William Blake

Biography

In August 1803, at Felpham, Blake was tried for fighting with a soldier, John Schofield, and for allegedly shouting, according to the soldier, “Damn the king. The soldiers are all slaves.” A jury at Chichester acquitted him. He later portrayed Schofield in an illustration to “Jerusalem”.

Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in Soho, London, the son of a hosier, James Blake; he was the third of seven children. He stayed at school only until the age of ten, learning to read and write, and was then taught at home by his mother, Catherine. His parents belonged to the Moravian Church but had their son baptised in the Anglican church of St James, Piccadilly. The Bible remained a source of imagery for him all his life. His father bought him prints and drawings of Greek antiquities, and the boy copied them, thus coming to know Raphael, Michelangelo, Maarten van Heemskerck and Dürer. At ten he began attending Henry Pars’s drawing school in the Strand.

On 4 August 1772 he was apprenticed for seven years to the engraver James Basire. By the age of twenty-one Blake was a professional engraver. Basire sent him to draw Gothic churches, above all Westminster Abbey, where there were suits of armour, painted funeral effigies and waxworks. There boys from Westminster School teased the apprentice, and one of them, so the story goes, was knocked off a scaffold by him. There too Blake, by his own account, saw Christ with the Apostles and a procession of monks. Scholars trace the Gothic line of his later drawing to those long days in the Abbey.

From 8 October 1779 he studied at the Royal Academy of Arts. No fees were required, but he had to buy his own materials. He took a dislike to the Academy’s president, Joshua Reynolds: in the margins of Reynolds’s “Discourses” he wrote that to generalise is to be an idiot, and that merit lies only in particularising. To Rubens and fashionable oil painting he preferred the clear line of Michelangelo and Raphael. There he made friends with John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland. In June 1780 a mob storming Newgate Prison during the Gordon Riots swept him up in the street; Blake’s first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, writes that he found himself in the front rank.

In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, five years his junior. She could not write and made a cross in the marriage register; Blake taught her to read and write, and to engrave. From then on she printed and coloured books alongside him. His first collection, “Poetical Sketches”, is dated to 1783. After his father’s death, in 1784, Blake opened a print shop with James Parker and began working with the publisher Joseph Johnson, in whose house Priestley, Price, Fuseli, Mary Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine met. He illustrated Wollstonecraft’s “Original Stories from Real Life”. In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, he invented relief etching, which he himself called “illuminated printing”. Text and picture were drawn on copper in acid-resistant varnish, the acid ate away the rest, and the lines stood in relief. The impressions were coloured in watercolour and stitched. This is how “Songs of Innocence and of Experience”, “The Book of Thel”, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” and “Jerusalem” were made. The commissions he lived on were different: mostly ordinary line engraving with the burin, slow work in which a single plate could take months. The “Illustrations of the Book of Job”, finished shortly before his death, belong here too. To my mind, this gap between the fame of the inventor and the daily craft is talked about less than it should be.

In 1800 he moved to Felpham, in Sussex, to illustrate the works of the poet William Hayley. There he began “Milton”, whose title page is dated 1804, though work went on until 1808. Its preface contains the lines that later became the hymn “Jerusalem”. Blake fell out with Hayley, who, it seemed to him, thought only of “the meer drudgery of business”.

In 1804 he returned to London and began “Jerusalem”, his most ambitious work (1804–1820). He discussed the idea of an engraving of “The Canterbury Pilgrims” with the dealer Robert Cromek, who passed the commission to Stothard. Blake broke with Stothard and mounted his own exhibition in his brother’s haberdashery shop at 27 Broad Street. Few people came, no tempera and no watercolour sold, and the only review, in “The Examiner”, was hostile. For the exhibition he wrote his “Descriptive Catalogue” (1809), later reprinted as a work on Chaucer. In 1818 Cumberland’s son introduced him to John Linnell, who in turn introduced him to Samuel Palmer and a circle of young artists who called themselves the Shoreham Ancients. At sixty-five Blake took up the illustrations to the Book of Job, later admired by John Ruskin and Ralph Vaughan Williams. Thomas Butts bought many of his works, especially biblical ones, and treated him more as a friend.

In 1826 Linnell obtained for him a commission for engravings to the “Divine Comedy”. Blake did not live to finish them: only a few watercolours and seven trial proofs are complete. In the margins he argued with Dante, and in the illustrations he did not so much accompany the text as revise it. It is said that he spent one of his last coins on a pencil so as to go on sketching.

Blake died on 12 August 1827 at Fountain Court, off the Strand. That day he worked on Dante and then, as remembered by those present, began to sing hymns. He was buried five days later in the Dissenters’ burial ground at Bunhill Fields, where his parents lay; the cost was met with money Catherine borrowed from Linnell. She died in October 1831.

The grave was later lost. Only in 2018, after fourteen years of searching, did a Portuguese couple, Carol and Luís Garrido, establish its location, and on 12 August 2018 a slab inscribed “Poet Artist Prophet” was unveiled there.