William Blake

1757 - 1827 • English • Painter/Printmaker • Romantic Classicist/Symbolist

" The taste of English amateurs has been too much formed upon pictures imported from Flanders and Holland; consequently our countrymen are easily brow-beat on the subject of painting; and hence it is so common to hear a man say: "I am no judge of 'pictures.' "But O Englishmen! I know that every man is so who has not been connoisseured out of his senses." - William Blake

Blake was a mystic, seer, poet, and painter. He came under FUSELI's influence and was in thrall to ROMANTICISM'S Sturm und Drang-storm and stress-as Fuseli had been. Blake was energetic in his defense of Fuseli when the latter's work was demeaned, and was equally ardent in his attacks on REYNOLDS, whose ACADEMIC tradition he resented and on whose Discourses he wrote highly critical annotations. He began, "Having spent the Vigour of my Youth &Genius under the Oppression of Sir Joshua &his Gang of Cunning Hired Knaves Without Employment & as much as could possibly be Without Bread, the Reader must Expect to Read in all my Remarks ... Nothing but Indignation &Resentment." Blake was not, in fact, recognized during his lifetime, nor for long afterward. He had begun to draw from casts of ANTIQUE sculpture at the age of 10, spent a brief, unsatisfactory period at the Royal ACADEMY, and with greater rewards studied PRINTS of MICHELANGELO'S work. As a visionary he thought he spoke directly with God, and he expressed his personal, religious sentiments in books he wrote and illustrated using the LINEAR mode of NEOCLASSICISM, combined with the oddly elongated and muscular figures of Fuseli. Blake devised a complex technique of ETCHING in an effort to approximate the look of ILLUMINATED MANUSCRIPTS of the MEDIEVAL period. The Ancient of Days, frontispiece of Europe: A Prophesy (1794), is one of his best-known prints: The bearded, windswept old prophet leans out from a fiery orb, rays of light emanating from his hand. Blake believed that Nature's forms are symbols to be understood through divine inspiration. In contrast to the violence implicit in Fuseli's work, Blake's world of dreams and visions is mystically ecstatic instead of threatening.