III.

Blake as Artist

As was to be Blake’s custom, he illustrated the Songs with designs that demand an imaginative reading of the complicated dialogue between word and picture. His method of illuminated printing is not completely understood. The most likely explanation is that he wrote the words and drew the pictures for each poem on a copper plate, using some liquid impervious to acid, which when applied left text and illustration in relief. Ink or a color wash was then applied, and the printed picture was finished by hand in watercolors.

Blake has been called a preromantic because he rejected neoclassical literary style and modes of thought (Romanticism). His favorite tenet was that “all things exist in the human imagination alone.” In his graphic art, too, he shunned 18th-century conventions and felt that ideal forms should be constructed not from observations of nature but from inner visions. His style made great use of the line in repudiation of the painterly academic style. Blake’s attenuated, fantastic figures refer back to the medieval tomb sculptures he copied as an apprentice. The influence of Michelangelo is evident in the radical foreshortening and exaggerated muscular form in one of his best-known illustrations, popularly known as The Ancient of Days, the frontispiece to his poem Europe, a Prophecy (1794).

Much of Blake’s painting was on religious subjects: illustrations for the work of John Milton, his favorite poet (although he rejected Milton’s Puritanism), for John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and for the Bible, including 21 illustrations to the Book of Job. Among his secular illustrations were those for an edition of Thomas Gray’s poems and the 537 watercolors for Edward Young’s Night Thoughts—only 43 of which were published.