VIEW OF BLAKE 2

British Museum

Illustrations to Young's Night Thoughts

It seems that William Blake was fairly well known in his lifetime although poorly understood. Among the men who were acquainted with Blake and wrote biographic accounts about his life and work are Benjamin Malklin, John Thomas Smith, Crabb Robinson, and Allen Cunningham. The accounts that they published were based on source material collected from close acquaintances of Blake, such as Varley, Linnell, Tatum, Fuseli, and Cromek.

The Scotsman Allan Cunningham included William Blake in his in his six volume work, Lives of the Most Eminent British Painters, Sculptors and Architects published shortly after Blake died. Cunningham was not personally acquainted with Blake but men who did know Blake acted as his sources. Cunningham first met Cromek in 1809 when he was touring Scotland. The following year Cunningham moved to London with Cromek's encouragement. It was twenty years later that Cunningham wrote of Blake's life.

 

Lives of the most eminent British Painters (1829-33) by Allan Cunningham

On William Blake

"He was by nature a poet, a dreamer, and an enthusiast. The eminence which it had been the first ambition of his youth to climb, was visible before him, and he saw on its ascent or on its summit those who had started earlier in the race of fame. He felt conscious of his own merit, but was not aware of the thousand obstacles which were ready to interpose. He thought that he had but to sing songs and draw designs, and become great and famous.The crosses which genius is heir to had been wholly unforeseen, and they befell him early. He wanted, too, the skill of hand, and fine tact of fancy and taste, to impress upon the offspring of his thoughts that popular shape which gives such productions immediate circulation. His works were, therefore, looked coldly on by the world, and were only esteemed by men of poetic minds, or those who were fond of things out of the common way. He earned a little fame, but no money by these speculations, and had to depend for bread on the labours of the graver.

All this neither crushed his spirit nor induced him to work more in the way of the world; but it had a visible influence upon his mind. He became more seriously thoughtful, avoided the company of men, and lived in the manner of a hermit, in that vast wilderness, London. Necessity made him frugal, and honesty and independence prescribed plain clothes, homely fare, and a cheap habitation. He was thus compelled more than ever to retire to worlds of his own creating, and seek solace in visions of paradise for the joys which the earth denied him. By frequent indulgence in these imaginings he gradually began to believe in the reality of what dreaming fancy painted the pictured forms which swarmed before his eyes assumed, in his apprehension, the stability of positive revelations, and he mistook the vivid figures which his professional imagination shaped, for the poets, and heroes, and princes of old. Amongst his friends he at length ventured to intimate that the designs on which he was engaged, were not from his own mind, but copied from grand works revealed to him in visions; and those who believed that would readily lend an car to the assurance that he was commanded to execute his performances by a celestial tongue!

Of these imaginary visitations he made good use, when he invented his truly original and beautiful mode of engraving and tinting his plates. He had made the designs of his Days of Innocence, and was meditating, he said, on the best means of multiplying their resemblance in form and in line; he felt sorely perplexed. At last he was made aware that the spirit of his favourite brother Robert was in the room, and to this celestial visitor he applied for counsel. The spirit advised him at once: "Write," he said, "the poetry, and draw the designs upon the copper with a certain liquid (which he named, and which Blake ever kept a secret): then cut the plain parts of the plate down with aquafortis, and this will give the whole, both poetry and figures, in the manner of a stereotype." The plan recommended by this gracious spirit was adopted; the plates were engraved, and the work printed off. The artist then added a peculiar beauty of his own. He tinted both the figures and the verse with a variety of colours, amongst which, while yellow prevails, the whole has a rich and lustrous beauty, to which I know little that can be compared. The size of these prints is four inches and a half high by three inches wide. The original genius of Blake was always confined, through poverty, to small dimensions. Sixty-five plates of copper were an object to him who had little money. The Gates of Paradise, a work of sixteen designs, and those exceedingly small, was his next undertaking. The meaning of the artist is not a little obscure; it seems to have been his object to represent the innocence, the happiness, and the upward aspirations of man. They bespeak one intimately acquainted with the looks and the feelings of children. Over them there is shed a kind of mysterious halo which raises feelings of devotion. The Songs of Innocence and the Gates of Paradise became popular among the collectors of prints. To the sketch-book and the cabinet the works of Blake are unfortunately confined. 

...

An overflow of imagination is a failing uncommon in this age, and has generally received of late little quarter from the critical portion of mankind. Yet imagination is the life and spirit of all great works of genius and taste; and, indeed, without it, the head thinks and the hand labours in vain. Ten thousand authors and artists rise to the proper, the graceful, and the beautiful, for ten who ascend into "the heaven of invention." A work — whether from poet or painter — conceived in the fiery ecstasy of imagination, lives through every limb; while one elaborated out by skill and taste only will look, in comparison, like a withered and sapless tree beside one green and flourishing. Blake's misfortune was that of possessing this precious gift in excess. His fancy overmastered him — until he at length confounded "the mind's eye" with the corporeal organ, and dreamed himself out of the sympathies of actual life...."

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Europe, PLATE 2, (E 61)
"Unwilling I look up to heaven! unwilling count the stars!
Sitting in fathomless abyss of my immortal shrine.
I sieze their burning power
And bring forth howling terrors, all devouring fiery kings.

Devouring & devoured roaming on dark and desolate mountains      
In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.
Ah mother Enitharmon!
Stamp not with solid form this vig'rous progeny of fires.

I bring forth from my teeming bosom myriads of flames.
And thou dost stamp them with a signet, then they roam abroad    
And leave me void as death:
Ah! I am drown'd in shady woe, and visionary joy.

And who shall bind the infinite with an eternal band?
To compass it with swaddling bands? and who shall cherish it
With milk and honey?"                                             
I see it smile & I roll inward & my voice is past.

She ceast & rolld her shady clouds
Into the secret place."