William Blake

Based on Wikipedia: William Blake

The Man His Contemporaries Thought Was Mad

William Blake saw God's face pressed against his bedroom window when he was a child. He watched angels lounging among haystacks in the English countryside. The prophet Ezekiel visited him personally. His neighbors in eighteenth-century London, understandably, thought he had lost his mind.

They were wrong.

Blake would become one of the most influential figures in English poetry and visual art, a founding voice of the Romantic movement before anyone had thought to name it that. But here is the peculiar tragedy of his life: almost no one recognized his genius while he was alive. The twentieth-century literary critic Northrop Frye would later describe Blake's prophetic works as "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the English language." A backhanded compliment, perhaps, but accurate. Blake created a universe of extraordinary depth and beauty, and his era simply looked away.

A Hosier's Son with Expensive Tastes

Blake was born on November 28, 1757, above his father's hosiery shop on Broad Street in Soho, London. He was the third of seven children, two of whom died in infancy—a common enough tragedy in Georgian England. His father James sold stockings. His mother Catherine educated him at home after he left school at the age of ten, having learned just enough reading and writing to be dangerous.

The Blakes were English Dissenters, which meant they rejected the authority of the Church of England. This is important. It meant young William grew up in a household where questioning religious orthodoxy was the norm, where the Bible was studied intensely but institutional Christianity was viewed with suspicion. That skepticism toward organized religion would color everything Blake ever created.

Despite being Dissenters, the family still had William baptized at St James's Church in Piccadilly—perhaps hedging their spiritual bets, as parents do.

What's remarkable about Blake's childhood is how seriously his parents took his artistic inclinations. His father purchased prints of Greek antiquities for him to copy, introducing the boy to the work of Raphael, Michelangelo, and Albrecht Dürer before he was old enough to attend a proper art school. When William was ten, recognizing their son's headstrong temperament, James and Catherine didn't bother trying to force him into formal schooling. Instead, they enrolled him in drawing classes at Henry Pars's academy in the Strand.

The number of prints and books they bought for William suggests the family enjoyed comfortable wealth, at least for a time. It also suggests they saw something special in their strange, visionary son.

Learning an Unfashionable Trade

At fifteen, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver named James Basire. The apprenticeship cost fifty-two pounds and ten shillings—a substantial sum—and would last seven years. Basire practiced a style of line-engraving that was already considered old-fashioned by the standards of the 1770s. The flashier artists of the day preferred stipple engraving or mezzotint, techniques that created softer, more painterly effects.

Blake learned the old way. This may have been detrimental to his career in the short term, marking him as unfashionable. But it gave his work a clarity and precision that would prove timeless.

The apprenticeship seems to have gone smoothly enough, though Blake's biographer Peter Ackroyd notes that Blake later added Basire's name to a list of artistic adversaries—and then crossed it out. Make of that what you will.

After two years, Basire sent Blake to copy images from the Gothic churches of London, particularly Westminster Abbey. This may have been a clever solution to workplace tension; Blake apparently didn't get along well with another apprentice named James Parker. Whatever the reason, those long afternoons in the Abbey transformed Blake's artistic vision.

Ghosts in Westminster Abbey

The Westminster Abbey of Blake's day was nothing like the sanitized tourist attraction it would become. It was cluttered with suits of armor, painted funeral effigies, and varicolored waxworks—a strange, theatrical space of faded brightness and color. Blake spent months there, sketching Gothic architecture and medieval tombs.

The schoolboys from Westminster School were allowed into the Abbey and took pleasure in tormenting the quiet young engraver at his work. One boy pushed Blake too far. Blake knocked him off a scaffold, sending him crashing to the ground "with terrific Violence." When Blake complained to the Dean, the schoolboys lost their Abbey privileges entirely.

Don't mess with visionaries.

It was in the Abbey that Blake claimed to experience some of his most profound visions. He saw Christ walking with his Apostles. He watched processions of monks and priests and heard their chanting echo through the Gothic arches. Whether these were hallucinations, spiritual experiences, or the product of an extraordinarily vivid imagination, Blake never doubted their reality.

The Gothic style he absorbed during those long afternoons—what he called "the living form"—left permanent traces in his art. While his contemporaries chased Classical ideals of smooth perfection, Blake embraced the angular energy of medieval design.

Rebellion at the Royal Academy

In 1779, Blake enrolled at the Royal Academy in Old Somerset House. The academy was the most prestigious art institution in England, presided over by Sir Joshua Reynolds, the country's most celebrated painter. Students paid no tuition but were expected to supply their own materials for six years of study.

Blake hated almost everything Reynolds stood for.

Reynolds championed a painting style that Blake considered unfinished and sloppy. More fundamentally, Reynolds believed in "general truth" and "general beauty"—the idea that art should capture universal ideals rather than specific particulars. In his Discourses, Reynolds wrote that "the disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind."

Blake scrawled his response in the margins of his personal copy: "To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit."

This wasn't just aesthetic disagreement. It was a fundamental clash of worldviews. Reynolds believed art should smooth away the rough edges of reality to reveal timeless ideals beneath. Blake believed the particular, the specific, the individual vision was where truth resided. Every abstraction was a betrayal.

Blake also couldn't stand Reynolds' apparent humility, which he considered a form of hypocrisy. Reynolds talked about elevated artistic ideals but painted fashionable portraits for wealthy clients. He preached history painting as the highest form of art but rarely practiced it himself.

Despite his contempt for Reynolds' philosophy, Blake wasn't above exhibiting at the Royal Academy. He showed work there on six occasions between 1780 and 1808. Even revolutionaries need exposure.

Caught Up in a Riot

In June 1780, Blake was walking toward Basire's shop when he found himself swept up in a mob. This wasn't a metaphor. An actual rampaging crowd had formed in response to a parliamentary bill easing sanctions against Roman Catholics, and Blake was carried along as they stormed Newgate Prison.

The mob attacked the prison gates with shovels and pickaxes, set the building on fire, and released the prisoners inside. According to his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, Blake was reportedly in the front rank during the attack.

These became known as the Gordon Riots, one of the most destructive episodes of civil unrest in London's history. The government of King George III responded with harsh new legislation and created London's first organized police force.

Whether Blake was a willing participant or simply couldn't escape the crowd, we don't know. But it's fitting that this poet of radical visions found himself, at least once, at the literal front lines of revolutionary violence.

Love at First Pity

The following year, Blake was recovering from a romantic disaster. He had proposed marriage to someone and been refused. While visiting friends, he told the story of his heartbreak to a young woman named Catherine Boucher and her parents.

"Do you pity me?" Blake asked Catherine.

She said yes.

"Then I love you," Blake declared.

It was an unconventional courtship, but it worked. William and Catherine married on August 18, 1782, at St Mary's Church in Battersea. Catherine was five years younger than William and illiterate—she signed her wedding contract with an X. The original certificate can still be viewed at the church, which installed a commemorative stained-glass window in the 1970s.

The marriage would last forty-five years, until Blake's death. And it would be a true creative partnership.

The Wife Who Made the Art Possible

Catherine Blake wasn't just a supportive spouse. She was an artist and printer in her own right, essential to almost everything William created.

She mixed and applied his paint colors. She worked as a printmaker and colorist for his illuminated books. She helped with the physical labor of printing and binding. As the literary scholar Angus Whitehead writes, she was "the person who lived and worked most closely with Blake, enabling him to realize numerous projects, impossible without her assistance."

Consider what went into creating one of Blake's illuminated books. The text and illustrations had to be written on copper plates using acid-resistant ink. The plates were etched in acid. Then each page had to be printed and hand-colored in watercolors before being stitched into a volume. William and Catherine did all of this themselves in their small London home.

As Alexander Gilchrist wrote in 1863: "The poet and his wife did everything in making the book—writing, designing, printing, engraving—everything except manufacturing the paper: the very ink, or colour rather, they did make."

One of Catherine's most celebrated contributions is the coloring of the cover of Europe: A Prophecy. In 2019, the Tate Britain held a major Blake exhibition that gave particular focus to Catherine's role—a long-overdue recognition of the woman who made so much of Blake's vision tangible.

Inventing a New Kind of Book

Around 1788, when he was thirty-one years old, Blake developed a technique he called relief etching. This would become his signature method for creating the illuminated books that are now his most celebrated works.

Traditional etching worked by scratching lines into a copper plate. The scratched lines held ink and transferred the image to paper—a technique called intaglio printing. Blake's innovation reversed the process. He painted his designs directly onto the copper using an acid-resistant medium, then bathed the plate in acid. The acid ate away the untreated copper, leaving his text and illustrations standing up in relief, like a rubber stamp.

This allowed Blake to combine words and images on the same page in ways that hadn't been possible before—at least not without employing teams of specialized craftsmen. Blake could write a poem, illustrate it, etch the plate, print the page, and color it by hand, all in his own workshop with Catherine's help.

The results were unlike anything that had existed before in English publishing. Each page of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem was a unique work of art, with text and image intertwined in organic, flowing compositions. No two copies were identical because each was hand-colored.

Blake called this process "illuminated printing," consciously echoing the medieval illuminated manuscripts he had studied in Westminster Abbey. He was reaching back to a tradition that predated the printing press, when books were handmade objects of beauty rather than mass-produced commodities.

A Different Kind of Engraver

Despite inventing relief etching, Blake still had to earn a living through traditional intaglio engraving—the same laborious technique he had learned as Basire's apprentice. This was the commercial work that paid the bills.

Intaglio engraving was incredibly time-consuming. An engraver had to incise every line of an image into a copper plate, cutting grooves that would hold ink. Complex plates could take months or years to complete. But as Blake's contemporary John Boydell recognized, engraving offered a "missing link with commerce"—it allowed artists to reach mass audiences through reproduced prints.

Blake's commercial engravings included work for other people's books. One notable example is his engraving Europe Supported by Africa and America, created for a book by his friend John Gabriel Stedman called The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, published in 1796.

The image shows three women embracing. Black Africa and White Europe clasp hands in a gesture of equality while barren earth blooms beneath their feet. Europe wears a string of pearls; her sisters Africa and America wear slave bracelets. The symbolism is pointed: sisterhood across racial lines, the persistent reality of slavery, and perhaps a hope for liberation.

Even in commercial work, Blake embedded his radical vision.

The Revolutionary Circle

In 1784, after his father's death, Blake and his former fellow apprentice James Parker opened a print shop. They began working with the radical publisher Joseph Johnson, whose house served as a gathering place for some of England's most dangerous thinkers.

The guest list was remarkable. Joseph Priestley, the theologian and scientist who discovered oxygen. Richard Price, the philosopher whose writings had inspired the American Revolution. John Henry Fuseli, the Swiss painter whose nightmarish images were as strange as Blake's own. Mary Wollstonecraft, who would soon write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and launch the feminist movement. Thomas Paine, whose Common Sense had helped spark American independence and whose Rights of Man would nearly get him executed for treason.

Blake moved in heady company. He wore a Phrygian cap—the red liberty cap of the French revolutionaries—in solidarity with the upheaval across the Channel. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin, he saw the American and French Revolutions as the dawn of a new age of human freedom.

Then came the Terror.

When Maximilien Robespierre seized power in France and began sending thousands to the guillotine, Blake's revolutionary enthusiasm curdled into despair. The dream of liberation had become a nightmare of state murder. Blake would spend the rest of his life working through this trauma in his prophetic books, trying to understand how the promise of freedom could become the machinery of death.

A Voice for Women

Blake illustrated Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life in 1791. There's no evidence they ever met in person, but they seem to have shared views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage.

Two years later, Blake published Visions of the Daughters of Albion, one of his most radical works. In it, he condemned the "cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love" and defended the right of women to "complete self-fulfilment."

This was dangerous ground in 1793. Women were legally the property of their husbands. Divorce was nearly impossible. Sexual autonomy was barely conceivable as a concept. Blake's poem imagined a world where women owned their own bodies and desires—a vision that wouldn't begin to approach reality for nearly two centuries.

The Imagination as God

What did Blake actually believe? The question has puzzled scholars for two hundred years.

He was a theist—he believed in God—but his theology was idiosyncratic, drawing on the ideas of the ancient heretic Marcion, who believed the God of the Old Testament was a false deity, a cruel demiurge who had trapped humanity in a prison of matter. Blake was hostile to the Church of England and to almost all forms of organized religion. He was influenced by the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, who claimed to have visited heaven and hell and conversed with angels.

But Blake was no simple follower of anyone. He absorbed influences and transformed them utterly.

At the core of Blake's vision was imagination. Not imagination as idle daydreaming or escapist fantasy, but imagination as the fundamental creative power of the universe. Blake called the imagination "the body of God" and "human existence itself." To imagine was to participate in divine creation. To repress imagination—through institutional religion, through rationalist philosophy, through social conformity—was to murder the divine within oneself.

This is why Blake's contemporaries thought he was mad. He wasn't speaking metaphorically when he said he saw visions. For Blake, the visionary imagination was more real than the physical world perceived by the senses. The material world was a kind of sleep; imagination was waking up.

The Scholar's Verdict

The nineteenth-century scholar William Michael Rossetti struggled to categorize Blake and finally gave up. He called Blake "a glorious luminary" and "a man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors."

That assessment still holds. Blake drew on the Bible, on Milton, on Swedenborg, on radical politics, on Gothic art, on his own unverifiable visions. He synthesized all of these into something entirely his own. There was no Blake movement, no school of Blake imitators, because no one else could see what he saw.

And yet his influence would prove immense. The Pre-Raphaelites rediscovered him in the mid-nineteenth century. The Beats and counterculture of the 1960s adopted him as a prophet of liberation. Every artist who has insisted on the primacy of personal vision over commercial fashion owes something to Blake's stubborn example.

The Unfinished Masterpiece

Blake lived in London his entire life except for three years spent in the coastal village of Felpham. He moved through various addresses in Soho, Lambeth, and South Molton Street, always working, always producing—poems, paintings, engravings, illuminated books.

From 1790 to 1800, the Blakes lived at 13 Hercules Buildings in North Lambeth. The house was demolished in 1918, but a plaque marks the site, and a series of seventy mosaics in the nearby railway tunnels of Waterloo Station reproduces illustrations from his illuminated books.

Blake died on August 12, 1827, at the age of sixty-nine. He had just completed his Illustrations of the Book of Job, a series of engravings that scholars consider among his greatest works. A study of his surviving copper plates shows he made frequent use of a technique called repoussage—hammering out mistakes by hitting the back of the plate. Even at the end, he was still perfecting his craft, still learning.

His prophetic works remained largely unread. His paintings were scattered among a few collectors. The world had not yet caught up with him.

It would take another generation before readers and viewers began to understand what Blake had created. And even now, two centuries later, we are still catching up with a man who saw God's face at his window and devoted his life to making the invisible visible.

As Blake himself wrote: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is: Infinite."

He spent his life trying to cleanse those doors.