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William Blake
William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August
12, 1827) was an English poet, painter and printmaker, or "Author
& Printer", as he signed many of his books. He is now widely
recognised as a genius of English letters, and one of the foremost
(arguably the foremost) visionary artists of the modern age; it
is now fashionable in certain circles to criticise his art as simplistic.
It is likely fair to state that Blake's visual art, if only for
being so closely wedded to his verse, will outlive such criticism.
Early career
Blake was born at 28 Broad Street, Golden Square, London into a
middle-class family. He was from earliest youth a seer of visions
and a dreamer of dreams, seeing "Ezekiel sitting under a green
bough", and "a tree full of angels at Peckham", and
such he remained to the end of his days. His teeming imagination
sought expression both in verse and in drawing. At ten years old,
he began engraving copies of drawings of Greek antiquities, a practice
that was then preferred to real-life drawing. Four years later he
became apprenticed to an engraver, James Basire. After two years
Basire sent him to copy art from the Gothic churches in London.
At the age of twenty-one Blake finished his apprenticeship and set
up as a professional engraver.
In 1779, he became a student at the Royal Academy,
where he rebelled against what he regarded as the unfinished style
of fashionable painters such as Rubens. He preferred the Classical
exactness of Michelangelo and Raphael.
In July, 1780, he was at the head of a rampaging
mob that stormed Newgate Prison in London. The mob were wearing
blue cockades (ribbons) on their caps, to symbolise solidarity with
the insurrection in the American colonies. This disturbance, later
known as the Gordon riots, provoked a flurry of paranoid legislation
from the government of George III, as well as the creation of the
first police force.
In 1782 Blake met John Flaxman, who was to become
his patron. In the same year he married a poor, illiterate girl
named Catherine Boucher, who was five years his junior. Catherine
signed her wedding contract with an X. Blake taught her to read
and write and even trained her as an engraver. At that time, George
Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, became
an admirer of Blake's work.
Illustration: The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in
the illuminated books of William Blake. Here, Blake depicts an almighty
creator stooped in prayer contemplating the world he has forged.
The Song of Los is the third in a series of illuminated books, hand
painted by Blake and his wife, known as the "Continental Prophecies",
considered by critics to contain some of Blake's most powerful imagery.Blake's
first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published circa
1783. After his fathers death, William and brother Robert opened
a print shop in 1784 and began working with radical publisher Joseph
Johnson. At Johnson's house he met some of the leading intellectual
dissidents of the time in England, including Joseph Priestley, scientist;
Richard Price, philosopher; John Henry Fuseli, painter whom he became
friends with; Mary Wollstonecraft, feminist; and Thomas Paine, American
revolutionary. Along with William Wordsworth and William Godwin,
Blake had great hopes for the American and French revolution and
wore a red liberty cap in solidarity with the French revolutionaries,
but despaired with the rise of Robespierre and the Reign of Terror
in the French revolution.
Mary Wollstonecraft became a close friend, and
Blake illustrated her Original Stories from Real Life (1788). They
shared similar views on sexual equality and the institution of marriage.
In the Visions of the Daughters of Albion in 1793 Blake condemned
the cruel absurdity of enforced chastity and marriage without love
and defended the right of women to complete self-fulfillment.
In 1788, at the age of thirty-one, Blake began to experiment with
relief etching, which was the method used to produce most of his
books of poems. Blake wrote in a letter that the method was revealed
to him in a dream, by his dead brother, Robert. The process is also
referred to as illuminated printing, and final products as illuminated
books or prints. Illuminated printing involved writing the text
of the poems on copper plates with pens and brushes, using an acid-resistant
medium. Illustrations could appear alongside words in the manner
of earlier illuminated manuscripts. He then etched the plates in
acid in order to dissolve away the untreated copper and leave the
design standing. The pages printed from these plates then had to
be hand-colored in water colors and stitched together to make up
a volume. Blake used illuminated printing for four of his works:
the Songs of Innocence and Experience, The Book of Thel, The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell, and Jerusalem. Each of his illuminated books
was thus a unique work of art and a radical break with not only
traditional book printing but the traditional means of presenting
poetic and philosophical discourse. Blake seems to have believed,
or rather hoped, that self published books could liberate the artist
and author from the tyranny of censorship by Church and State but
its time consuming nature meant that his most personal and prophetic
works reached a minute audience in his lifetime.
The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes
that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the
world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even
draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend
to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces
can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from
the existing paintings.h
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