, hands clenched with effort, is about to drop his enormous black cloak over her, smothering her in darkness. Most viewers would have assumed that this looming threat was a personification of death, but more likely Blake thought of it as reason, from whom sense has all too briefly escaped.20
4. Sense Runs Wild
In the original watercolor the woman’s vaginal cleft is discreetly but clearly visible. No doubt the publisher required Blake to conceal it. Even so, this and his other Night Thoughts designs caused something of a scandal. “The serious and the pious,” a friend commented, “were not prepared to admit shapes trembling in nudity round the verses of the grave divine.”21
Marriage and Four Portraits
In 1782 a major event in Blake’s life occurred: he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener, whose surname was probably pronounced “Butcher.” He was twenty-five and she was twenty, a servant and essentially illiterate, though he later taught her to read and write. An early biographer heard that he was taken with “the whiteness of her hand, the brightness of her eyes, and a slim and handsome shape, corresponding with his own notions of sylphs and naiads.” Another said, “‘A brunette’ and ‘very pretty’ are terms I have picked up as conveying something regarding her appearance in more youthful days. Blake himself would boast what a pretty wife he had.”22
William was on the rebound when he met Catherine, and according to one account he told her “the lamentable story of Polly Wood, his implacable lass, upon which Catherine expressed her deep sympathy, it is supposed in such a tender and affectionate manner that it quite won him. He immediately said, with the suddenness peculiar to him, ‘Do you pity me?’ ‘Yes indeed I do,’ answered she. ‘Then I love you,’ said he again. Such was their courtship.” The echo of Othello is curious—“She loved me for the dangers I had passed / And I loved her that she did pity them”—and episodes of jealousy would provoke serious tension over the years. But late in life, at any rate, they struck all who knew them as an exceptionally devoted couple. Catherine became a skilled collaborator in the printing process, as well as sustaining her husband during periods of depression, and Peter Ackroyd suggests convincingly that without her none of his greatest works would have appeared.23
The biographer Gilchrist gives a good sense of what Catherine’s support entailed. “She would get up in the night, when he was under his very fierce inspirations, which were as if they would tear him asunder, while he was yielding himself to the muse, or whatever else it could be called, sketching and writing. And so terrible a task did this seem to be that she had to sit motionless and silent, only to stay him mentally, without moving hand or foot; this for hours, and night after night.” Gilchrist also reports that Catherine learned to see visions of her own. “Not only was she wont to echo what he said, to talk as he talked on religion and other matters—this may be accounted for by the fact that he had educated her—but she too learned to have visions: to see processions of figures wending along the river, in broad daylight, and would give a start when they disappeared in the water.”24
When Catherine was in her early forties, Blake made an appealing sketch of her (figure 5) on the reverse side of a printed text that partly shows through. Her eyes, with striking eyelashes, look downward—she seems to be drawing or painting—and curls of hair escape from her cap.
A number of portraits of William Blake also exist. The most impressive (figure 6) was the work of a rival engraver, and appeared as the frontispiece to an edition of another gloomy poem, The Grave by Robert Blair. It was included there because Blake had designed (but not engraved) the images, and was copied from a portrait in oils by Thomas Phillips that now hangs in the National Gallery, made when Blake was fifty.
Another portrait (figure 7), rediscovered in 1974, was at first thought to have been by Blake’s friend John Linnell, but Linnell knew him only at the end of Blake’s life, and his own style was much more naturalistic. This shows Blake in his mid-forties, and its present owner, Robert Essick, argues persuasively that it is a self-portrait, with the fixity of gaze chara
cteristic of an artist studying himself in a mirror. Bentley observes that it resembles miniatures Blake was painting at the time and that many of the features correspond closely to the Phillips portrait: “the high-collared coat with its odd lapels, the white stock, the domed forehead, piercing eyes, arched eyebrows, and hair receding from the peak.”25
5. Catherine Blake
That the eyes are compelling is appropriate, for everyone who knew Blake was struck by their power. “His eye was the finest I ever saw,” his young disciple Samuel Palmer told Gilchrist, “brilliant, but not roving, clear and intent, yet susceptible. It flashed with genius, or melted in tenderness; it could also be terrible. Cunning and falsehood quailed under it, but it was never busy with them. It pierced them, and turned away.” Another close friend, Frederick Tatham, called Blake’s eyes “most unusually large and glassy, with which he appeared to look into some other world.”26
6. William Blake, engraved after Thomas Phillips
Eternity's Sunrise: The Imaginative World of William Blake Page 2