William Blake. Osbert Burdett
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and nothing else,” and his fierce criticism of Basire’s colleagues may be illustrated by his remark on one:
Woollett[16] I knew very intimately by his intimacy with Basire, and knew him to be one of the most ignorant fellows I ever met… He often proved his ignorance before me at Basire’s by laughing at Basire’s knife tools, and ridiculing the forms of Basire’s other gravers, till Basire was quite dashed and out of conceit with what he himself knew. But his impudence had the contrary effect on me.
Blake was defending what he believed to be the principle of drawing, and we shall observe how the representation of natural effects was to seem to him the death – instead of the discipline – of imagination. Saturated with the conventional sculptures of the Abbey, he desired the transfiguration of natural forms, and sided with art rather than observation. He began to conceive in the Gothic manner, and from this to infer that all intuition came in the shape of Gothic images, which it was the failure of an artist not directly to transcribe. He was like a townsman who had never seen the country except in landscape pictures. The shape in which Blake’s visions came to him was obviously Gothic, but so deep, and therefore so unconscious, was this influence that he believed all visions had come to all men in the same guise, and that Nature herself could be a vision was the gravest of errors. It is true, of course, that to all mystics nature is the myth or reflection of a beauty that does not belong to the visible world, but it is extreme to say, as Blake did, that to represent nature in art is to be busy with the letters at the expense of the imaginative meaning. To assert that conventional foliage is necessarily more beautiful than a living leaf is to uproot art from its foundation, to derive inspiration from previous art or from an individual mind, and when the theory becomes an obsession even formal beauty is imperilled.
William Blake, Illustration from The Book of Daniel: Nebuchadnezzar, 1795-c. 1805.
Colour print finished in ink and watercolour on paper, 54.3 × 72.5 cm.
Tate Gallery, London.
When Blake’s apprenticeship to Basire came to an end in 1778, he went for a time to study in the antique school at the Royal Academy. His teacher there was old Mr. Moser, its first keeper, a chaser medallist and enamel painter, who had been in charge of the parent schools in St. Martin’s Lane. In one of his later annotations to Reynolds’s Discourses, Blake records one of their conversations:
I was once looking over the prints from Raphael and Michelangelo in the Library of the Royal Academy. Moser came to me and said, “You should not study these old, hard, stiff and dry, unfinished works of art. Stay a little and I will show you what you ought to study.” He then went and took down Le Brun and Rubens’ galleries. How did I secretly rage! I also spoke my mind! I said to Moser, “These things that you call finished are not even begun: how then can they be finished? The man who does not know the beginning cannot know the end of art.”
Blake was content to draw from the antique; very characteristically, he found the living figure too natural. The Abbey became to him that which the palaestra had been to the Greek sculptors. Already his imagination could feel free only when it was working removed from reality. Thus when Malkin tells us that Blake “professed drawing from life always to have been hateful to him,” and spoke of it “as looking more like death or smelling of mortality,” we can understand how this fatal prejudice had lodged itself in his mind. He seems more reasonable when he says: “Practice and opportunity very soon teach the language of art. Its spirit and poetry, centred in the imagination alone, never can be taught; and these make the artist.” True enough, yet one of the most valuable opportunities that the imagination can have is the study of the natural form that Blake so despised. He carried his recoil so far as to confess that “natural objects always did and do weaken, deaden, and obliterate imagination in me.” Haunted by the forms of the Gothic sculptors, and identifying these with the religious ideas that had given them birth, Blake resented living realities as intruders, and refused to admit the criticism that they offered of the images that exclusively occupied his mind. A watercolour drawing made at this time, The Penance of Jane Shore, was included by Blake in the exhibition of his works held in 1809. A note in the descriptive catalogue says of it: “This drawing was done above thirty years ago, and proves to the author, and he thinks will prove to any discerning eye, that the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in all essential respects.”
William Blake, Illustration from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 24, c. 1790.
Relief etching, colour-printed, with pen and watercolour, 20.9 × 17.9 cm.
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York.
William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 1, 1793.
Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 3, 1793.
Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
William Blake, Illustration from The Daughters of Albion, plate 2, 1793.
Relief etching, watercoloured by hand.
Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge (Massachusetts).
Meanwhile, Blake was beginning to earn his living by making engravings for Harrison, Johnson, and other booksellers. He engraved designs for their books and magazines. The most important were eight plates after Stothard for the Novelist. Blake became acquainted with Stothard in 1780, and by him was introduced to Flaxman. It was with Flaxman that Blake went yachting and sketching on the Medway, as far as Upmore Castle, some time between 1780 and 1782. Mrs. Bray, in her Life of Stothard, tells how the members of the party were mistaken for French spies, supposed to be map-making, and were then arrested by soldiers and only released when the Royal Academy identified them. A third friend made in this year was Henry Fuseli, an idealistic painter who had been Lavater’s[17] schoolfellow, and declared that nature “put him out;” when he shortly settled in Broad Street, and Flaxman moved to 27 Wardour Street, the three became neighbours. Gilchrist says that Blake needed such friends because “he was one of those whose genius is in a far higher ratio than their talents, and it is talent which commands worldly success.” The inference is not so prosaic as it sounds. We have Mr. George Moore’s[18] authority for saying that “genius without talent can only totter a little way.” Blake “loved laughing,” but he had little sense of humour, and virtually no critical intelligence. His hand was much better cultivated than his head, and in but few of his writings is there a line of mental laughter, usually the flower of observation delighting in the criticism that nature and behaviour passes upon our ideas. In this same year, 1780, Blake first exhibited at the Royal Academy. His picture was a watercolour of the Death of Earl Godwin. It was the year of the Gordon Riots, and one day walking in the streets Blake was swept along by the mob and witnessed the burning of Newgate, but though he occasionally said severe things about the Latin Church, he did not identify himself with the No-Popery cry of the London agitators. He was beginning to be busy with the painting of watercolours, and with tempera on canvas, a modification of which he came to christen fresco.
He was now a young man in his early twenties, and his first youthful love affair seems to have been with “a lively little girl” called Polly Wood. She was ready to go for walks with him, but when he mentioned marriage she refused. Blake was not the only feather in her cap; she liked young men’s society, but was by no means sure that the time had come to commit herself definitely to any of these admirers. When Blake was simple-minded enough to complain that she also kept company with others, she was astonished
William Woollett (c. 1735–1785) was a British engraver. Very well-known during his times, his techniques, and notably the “worm line,” were used throughout Europe. In 1775, he was appointed “Engraver to the King.”
Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741–1801) was a Swiss poet.
George Moore (1852–1933) was an Irish novelist, art critic and poet.