William Blake

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, above his father's hosiery shop at 28 Broad Street in the Soho district of London ^[1]. He was the third of seven children born to James Blake and Catherine Wright Armitage Blake, two of whom died in infancy. The family belonged to the dissenting tradition of English Protestantism, standing apart from the established church, and the Bible became the deepest and most lasting influence on everything Blake later wrote and drew ^[2].

He never attended school. His mother taught him at home, and by his own account visionary experiences began early: as a boy he reported seeing a tree filled with angels on Peckham Rye and the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in the fields ^[1]. His parents seem to have treated these claims with a mixture of alarm and tolerance. Recognizing the boy's talent for drawing, they enrolled him at ten in Henry Pars's drawing school on the Strand, then the leading preparatory school for young artists in London ^[3].

At fourteen, Blake was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire, official engraver to the Society of Antiquaries. The apprenticeship lasted seven years and gave Blake his trade for life. Basire sent him to make drawings of the monuments in Westminster Abbey, and the long hours spent copying Gothic tombs and effigies shaped his taste permanently, turning him toward linear, medieval forms and away from the fashionable painterly styles of his day ^[3].

After completing his apprenticeship in 1779, Blake enrolled as a student at the newly founded Royal Academy of Arts. He quickly came into conflict with its president, Sir Joshua Reynolds, whose emphasis on generalized form and oil painting Blake found false to his own convictions about precise outline and imaginative vision ^[2]. He exhibited occasionally at the Academy but earned his living as a commercial engraver, reproducing other artists' designs for booksellers.

In 1782 he married Catherine Boucher, the daughter of a market gardener from Battersea. She was illiterate when they married and signed the register with an X; Blake taught her to read, write, and eventually to color his prints and print impressions from his plates. The marriage, which produced no children, lasted forty-five years, and Catherine became his indispensable partner in the workshop ^[1].

Blake's first collection of verse, Poetical Sketches, was printed in 1783 with the help of friends, though it was never formally published or sold ^[4]. The decisive breakthrough came around 1788, when he developed the technique he called relief etching, writing text and drawing designs directly onto copper plates with an acid-resistant liquid so that words and images could be printed together and then colored by hand. He claimed the method had been revealed to him in a vision by the spirit of his dead brother Robert, who had died of tuberculosis in 1787 at the age of nineteen ^[2]. This invention made possible the illuminated books on which his fame now rests.

The illuminated books began with small experimental works and reached early maturity in Songs of Innocence (1789), a set of lyrics voiced largely through children and pastoral figures. In 1794 Blake combined it with a darker companion set to form Songs of Innocence and of Experience, subtitled as showing the two contrary states of the human soul ^[4]. The collection contains his best known poems, including The Lamb, The Tyger, London, and The Chimney Sweeper, and each copy was printed and colored individually, so no two surviving copies are identical ^[5]. Anyone asking what William Blake achievements amount to usually begins here, though the Songs are only a fraction of his output.

During the 1790s he produced a rapid sequence of prophetic and satirical works: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America a Prophecy, Europe a Prophecy, and The Book of Urizen among them ^[4]. In these books Blake built a private mythology populated by invented figures such as Urizen, Los, and Orc, through which he examined reason, imagination, political revolution, and religious authority. He wrote sympathetically about the American and French revolutions and attacked slavery, church corruption, and the constraints placed on human desire ^[2].

His two longest poems, Milton and Jerusalem, occupied him for much of the period from about 1804 to 1820. The preface to Milton contains the short lyric beginning "And did those feet in ancient time," which, set to music by Hubert Parry in 1916 as the hymn Jerusalem, became one of the most widely sung patriotic pieces in Britain ^[6]. As a visual artist Blake was equally productive: he made hundreds of watercolors and tempera paintings on biblical and literary subjects, illustrated the poems of Thomas Gray and Edward Young, and produced a large color-printed series in 1795 that includes the celebrated image of Newton crouched with his compasses, now in Tate Britain ^[5].

Blake lived almost his entire life in London, moving among a handful of addresses in Soho, Lambeth, and finally Fountain Court off the Strand. The single exception was three years, from 1800 to 1803, spent in a cottage at Felpham on the Sussex coast under the patronage of the poet William Hayley ^[1]. The arrangement soured as Blake chafed at Hayley's steady supply of routine commissions, and the stay ended badly for another reason: in August 1803 Blake ejected a soldier named John Scofield from his garden, and Scofield accused him of uttering seditious words against the king. Blake stood trial for sedition at Chichester in January 1804 and was acquitted, but the episode frightened him deeply during years when England was at war with Napoleonic France ^[3].

His religious views were his own. He rejected the doctrines of the established church while remaining saturated in scripture, and he read the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg closely before turning against him in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ^[2]. Throughout his life he insisted that his visions were real perceptions, telling friends in matter-of-fact terms about conversations with angels, prophets, and the spirits of the dead. Some acquaintances thought him insane; those who knew him well, including the diarist Henry Crabb Robinson, generally described him instead as gentle, industrious, and utterly convinced ^[1].

Money was a constant problem. Blake's one attempt at a public exhibition, held in 1809 above his brother's shop in Broad Street, attracted almost no visitors, and the sole press notice, in The Examiner, called him an unfortunate lunatic ^[3]. He depended for long stretches on a small circle of loyal buyers, above all his friend and patron Thomas Butts, a civil servant who purchased Blake's biblical watercolors steadily for years ^[5].

The last decade of Blake's life brought poverty but also an unexpected renewal. Around 1818 he met John Linnell, a successful younger painter who became his most important late patron. Linnell commissioned the two projects that crown Blake's career as a graphic artist: the engraved Illustrations of the Book of Job, published in 1826, and a series of more than one hundred watercolors illustrating Dante's Divine Comedy, of which Blake had engraved only seven plates at his death ^[5].

Through Linnell, Blake also gathered a group of young admirers who called themselves the Ancients, among them Samuel Palmer, George Richmond, and Edward Calvert. They visited him at his two-room lodging in Fountain Court, referred to it as the House of the Interpreter after a passage in Bunyan, and treated the old engraver with a reverence he had never received from the wider art world ^[3]. In these years he also produced the small woodcuts for a school edition of Virgil's pastorals, images whose dense, dreamlike landscapes had a lasting effect on Palmer and, much later, on twentieth century British printmakers ^[5].

Blake died on August 12, 1827, at Fountain Court near Charing Cross, aged sixty-nine, reportedly singing on his deathbed. He was working on the Dante watercolors and a hand-colored copy of his engraving of the Ancient of Days almost to the end ^[1]. He was buried in an unmarked common grave at Bunhill Fields, the dissenters' burial ground in London; the precise spot was identified by researchers and marked with a new gravestone in 2018 ^[7]. Catherine survived him by four years, dying in 1831.

For decades after his death Blake remained a marginal figure, remembered mainly by the Ancients and a few collectors. The turning point came in 1863, when Alexander Gilchrist's Life of William Blake, completed after Gilchrist's death by his wife Anne with help from Dante Gabriel Rossetti, introduced the poet to Victorian readers under the pointed subtitle Pictor Ignotus, the unknown painter ^[8]. The Pre-Raphaelites, then W. B. Yeats, who co-edited an edition of Blake's works in 1893, carried the revival forward, and twentieth century scholarship, notably Northrop Frye's Fearful Symmetry (1947) and the editorial work of Geoffrey Keynes and David Erdman, established the full range of his writing ^[2].

Any serious William Blake biography now treats him as a double master, a claim few artists in any language can support: a major poet who was also a major visual artist, with the two practices inseparable in the illuminated books. His influence runs through poets from Walt Whitman to Allen Ginsberg, through the counterculture of the 1960s, and into songwriters, novelists, and filmmakers who have borrowed his images and titles ^[6]. Lines such as "To see a World in a Grain of Sand" and the tiger burning bright are quoted far beyond literary circles.

His works are held today in the British Museum, Tate Britain, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Huntington Library, the Morgan Library, and Yale Center for British Art, and the complete illuminated books are freely available in digital facsimile through the William Blake Archive, a scholarly project founded in 1996 ^[9]. For readers who ask who was William Blake, the shortest honest answer is that he was a London engraver who trusted his imagination completely, paid a heavy price for it in his lifetime, and was proved right by posterity. The essential William Blake facts, his poverty, his visions, his invented printing method, and his late vindication, together form one of the most remarkable careers in English art ^[1].