Blake's Pictorial ImaginationAuthor(s): Anthony BluntReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 6 (1943), pp. 190-212Published by: The Warburg InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/750432 .Accessed: 28/09/2012 09:02

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BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION

By Anthony Blunt

lake's first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, discussing Stothard's borrowings from Blake, says of the latter: His own compositions bear the authentic first-hand impress; those unmistakable traces, which no hand can feign, of genuineness, freshness, and spontaneity; the look as of coming straight from another world-that in which Blake's spirit lived. He, in his cherished visionary faculty, his native power and lifelong habit of vivid invention, was placed above all need or inclination to borrow from others. If as happens to all, there occur occasional passages of un- conscious reminiscence from the old masters, there is no cooking or disguise.1 This estimate of Blake's art has occasionally been challenged over points of detail, but it is still

generally accepted by critics of his work ;2 and it is the object of this article to show not only that is Gilchrist wrong in the sense that one can point to a number of cases in which Blake made use of the works of other artists for his own compositions, but that his whole method of work was based on a close study of earlier art, and that he constantly and regularly makes use of the great traditions to which he was heir.

The researches of Foster Damon and other scholars into Blake's religious and philosophic doc- trines have exploded the myth that he was a sort of illiterate visionary and have proved that he was widely read in the works of the great mystics, such as Boehme and Paracelsus, that he was deeply influenced by Plato, and that he derived many of his views from the early Christian Fathers and heretics. It can be shown that in the field of the visual arts also he studied widely and made ex- tensive use of what he learnt.

It must be said at once that the fact that Blake relied to a great extent on the work of his predecessors does not in any sense diminish our estimate of him as an imaginative artist. On the contrary, it is a peculiar testimony to the immense power of his invention that when he borrows from others he invariably makes of what he takes something wholly his own. The great imaginative artists of all times have used the works of others, and it may be proof of timidity, not of originality, for a painter to cut himself off from what has already been achieved by his predecessors.

It is now realized that Blake is not so completely isolated a phenomenon as was thought in the i9th century, and that other artists such as Fuseli and Flaxman not only used his ideas but were also in certain ways akin to him in spirit. But the arguments set out below are designed to demon- strate that his method of work was allied not only to that of these artists who belong in a sense to the same group, but also to that of painters, such as Reynolds, with whom he felt himself to be in the most violent opposition. The difference between Blake and Reynolds is not that one was an eclectic and the other an artist independent of the influence of tradition. Both borrowed, but each transformed what he took to suit his particular aim in painting; and their aims were diametric- ally opposed.

Before, therefore, examining the sources on which Blake drew it is essential to have a clear con- ception of his purpose as an artist, and for this it will be necessary to consider his other activities, not only his poetry but also the general outlines of his philosophy and the development of his mental outlook.

Here again we shall go wrong if we consider Blake without thought for his contemporaries. He was not an isolated figure, but an extreme representative of a tendency which can be traced in others. In his later years he worked with a high degree of independence, but even then he was not

1 A. Gilchrist, Life of William Blake, Everyman edition, I942, p. 45. Earlier Nollekens had expressed almost the same view: "In his choice of subjects, and in his designs in Art, perhaps no man had higher claim to originality, nor ever drew with a closer adherence to his own conceptions; and from what I knew of him, and have heard related by his friends, I most firmly believe few artists have been guilty of less plagiarisms than he. It is true, I have seen him admire and heard him expatiate upon the beauties of Marc Antonio

and of Albert Duirer; but I verily believe not with any view of borrowing an idea." (J. T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, 1829, II, p. 466.)

2 The only writer to challenge it seriously is Mr. Collins Baker in his extremely interesting article in the Huntingdon Library Quarterly, IV, p. 359. In this article Mr. Collins Baker points to various models used by Blake, and also emphasizes the fact that such borrowing is the general rule and not the exception with him.

190

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION x19r devoid of friends, and in the early part of his life he was connected with various groups whose ideas strongly coloured his own.

He was born in 1757, the son of a tolerably successful shopkeeper in Soho. His family belonged to the sect of Swedenborgians, one of those emotional, revivalist groups which flourished in the second half of the 18th century, and had their largest following in England among the lower middle classes to which Blake belonged. His early life was coloured by this religious training, and he only turned against Swedenborg in about 1793. It is evident, however, that from the beginning he was gifted with an exceptionally strong imagination. The stories about the visions which he saw as a child are well known and need not be repeated here, but they prove that even among a circle of "illuminati" he was regarded as having peculiar and somewhat alarming tendencies in this direction.

Blake's first contact with the intellectual world was at the salon of Mrs. Mathew, wife of a London parson, who had collected round her a group of blue-stockings. In this circle, to which Blake was introduced by Flaxman, pious morality was combined with a taste for literature, not the poetry of the Augustans, but Shakespeare and the pre-Romantics of the later 18th century. It was through the Mathews that Blake was enabled to publish his first volume of verse, the Poetical Sketches, in 1783. Here Blake appears as a full adherent of the movement which was preparing the way for Coleridge and Wordsworth. Gray, Collins, Young and Thomson are his models from his own century, coupled of course, with Macpherson; and, apart from the superb quality of some of the lyrics and the fact that the author had evidently made a very personal study of the Elizabethans, it would not be possible from this volume to say that Blake was doing more than expressing with greater purity the ideals towards which the most advanced of his contemporaries were tending.

The lyrical tendencies in Blake were further developed in the Songs of Innocence (1789) and the Songs of Experience (1794), but while he was composing them he had come into contact with new influences which vitally affected his view of life.

The French Revolution had begun, had reached its crisis, and had even passed its extreme point. Like everyone else in England Blake was deeply influenced by what took place in France. About 1787 he met the bookseller Johnson, in whose house he came into contact with a group of radicals, among whom were Godwin, Tom Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft. In the salon of the Mathews he had been in an atmosphere of enlightened culture, without any marked political tendencies. Now he found himself among enthusiastic supporters of the doctrines of liberty, who believed that the American Revolution had marked the first step towards the millenium, and that the French Revolution would attain it. Blake seems to have shared their general views, and was certainly a violent supporter of the French Revolution in its earlier stages.'

It must be remembered, however, that these English radicals did not in any sense form a coherent revolutionary party. They were a group of individualists, more interested perhaps in speculation than in action. Beginning with practical demands for parliamentary reform, they soon launched out into the construction of ideal states which may have seemed near to realization in the fever created by events in France, but which England, with its bourgeois revolution long passed and a solidly established commercial and land-owning oligarchy in power, would resist strongly and successfully. They were therefore doomed to sterility from the start, and the very remoteness and unreality of their theories is in itself a proof of this. Godwin's plea for a world free of all state interference and coercion of any kind could only be a fantasy.

To Blake, however, as to all the members of this circle, these ideas seemed intensely real and vitally important, and he expressed them in a series of revolutionary works, in the political as well as the literary sense. The earliest of these is his poem, The French Revolution, of which we know only the first book, printed but never published by Johnson in 1791. This poem celebrates the early stages of the Revolution, and holds up as models the first protesters against tyranny, going so far as to make Philippe Egalitd into a hero. The other works which can properly be regarded as political are of a different kind, and reveal already how far Blake was from understanding the true meaning

1 Mr. E. M. W. Phillips, in his unpublished dissertation on "English Expressionist Artists in the 19th Century," presented in I938, has already called attention to the importance of the French Revolution for Blake's development. I did not

have an opportunity of reading his thesis till the part of this article dealing with this theme was already planned in detail, but his conclusions and mine agree in many points.

192 ANTHONY BLUNT of developments in France. America ('793) and Europe (1794) are songs in praise of the spirit of revolution as freeing man from tyranny, but they are written in terms wholly removed from reality. Revolution is not thought of as a pratical activity, but as a matter of conflicting principles, in terms which are almost theological. In the Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793) Blake treats of more specific social problems, such as enforced chastity and its evil effects, but here again his views are veiled in the personal mythology which he was already beginning to evolve. The most interesting of all the books of this period is the Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), in which Blake expresses for the first time what was to be a basic doctrine in all his later writings, namely his hatred of reason or restraint, which has no other function than to limit and destroy energy, the only source of good. Man, he says, can only attain salvation by the full development of his impulses, and all restraint on them whether by law, religion or moral code is wrong.

1794 was a crucial year for the English radicals in general and for Blake in particular. The Terror had aroused a feeling of panic in this country, and had made the English ruling classes aware how grave was the threat to their position. Reaction set in, and radical groups which up to then had been regarded with a certain degree of toleration were violently persecuted. Most of Blake's friends suffered in one way or another. Paine fled to France, saved it is said by Blake, and many members of the London Corresponding Society, with which he was connected, were con- demned to long sentences of imprisonment or deportation. Those of the party whose interests had been more purely theoretical, such as Godwin, escaped actual persecution; but their position was deeply affected by what happened to their friends. They had in any case been shocked by the ex- cesses of the Terror, and now they saw the whole organization to which they belonged broken up. As a result they found themselves in isolation and forced from the fields of practical politics. The inevitable effect was that they were driven more and more in on themselves. Godwin fell back on pure speculation, which was regarded as innocuous by Pitt's government, and continued to evolve, as it were in vacuo, his doctrines of pure anarchy. Mary Wollstonecraft devoted herself to problems connected with the position and education of women. Others found different solutions of the same kind.

On Blake also the effect of this reaction was profound. His interest in politics had always been more emotional than practical, and after the events of 1794 he withdrew entirely into the field of the intellect. His anti-rationalism, which had separated him even in his most active days from the real revolutionaries, now becomes a dominant factor in his life, and he plunges straight down the path to mysticism. The energy which had made him such a fervent supporter of the Revolution in its earlier stages-he went about the streets of London wearing a red cap-is now turned into the sphere of the imagination. He consciously escaped from active life and from politics, and in his later days he summed up his view in characteristic form when he said to Crabb Robinson of Christ: "He should not have attacked the government. He had no business with such matters." 1 And in 181 o he wrote in his Public Address:

I am really sorry to see my Countrymen trouble themselves about Politics. If Men were Wise, the Most arbitrary Princes could not hurt them. If they are not wise, the Freest Government is compell'd to be a Tyranny. Princes appear to me to be Fools. Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords appear to me to be fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life.2

Even in his most openly political days Blake had always been something of an anarchist, and after 1794 he develops his theories of this kind to their furthest point; but he applies them to the intel- lectual field alone. What Godwin worked out theoretically for the active life, Blake applied to the sphere of the mind.3 He never, however, became a reactionary, and when he came, in 1798, to read and annotate Bishop Watson's attack on Tom Paine, his old loyalties survived, and he sided violently with the revolutionary against the narrow orthodoxy of the bishop.4 In 1804, again, he

1 Henry Crabb Robinson, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Lamb, ed. by E. J. Morley, 1922, p. 3.

2Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, Nonesuch Press, I927, p. 819. 3 Blake disliked Godwin, and disapproved of many of his

views, but the analogy between their doctrines of anarchy is,

in spite of that, close. 4 His attitude to Voltaire is also illuminating. Blake hated

him as a Deist and a Materialist (cf. Works, p. 10o7), but he hated still more the orthodox Christians who attacked him. He said to Crabb Robinson: "I have had much intercourse

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 193 was a keen supporter of the foundation of Phillips' Monthly Magazine, which was to be the organ of the democratic party in the literary field.1

Blake was ultimately to find his salvation in following the path of mysticism, but it was not to be an easy task, and the despair into which he was at first thrown is apparent in the writings of the years about 1795. The later so-called "Lambeth books"- The Book of Urizen (1794), the Book of Los (1795), Ahania (1795) and the Song of Los (1795), are the gloomiest of his production. Blake was at this time obsessed with the horror of the world in which he lived, and all these works centre on the problem of evil (which for him meant the deadening of the imaginative power), the restraints to which men were subjected, and the belief which he saw all around him that material things were all that counted. To express this he evolved a new system of cosmology, which incorporates many old heresies, particularly features of Gnosticism. For him the creation of the world was an evil act, because it meant the descent from the infinite to the finite. The creator must, therefore, have been an evil genius, not the God whose doctrines Christ taught. All the books mentioned above deal with this theme-the creation as a fall, the evolution of religion as an evil force restraining man from the true life of the imagination, the domination of reason, which, separated from imagination and pleasure, becomes the greatest cause of man's sufferings. These and similar themes are the burden of this complaint. And he can offer no solution. The books begin and end on a note of com- plete gloom.

Blake did not, however, stay long in this dark night. In the three long poems of the later period there is a steadily growing note of optimism. He did not, however, reach contentment under the impulse of external circumstances. Having cut himself off from the world he made it his business to become free from its evil influences. He so managed his practical and physical existence that by his work as a hack engraver and through the kindness of a few understanding patrons, such as Hayley and Butts, he was able to carry on his own spiritual life in freedom; and his later evolution can be studied entirely in terms of intellectual movements and influences.

The attainment of spiritual peace can be traced through three long poems. In the Four Zoas (1796-1804) Blake is only making the first steps. There are still the long descriptions of the creation in almost the same terms as in the later Lambeth books; but there is a difference in that Blake envisages an ultimate salvation through Christ. Milton, written between 1804 and i8o8, after Blake's return from Felpham, is yet more optimistic. Error is powerful but it can in the long run be des- troyed, if only it can be clearly defined and so recognized as error. The final solution however is found in Jerusalem, begun about 1804 but not finished probably until after 1820. Here redemption is offered, if only man will follow the example of Christ who died for love of man, and if he will himself make the same sacrifice and live in mutual love and forgiveness of sins.2 There is still much that is gloomy -and turgid in Jerusalem, but in the great passages about the Crucifixion there is a tone of ecstasy which is in itself proof that Blake had at last attained to the state of mystical bliss and unity with God, which is so intensely rendered in the illustrations to the poem.

He gives explicit expression to his first recovery of the state of innocence in an ecstatic letter to Hayley written in October 1804:

I have entirely reduced that spectrous fiend to his station, whose annoyance has been the ruin of my labours for the last passed twenty years of my life. . . . Suddenly, on the day after visiting the Truchsessian Gallery of pictures, I was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by win- dow shutters. . . . Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand, even as I used to be in my youth, and as I have not been for twenty dark, but very profitable years.3

with Voltaire and he said to me I blasphemed the Son of Man and it shall be forgiven me. But they (the enemies of Voltaire) blasphemed the Holy Ghost in me and it shall not be forgiven them" (Crabb Robinson, op. cit., p. 12). It must also be remembered that throughout his life Blake's sympathies remained with the oppressed and against the oppressors,

whether in church or state. 1 Gilchrist, op. cit., p. I8I. 2 The same doctrine is to be found in the Everlasting Gospel,

c. 1818. 3 Works, p. I io8 f.

194 ANTHONY BLUNT Blake's development in painting presents a close parallel with his general spiritual evolution.

We are so familiar with his later 'mystical' compositions that it is necessary, in order to redress the balance, to consider his early work in a certain detail. For if we focus our attention on the paintings which he executed before 1794 we shall find that, far from being an eccentric and independent genius, he appears, as in the poems of the same period, to be a competent and imaginative, but not even a very extreme representative of a style of painting widely current at the time.

His earliest known work is an engraving after Michelangelo (P1. 54a) to which we shall return later. In more typical compositions such as the "Penance of Jane Shore" (c. I778) (P1. 54b) or "Edward and Eleanor" (c. 1779) Blake is in no sense an innovator. His idiom is that of the senti- mental neo-classical school of which West and Mortimer were the most prominent members in England, and which derived from the French classical tradition of Poussin as revived by painters such as Vien. In the "Jane Shore" he is a little more naturalistic, in that he introduces to some extent the costume of the 16th century, the period to which the subject belongs, though the draperies are still treated in a purely classical manner; but in the "Edward and Eleanor," the mediaeval soldiers are dressed in Roman armour as Poussin or Mengs would have wished. In his illustrations to Mary Wollstonecraft's Original Stories from Real Life (1791) the costumes are, as befits the theme, contemporary, and Blake uses the rather elegant form of mannerism which was being popularized in England by Stothard. The Gates of Paradise (1793) shows a greater freedom of imagination, but even here Blake fits into a current tradition and bases his style on the emblem books such as Quailes which were still popular at the time.1 In the water colours "Har and Heva" (1788-9) (P1. 54d) and the "Breach in the City" (1784) there is a more Ossianic grandeur, but the forms are still those of neo-classicism.2

At this stage therefore we can say that, though Blake was opposed to the most fashionable school of his day, that of Reynolds and Gainsborough, he was not alone in his opposition, and belonged to a well-defined and acknowledged group of progressive artists. Compared with Fuseli he would have seemed a relatively classical painter.

The gradual development away from this traditional style can be seen in the illustrations to the 'revolutionary' books of I793-4. In most of the plates to these Blake has already adopted the 'mystical' style to be analysed below, but occasionally he still introduces contemporary scenes, though these are of ordinary life (cf. Europe, p. 7, "Plague") (P1. 54c). On the whole, however, it is rare after 1793 to find even these reminiscences of his earlier manner except in works which were intended for publication and not for Blake's private circle, such as the illustrations to Young and Gray, in which he often takes up again the idiom of Stothard or Fuseli.

The contrast between Blake's early works and his later mystical style is so marked that detailed analysis is unnecessary. This can be summed up by saying that, as Blake gives free rein to his anti- rational and purely imaginative tendencies in his thought and in his poetry, so in painting he rejects all the principles of rational and classical art which had been evident in his first compositions-mixed though it was even there with elements of fantasy-and evolves a completely imaginative style. But in doing so he does not take a completely new path. He joins that great body of artists who had never conceived art to consist in the exact rendering of nature, but had used it as a vehicle for ideas. He breaks away from the tradition of Raphael and Poussin, to which he had been joined by many ties, and goes over to the party that includes the artists of the Middle Ages, most early religious artists, and the Mannerists of the Counter-Reformation.

The subjects of his early works, as we have seen, are usually taken from English history or deal with moral or historical problems of direct interest to his contemporaries. But after the crucial years of the Revolution his inspiration is drawn either from the Bible and the great epics of English

1 Cf. plate 6, Works, p. 756. 2 Mention should perhaps be made here of a recently

published work attributed to the early period of Blake, see the article by George Hellman, "The Judgment of Solomon," Print Collector's Quarterly, XXIX, p. 105. This article purports to prove that a large oil painting discovered some years ago and a drawing connected with it are early works of Blake.

The reasons advanced for this view are trivial, and the paint- ing must be by some English artist of the same period as Blake but certainly not by him. It does not, incidentally, represent the Judgment of Solomon, for the sketch does not contain any figures which can be identified as the mothers, and the two women in the painting described by the author as depicting these characters are evidently only attendants.

54

a-Blake, Joseph of Arimathea. Engraving (pp. 194, 200, 202)

b-Blake, The Penance of Jane Shore. Graham Robertson Coll. (p. 194)

c-Blake, Plague, Europe, p. 7 (p. 194) d-Blake, Har and Heva. Water-Colour. Sir Edward Marsh Coll.

(PP. 194, 203)

55

a-Blake, America, p. 7 (p. 198) c-Blake, Blair's Grave, pl. 4 (P. 198)

b-Blake, Symbol of Human History, Dante, pl. 28 (p. 198)

d-Blake, Study for Blair's Grave, pl. 4. Water-Colour. Mrs. D. Y. Cameron Coll. (pp. 198, 208)

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 195 literature, above all Milton, or else from his own private mythology. His compositions are no longer based on the reconstruction of a clearly defined space, and his figures hover or crowd into the page without consideration how they could exist there. The classical principle of a subtly varied sym- metry is exchanged for a composition of swirling.movement, or for an exact repetition on both sides, which on classical canons would seem crude. His figures are poised inexplicably in the air or hurl themselves down through space with unrestrained violence. One side of the composition may be in complete repose and the other in violent turmoil. The linear pattern is often based on an un- compromising contrast of horizontal and vertical lines. A gesture is repeated over and over again in the same design, for the sake of dramatic emphasis.

In the matter of proportion Blake becomes completely arbitrary. Figures are elongated or squat as the effect demands, and one figure will be four times the size of another in the same group, if the symbolism of the theme indicates such a contrast. No gesture is ever softened, arms shoot across the page, and faces grimace. Monsters and horrors recur, in forms which would have shocked any naturalist or classical artist. Add to all this a new attitude towards colour, which from having been soft and restrained in the early works, becomes strident and arresting, or sweet and ecstatic, accord- ing to the subject.

All these features made Blake's art seem startling and even mad to Blake's contemporaries, trained in the mellowness of Reynolds or the decent classicism of West. But they are only the regular stock-in-trade of most religious artists, and are the means which any painter will use if he is bent on conveying an intensely felt idea rather than in depicting a subject realistically.

A distinction must however be drawn between Blake and earlier artists in the great religious tradition. The sculptor who carved an Egyptian god, or the artist who illuminated a manuscript in the Middle Ages belonged to a well-defined tradition which was readily and unconsciously accepted by most of his contemporaries. The Mannerists of the Counter-Reformation, though to some extent Revivalist in spirit, were part of a widespread movement. But Blake, though he did not work in quite the isolation in which he is generally said to have lived, was a lonely figure, dependent for his inspiration, if not always for his methods, on his own imagination, and there is for that reason an exaggeration in his work, an uncontrolled quality, which makes it reasonable that he should have been considered as a madman not only in his own day but throughout most of the 19th century. Circumstances compelled him to solitude, and to a reliance on his own judgment that must destroy balance. But he was not the only one who suffered in this way. In the circles with which he was most closely connected, Fuseli was notoriously eccentric, and Cowper and Romney died insane. It is only in some of the works of Blake's latest period, when he had reached the mystical union which was his goal for thirty years, that this element of strain and exaggeration for a moment disappears. The best of the Dante designs, and of the illustrations to the Book of Job are among the great religious works of art of all time.

Before examining in detail the relation of Blake to earlier artists and the use he made of their work, it will perhaps clear away certain difficulties if we consider what types of work could have been known to him.

Blake never left England and indeed, apart from four years spent at Felpham near Chichester, the whole of his life was passed in London. He had therefore no first-hand knowledge of the great works of art preserved on the Continent. Nor did the National Gallery exist in his time. His only opportunity of seeing foreign painting in the original lay in the various private collections in London. They were not many in number, and often not easily accessible, but during Blake's lifetime many of the great French collections, such as the Orleans and Calonne galleries, were transported to this country and sold by public auction. In addition to this we know from Gilchrist that he saw the collection of Count Truchsess when it was exhibited in I804, and that in his last years he was frequently at the house of the collector Aders. From all these sources he could have gained a know- ledge not only of the great Italian and French masters, but also of German and Flemish painters of the I6th century.

It was not however primarily from painting that Blake derived his sustenance. He was by pro- fession an engraver, and it was with the world of engraving that he was in closest touch. But, in addition to being an executant in this field, he was also a collector and a dealer. His earliest attempt

196 ANTHONY BLUNT to make his living was by setting up a print-seller's shop with a fellow pupil in Basire's studio, and it is known that he formed a large collection of engravings, which he was forced to sell to Colnaghi's in I821.1 His taste, which was regarded as eccentric at the time, was for the Italian and German masters of the I6th century, rather than the fluent performers of the 18th century. Since, however, he continued all his life to work for publishers as an engraver of the works of other artists, he was always in touch with what was being done in this field, and, as will be seen later, he made con- siderable use of newly-discovered works of art and archaeology published in current books.

There was however another equally important source with which Blake was in touch. When he was working under Basire he was put to draw in Westminster Abbey, and some of his drawings after tombs made at that time were published in Gough's Sepulchral Monuments (1786 and I798). We know from Gilchrist that the influence on Blake of these studies was very deep, and we may suppose that he did not limit his interest in Gothic sculpture to Westminster but also studied other monuments of this kind in London. Moreover he was a regular attendant at the sale room, where, in addition to prints, he would have the opportunity of seeing mediaeval manuscripts, the influence of which on his own printed books is evident.

Finally Blake could have known originals from the various civilizations of antiquity, non-classical as well as classical, in the British Museum, and in private collections such as that of Sir John Soane.

There is therefore evidence to show not only that Blake could have seen the great works of the past, but that he took great pains to study them.

It will be most convenient to examine Blake's borrowings from earlier art under four headings:

(i) Ancient art (2) Mediaeval art (3) Renaissance and Mannerist art (4) Oriental and primitive art

His attitude towards ancient and mediaeval art must be to some extent Gonsidered together. On this, as on so many other subjects, Blake made many statements which are decisive but not always consistent. In general for him mediaeval art was true art, and classical art a false and degenerate art. His most explicit declaration on this subject occurs in his discussion of Virgil, where he says: "Sacred Truth has pronounced that Greece and Rome . . . , so far from being parents of Arts and Sciences, as they pretend, were destroyers of all art.... Grecian is Mathematic Form: Gothic is Living Form. Mathematical Form is External in the Reasoning Memory; Living Form is Eternal Existence" ;2 and we know from Blake's general theories that "Reasoning Memory" was the faculty which he most strongly hated. On occasions he uses classical as synonymous with pagan, and there- fore for something entirely wicked. Speaking metaphorically, of Milton he says: "His tastes are Pagan; his house is Palladian, not Gothic."3

On the other hand we know from his own statements and from the evidence of his contemporaries that he constantly studied Greek and Roman sculpture, and on certain occasions even set it up as a model of what art should be. Writing to George Cumberland, he talks of "the immense flood of Grecian light and glory which is coming on Europe,"4 and in his Descriptive Catalogue he speaks of "the greatest antiques" as the models which he is emulating.5 Gilchrist tells us moreover that he studied the works of antiquity with passion, above all ancient gems and certain works of sculpture. It is in any case evident from his work that he often relied on formulae borrowed from classical sculpture to express his ideas.

This apparent contradiction is less surprising, however, if we examine his particular taste in ancient works of art. His first preference was for engraved gems in which he evidently saw that precision of outline and of minutely defined form which he believed essential in all drawing. It is

1 Colnaghi's records for that date have unfortunately been destroyed, so that we have no details about the contents of the collection.

2 Works, p. 768.

3 Gilchrist, op. cit., p. 317. 4 Works, p. Io44. 5 Ibid., p. 798.

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 197 also significant that he considered the Belvedere Torso to be not only the greatest work of antiquity, but the one truly original work produced by Greece and Rome.1 On the other hand, when the Elgin marbles were brought to England, he was not enthusiastic about them, and we know from Gilchrist that he agreed with Flaxman and Fuseli that the Theseus did not rank with the very finest relics of antiquity.2 It seems, therefore, that he shared the taste of his day for 'ideal' Greek art. The style of the Parthenon sculptures was too humanist and too rational for him, and he pre- ferred the more idealized Hellenistic works. We may guess that, had he seen them, he would also have preferred the works of archaic Greek art to those of the 5th century.

The true explanation, however, of Blake's mixed attitude towards ancient art can only be under- stood if we examine a curious theory which he held about the origins of classical civilization in general.

Blake believed that the only book in which true poetry, that is to say vision, was to be found was the Bible. The prophets of the Old Testament were the direct vehicles of divine inspiration and all later writers were only faint imitations of them. All classical mythology was only a reflection of the Hebrew.3 On one occasion he says: "The antiquities of every Nation under heaven, is no less sacred than that of the Jews. They are the same thing, as Jacob Bryant and all antiquaries have proved. How other antiquities came to be neglected and disbelieved, while those of the Jews are collected and arranged, is an inquiry worthy both of the Antiquarian and the Divine."4 All primitive art is, therefore, sacred-an echo of Rousseau's primitivitism-but it so happens that the only specimens surviving in their pure state are those of the Jews preserved in the Bible.

By analogy with this situation in literature Blake argued that the Jews must also have produced similar works of inspiration in the visual arts. And, following up this analogy, he concluded that the works of classical and other antiquity are only copies of these lost originals. Greek statues, he says for instance, are "copies, though fine ones from greater works of the Asiatic patriarchs."5 And on his engraving of the Laocoon he wrote: "Jah and his two sons, Satan and Adam, as they were copied from the Cherubim of Solomon's Temple by three Rhodians and applied to Natural Fact, or History of

Ilium."' But as copies the works of classical civilization ranked high: "Milton, Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Rafael, the finest specimens of Ancient Sculpture and Painting and Architecture, Gothic, Grecian, Hindoo, and Egyptian, are the extent of the human mind.'7 The works of classical antiquity were therefore far from being perfect but they were useful as among the best surviving copies of the ideal lost originals, and it is for this reason that Blake, while condemning them at one moment, praises them enthusiastically at another.

His reliance on ancient art, in general terms, is evident from many of his designs. His nudes usually approximate to the sculptural type familiar to all artists of his period and copied by his neo- classical contemporaries such as Flaxman. Above all, however, he believed in the classical practice of making drapery a mere veil to the naked form which it covered. In a note to Reynolds' Discourses he writes: "The Drapery is formed alone by the shape of the Naked,"' and it is recorded by Gilchrist that his one complaint against Disrer, an artist whom he greatly admired, was that his draperies were too rigid and did not reveal the forms under them.9 It is true that, as often, he exaggerated the qualities which he admired in his model, and in many cases his own draperies cling so closely to the forms of the body as to be almost invisible. For many of his figures he even avoids the sweep- ing robes of antiquity and replaces them for his male figures by what one can only describe as tights which fit the figures so closely that at first sight they appear to be nudes and the existence of the drapery is only indicated by a line round neck, wrists or ankles where the tights end.

On the other hand though, when he borrowed these elements from antiquity he transformed them in such a way that his figures have a purely un-antique character. He had no understanding for the naturalism of classical art and even when he used an ancient idiom, such as the detailed musculation of the male nude, he exaggerated it so that it becomes unnaturalistic and a mere

1 Ibid., p. 781. 2 Gilchrist, op. cit., p. 302. 3 Cf. Works, p. 898. 4 Ibid., p. 797. 5 Works, p. 78I.

6 Ibid., p. 764. 7 Ibid., p. 798. 8 Ibid., p. 993- 9 Gilchrist, op. cit., p. 302.

198 ANTHONY BLUNT formula. This has often been made an accusation against Blake, but it is consistent with his general conception of art. For him the human figure was only a symbol of a spiritual state; and a naturalistic rendering of the nude on classical lines would not have conveyed his intention so completely as the stylized form into which he translated his original. It must also be remembered that he very rarely treats classical subjects, and he is forced, therefore, in his biblical and mystical compositions to transform his ancient models into something more patriarchal.

His attitude of mixed admiration and condemnation of classical art is paralleled by his views on Greek philosophy. Plato, for instance, is constantly coupled by him with the names of Bacon, Newton and Locke, as one of the high priests of that rationalism which he hated. On the other hand his own ideas are permeated with the influence of Platonic doctrines or rather, to be more precise, of Neo-platonic doctrines. This double attitude is characteristic of Blake, who often picked out one quality in a system of thought and identified it with the whole system, to be entirely approved or entirely condemned. What he really admired in Plato was the mystical element, developed by his successors the Neo-platonists, and what he hated was the rational or, as he describes it, the mathematical side, which at certain moments blinded him to the other aspect of Plato's philosophy.

In the same way, while decrying classical art, he sometimes makes direct use of it. Apart from the general borrowings already mentioned, we can point to one or two instances in which he has taken an ancient statue as a direct model for one of his figures. For instance in Plate 7 of America

(P1. 55a) we see a naked figure lying on its face which copies almost exactly the pose of one of the celebrated ancient hermaphrodites, but, as always, Blake has used this figure in a completely un- classical manner by placing it beside an enormous woolly ram far bigger than the figure itself, the whole group being set under one of those fanciful trees which suggest that Blake may have known something of Chinese art. An even clearer instance occurs in the illustrations to Dante. The 28th drawing (P1. 55b) depicts a colossal figure, symbolical of the course of human history, wearing a crown composed of rays. Both the general pose of the figure and the crowned head are clearly taken from some ancient statue of Helios, but here again Blake has transformed his model by giving it a terror quite contrary to the spirit of ancient sculpture.

Blake's relation to mediaeval art is much clearer and has been generally noticed. Most critics, however, have been content with some general statement to the effect that he studied the tombs in Westminster Abbey and that the books printed by his special process show the influence of mediaeval manuscripts. It is possible, however, to be considerably more precise.

The influence of his studies in Westminster Abbey is most clearly to be seen in the illustrations to Blair's Grave, some of which are little more than direct copies of mediaeval monuments. In one, for instance, showing the Counsellor, King, Warrior, Mother and Child in the grave (P1. 55c, d), Blake has simply taken Gothic figures, some of which can be almost exactly identified (the Coun- sellor, for instance, with the tomb of Edward the Third), and has placed them side by side under a Gothic vault. In another illustration to this poem, "The Soul hovering over the Body," the recum- bent figure is again based on a Gothic tomb sculpture, but is transformed to some extent into a neo-classical type. A similar fusion appears in the frontispiece to the Songs of Experience in which two Gothic figures, again reminiscent of the tomb of Edward the Third, are mourned over by two other figures which seem to have stepped out of contemporary neo-classical painting.

Blake was, however, also influenced by other types of mediaeval sculpture as well as tomb- figures. Several of his water-colours contain groups which recall the bosses of mediaeval cathedrals. "God blessing the Seventh Day" (P1. 56a), the choir of angels in one of the illustrations for Milton's Hymn on the Nativity, and "The Son of Man" from the late drawings to the Book of Enoch are all based on the pattern of a figure or figures enclosed in a circle of flying angels which is a regular formula in mediaeval bosses. There is even one such boss which is reproduced by Flaxman in his lectures (P1. 56b) and was therefore probably known to Blake,1 which may well have provided the inspiration for the Milton and Enoch designs. The same pattern appears in a rather different form in one of Blake's last works, plate 5 of the Job series.2

1 Flaxman's original drawing after this boss is in one of the unpublished note-books in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cam- bridge.

2 A further similarity with mediaeival sculpture may be seen in the winged figure in "The Elohim creating Adam." This figure goes back to ancient prototypes, but it is strangely

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 199 The influence of mediaeval manuscripts is more complex. The whole conception of Blake's

printed books, with their intermingling of text and ornament, derives directly from the illumination of the Middle Ages. In the early books, such as Songs of Innocence and Experience, his models seem to have been late mediaeval manuscripts of the I4th and I5th centuries. The pretty, naturalistic details of the foliage and figures are closely related to these models, and the whole mode of colouring with its light and gay tones derives from the same source. But in his later work he turns, more surprisingly, to earlier examples of illumination. In his last work, Jerusalem, the pages have taken on a more solemn character, and not only the general layout, but even the grotesque beasts, introduced between the lines of the text, recall such models as I2th century Bestiaries with which he was probably familiar. The colouring again with its sombre brilliance confirms that his sources were probably i2th century manuscripts rather than later works.

It was not, however, only in his printed pages that he relied on originals of this period. In his water-colours also we can find echoes of i2th century designs which are too close to be fortuitous. The most striking of these parallels occurs in the water-colour of "St. Michael and the Dragon" (P1. 56c). The circular composition, with the movement leading on from the human figure to that of the beast, suggests the designs which artists of the I2th century loved to use in the initials of their manuscripts. There is," indeed, one initial in the Winchester Bible (P1. 56d) so close in character to Blake's group that it almost suggests a direct borrowing. The mediaeval example shows David struggling with the lion, and Blake seems to have blended in his design the movement of the lion with the outline provided by the initial letter itself, and so has produced a design in which the movement is even more stylized than in the original.1 Another instance, though perhaps less precise, is worth mentioning. The celebrated composition of "Satan smiting Job" has many mediae- val qualities; the almost glowing colour suggests not only manuscripts of the type which we are discussing, but also the stained glass of the Middle Ages.2 The curious convention of wavy bands which Blake uses for the clouds round the sunset is in many ways similar to what we find in illumina- tions of the I2th century, such, for instance, as the Ascension in the York Psalter. But most curious of all is the attitude ofJob, with his head thrown back in pain into a quite unnatural and exaggerated attitude, for which we find a close parallel in a figure in the Aberdeen Bestiary. It would be too much to say that Blake had directly imitated this figure, but he has certainly fallen back on a formula closely related in general character to that used by the mediaeval artist.

Other echoes of the Middle Ages are common in Blake's work. The theme of his frontispiece to Europe (P1. 58a), which shows God setting a compass to the earth, is one which recurs in mediaeval art, but not to my knowledge in the work of other periods.3 In one of the Dante designs which shows Dante, Beatrice, St. Peter, St. James and St. John the Evangelist, the three saints hover in circular glories which overlap and form a composition, strongly recalling the roundel in a stained glass window, or a similar design common in manuscripts of the I4th century.

Sometimes, moreover, we find a particular type which suggests fusion of the Gothic with the classical type. In Plate i i of the Job engravings, for instance, the bearded head of the monster which terrifies Job suggests at first sight the ancient Jupiter type, but at the same time it has something of the character of those grotesque heads familiar in Gothic sculpture in which the hair round a mask is transformed into foliage. Blake no doubt knew this Gothic form from the sculptures in.St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster, which were engraved in the studio of his master Basire for the Society of Antiquaries in 1795.4 Or again, in the painting of "The Virgin contemplating the infant Christ asleep on the cross," the attitude of the Virgin herself with bowed head and clasped hands, is one familiar in late mediaeval paintings of St. John and the Virgin below the cross. It is a type used by Giotto in the Arena "Entombment," occurring again later in Fra Angelico's version of the same similar in character to certain I2th century figures, such as those in the reliefs on the side walls of the porch at Malmes- bury.

1 Another possible connection with the Winchester Bible occurs in a water-colour of the Crucifixion, of which the present whereabouts is unknown. It shows, below the crosses, a crowd of figures with hands pointing upwards, forming an unusual silhouette in many ways similar to that in the initial

to Hosea I in the Winchester Bible. 2 The same type of colouring can be seen in other composi-

tions, particularly in coloured prints such as the "Elijah." 3 For a discussion of the iconography of this design, cf. the

author's article in this Journal, II, p. 53- 4 Cf. Plate 13 in Plans, Elevations and Sections . .

. of St. Stephen's Chapel, Westminster, engraved by James Basire, 1795.

200 ANTHONY BLUNT

subject in the Goldman collection, New York. In the I6th century it was revived by Rosso in his "Deposition" at Arezzo, and by Holbein in a similar subject engraved by Hollar, in which form Blake may well have known it.1

It is evident, therefore, that Blake's general conception of art was deeply influenced by his study of mediaeval models, but even when he borrowed ideas or single figures from such sources he usually clothes them in forms taken from other models. We have already seen how he blends mediaeval with neo-classical elements, but the idiom which he uses most frequently and most consistently was one derived from later sources, particularly from artists of the i16th century.

For him the two gods of painting were Michelangelo2 and Raphael. It is a commonplace of Blake criticism that his formula for painting the nude was based on Michelangelo, and this comment is usually coupled with a regret that Blake only knew the Italian master through engravings after his work and not in the original. A closer analysis, however, of the use which he made of Michel- angelo's compositions will show, first, that he only admired and understood certain elements in the great Italian, and, secondly, that he could see these particular elements perhaps more cLarly in the engravings than in the originals.

Blake's admiration for Raphael and Michelangelo, the two purest representatives of High Renaissance humanist painting, may seem at first sight to conflict with his general conception of art as a non-rationalist and visionary activity; but in fact this is not the case. Borrowings from these artists occur throughout Blake's work, but it is a curious fact that there seem to be no instances in which Blake has turned to the works of their classical period as his models. It was not from the "School of Athens" or from the great compositions on the roof of the Sistine Chapel that he learnt. His quotations are almost always from the later works of the two artists, above all from the "Last Judgment" and the Pauline chapel frescoes of Michelangelo on the one hand, and from the Loggie or the "Transfiguration" of Raphael on the other. That is to say, Blake found himself in closest sympathy with those works of Michelangelo and Raphael in which these artists were breaking away from High Renaissance humanism and laying the foundations of Mannerism.

It would be impossible to analyse all the instances in which Blake relies on these two artists, but it will be worth while to discuss certain individual cases. His earliest known work is an engraving entitled "Joseph of Arimathea among the rocks of Albion" (P1. 54a), which is an exact copy of one of the figures from the "Crucifixion of St. Peter," a debt acknowledged by Blake in his inscription on the plate. It is perhaps characteristic that even at this early date Blake is using Michelangelo's figure for a purpose entirely his own. The title to the engraving reads: "This is One of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages, Wandering about in sheepskins and goatskins of whom the World was not worthy; such were the Christians in all Ages."'3 Mr. Laurence Binyon has pointed out that according to the legend Joseph of Arimathea brought the gospel to England, and since for Blake religion, poetry and art were the same thing, Joseph becomes for him a symbol of all those who 'treasured the Light in darkness,' whether in religion or art.4

Another Michelangelesque source on which Blake habitually drew was the series of figures representing the Ancestors of Christ in the lunettes below the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. These belong, it is true, to an earlier period than the Pauline frescoes, but they already show Michelangelo's tendency towards Mannerism. The most interesting example of his use of these figures occurs in

1 The motive of the Christ child asleep on the cross is one common in Italian art of the I7th century (cf. Male, L'art religieux apris le concile de Trente, p. 331), and Blake presumably saw Guido Reni's version of the subject in the Orleans collec- tion when it was sold in London in 1798. This is one of the few instances in which Blake seems to have been influenced by I7th century artists. Another curious instance is a borrow- ing discovered by Mr. Collins Baker. The donkey which occurs in Blake's "Hecate" and is repeated in the "Riposo" is taken from a plate in Alexander Browne's Ars Pictoria, of 1675, a work largely based on the principles and examples

of late Flemish Mannerism. 2 He engraved, and probably designed, the portrait of

Michelangelo at the end of Fuseli's lectures, published in 18oi. The head of this figure is taken from Ghisi's portrait engraving (Steinmann, Die Portraitdarstellungen des Michel- angelo, pl. 30), and the motive of the walking-stick may derive from Leoni's medal (ibid., pl. 50) which is itself based on the right-hand figure in the lunette representing Salmon, Booz, and Obeth in the Sistine chapel.

3 Works, p. 86I. 4 Binyon, The Engraved Designs of William Blake, p. 35-

56

a-Blake, God blessing the Seventh Day. Water-Colour. Graham Robertson Coll. (p. I98)

b-Gothic Boss. From Flaxman's Lectures (p. 198)

c--Blake, St. Michael. Water-Colour. Fogg Art Museum, Boston (p. 199)

d-Initial from the Winchester Bible. Win- chester Cathedral Library (p. 199)

57

a-Blake, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Tempera. Private Coll. (p. 201) b-Blake, Pity. Water-Colour. Tate Gallery (pp. 201, 208)

c-Florentine School, 14th Cent. Charity. Museo Bar- dini (p. 201)

d-Blake, Pity. Drawing. Brit. Mus. (p. 201) e-Raphael, God appearing to Isaac. Vatican Loggie (p. 201)

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 201o the "Newton" which is based very closely on an engraving by Ghisi after the sleeping figure in the group of Roboam and Abias. In this case we are fortunately able to prove Blake's knowledge of the original, since there is in the British Museum a drawing by him which is an exact copy of the engraving.1 The Ancestors, however, frequently turn up elsewhere. In the illustrations to Gray, for instance, we find figures seated and seen full face in an attitude of gloomy contemplation which recall the left-hand figure in the Aminadab lunette.

A more complex instance is to be found in the tempera painting of "Faith, Hope and Charity" (P1. 57a). The figure of Faith on the left, seeing as in a glass darkly, is a fusion of different Ancestors. The attitude is a general reminiscence of several figures, and the contemplative stare recalls the Naason. This composition is yet another instance of the blending in Blake of mediaeval with later elements. The figure of Charity in the middle reminds us of certain 13th century Florentine Charities (P1. 57c), and the relation in scale between this figure and the two minute naked figures at her feet is one which would be normal in a mediaeval manuscript but quite contrary to classical canons.

To these instances of particular borrowings should be added certain cases of more general imitation. Blake's "Last Judgment," painted in i8o8 for Lady Egremont, is based in its whole conception on Michelangelo's fresco of the same subject. The spaceless composition of falling, rising or floating figures is purely Michelangelesque, and the individual groups of figures clinging together are constructed according to his principles. These entwined groups occur constantly in Blake, for instance in the "Meditations among the Tombs," and in some of the Job plates (e.g. pl. 16), and the Dante designs ("The Circle of the Lustful").

Although Blake placed the name of Raphael next to that of Michelangelo among his ideal artists his influence is not so widely visible.

We know, however, that he studied him from his earliest days and in 1780 he engraved four plates after his designs for "The Protestant's Family Bible." By a curious error, presumably due to the engraver of the ornamental borders to these plates, two of them are inscribed "Rubens del.," a confusion which can hardly have pleased Blake for whom Rubens was the type of everything to be avoided in painting. These four engravings are all based on compositions from the Loggie, though they are considerably altered, in order to fit Raphael's oblong compositions into the upright format of the book. One of them represents Joseph's dream from which Blake later borrowed the group of sheep in the background, which he uses in plates 5 and 28 of the Songs of Innocence.

Another curious instance of borrowing from Raphael occurs in one of Blake's apparently most spontaneous and original designs, the "Pity" (P1. 57b, d), where the figure at the very top with out- stretched arms is an echo of God the Father in the Loggie painting of "God appearing to Isaac" (P1. 57e). Another possible connection with I6th century Italian art in this design can be seen in the hair of the central figure blown out almost straight in the wind. This suggests that Blake may have had in mind a representation of Occasio such as that shown in the painting by Girolamo da Carpi of "Chance and Penitence" in the Dresden gallery.

These examples support what has been said above, namely that it was the Mannerist rather than the classical elements in Michelangelo and Raphael that attracted Blake. If this view is accepted, we need not regret that Blake knew these artists indirectly through engravings rather than in the original. The prints after Michelangelo and Raphael with which Blake was familiar were executed by their Mannerist followers and therefore tended to exaggerate the non-classical qualities in their work. It is therefore possible that Blake would have found these 'translations' more to his taste than the originals, and I am inclined to believe that he might have felt himself somewhat lost if he had been faced with, say, the Segnatura frescoes themselves.

Moreover the connection between Blake and other artists of the I6th century confirms his taste for Mannerist rather than humanist art.

These connections must be divided into two classes: those in which we can say almost definitely 1 Cf. the author's article in this Journal, II, p. 61, P1. I i.

In his notes to the new edition of Gilchrist (p. 382) Ruthven Todd states that there is another drawing in the British Museum by Blake after Michelangelo which is connected

with the frontispiece to Malkin's A Father's Memoirs of his Child, designed by Blake. In the present circumstances it is impossible to check this, but I am unable to find any Michel- angelesque original for the engraving.

202 ANTHONY BLUNT that Blake knew and used a particular original, and those in which, in spite of close similarity, there is reason to believe that Blake could not have known the model which he appears to be copying.

Of the first type the most interesting example is the frontispiece to Europe (P1. 58a) which has already been mentioned in connectiori with its mediaeval theme. In a previous article on the symbolism of this plate' I indicated Michelangelo's "Conversion of St. Paul" and Giovanni da Bologna's figure of the Appenines as the source for the formal side of this design. But, although the idiom which he uses derives ultimately from such models, it is possible to point to other Italian Mannerist works which are probably his more immediate sources. In 1756 there was published in Italy a volume of engravings after the works of Pellegrino Tibaldi which was almost certainly accessible to Blake. In this we find many of the elements of Blake's design. In one composition representing "Christ in glory" (P1. 58c) we find the dramatic downpointing arm which derives ultimately from Michelangelo's Christ in the "Conversion of St. Paul"; but in another plate repre- senting "Neptune" (P1. 58b) we see also the huge muscular leg and knee of Blake's figure and, in elementary form, the hair and beard swept out almost horizontally by the wind. As always Blake has exaggerated his model and has made these last features into something entirely stylized according to his own inventions, but the similarity is so great as to make it almost certain that he was drawing on this original.2

Another very curious instance of borrowing from Italian Mannerism occurs in one of Blake's most famous prints, the "Glad Day," which, as has been shown in a previous article in this Journal,3 is based almost exactly on an engraving illustrating the proportions of the human figure in Scamozzi's Idea dell'Architettura Universale.4 In this case, however, the borrowing is more exact than in the frontispiece to Europe. "Glad Day" is an early work, dating from about 1780, and at this time, as we have already seen from the "Joseph of Arimathea" (P1. 54a), Blake sometimes used the works of other artists in a more wholesale manner. In this case he has copied Scamozzi's figure with only the smallest alterations, although he has contrived to give it a character so com- pretely his own that the print has always been regarded as one of his most spontaneous creations.

Other cases of apparent reminiscences from Italian art are almost as close. For instance, in Blake's water-colours of "Jacob's Dream" (P1. 58e) the great spiral staircase, on which elongated and elegant figures walk, is extraordinarily close to one of Salviati's frescoes in the Palazzo Sacchetti in Rome (P1. 58d). Here, however, we are faced with the fact that, as far as is known, these frescoes were neither engraved nor copied before Blake's time. It seems therefore almost certain that he cannot have known Salviati's composition. The resemblance between the two works need not, however, be regarded as entirely fortuitous. Salviati formed his style on the study of early Roman and Florentine Mannerist artists, who were the models that Blake also studied and admired. It seems, therefore, that the connection between the two paintings can be explained by the fact that Blake and Salviati, starting from the same premises and working on principles of art which were basically similar, arrived, logically enough, at similar conclusions.

Blake himself, moreover, recognized that such a phenomenon was likely to occur in his art. On one occasion he was accused of having copied a figure in his "Canterbury Pilgrims" from a painting in Aders' collection. He said that his own design was executed many years before seeing the painting, but added that there was "no wonder in the resemblance, as in my youth I was always studying that class of paintings."5

There are other instances of the same phenomenon. Blake's allegorical painting of "Nelson guiding Leviathan" (P1. 59a) shows a naked figure standing encircled by a mass of twisted nudes, poised irrationally in space. This unusual form of composition comes very close to a type used by Pontormo in his fresco of "Christ in glory" in San Lorenzo, Florence. This fresco is now lost and is only known from a drawing in the Uffizi (P1. 59b). It was, apparently, never engraved, and again

1 Cf. this Journal, II, p. 62. 2 The same form of beard reappears in one of the drawings

for Paradise Regained. Cf. Figgis, The Paintings of William Blake, pl. 28.

3Vol. II, p. 65. 4 Mr. Collins Baker in the article already quoted has pointed

out that Blake borrows on another occasion from a diagram- matic figure of this kind. The Adam in the "Temptation of Eve" is based on a figure on pl. 23 of Alexander Browne's Ars Pictoria, 1675. 5 Gilchrist, op. cit., p. 373-

58

a-Blake, The Ancient of Days. Colour Print. Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (pp. 199, 202, 207)

b-Neptune. Engraving after Pellegrino Tibaldi, 1756 (p. 202)

d-Salviati, Fresco, Palazzo Sacchetti, Rome (p. 202)

c-Figure from "Christ in Glory." Engraving after Pellegrino Tibaldi (p. 202)

e-Blake, Jacob's Dream. Water Colour. Graham Robertson Coll. (p. 202)

59

a-Blake, Nelson, Tempera. Tate Gallery (pp. 202, 206)

b-Pontormo, Christ in Glory, Drawing. Uffizi (p. 202f.)

c-Blake, Pitt, Tempera. National Gallery (p. 206)

d-Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, Drawing. Tate Gallery (p. 203)

e-Florentine School, c. 1550. Detail. Aix-en- Provence (p. 203)

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 203 therefore we must assume that Blake did not know the composition. The same explanation, however, applies as in the case of Salviati. Pontormo also derived from the same originals that Blake knew. It should be added that here again several individual figures in Blake's design derive from Michel- angelo's "Last Judgment."

More curious is the case of one of Blake's most celebrated drawings from his series of Visionary Heads drawn for Varley at the very end- of his life. Blake claimed that he drew these heads from visions which appeared before him, and, from the circumstantial way in which he discussed the behaviour of his supernatural visitors, there is no doubt that he was describing his experiences accurately. On the other hand Blake's mind was so deeply soaked in works of art which he had studied, that these visions often took on forms reminiscent of existing works of art, or at any rate of traditional styles. The head of Corinna, for instance, is akin to classical or neo-classical figures. Even the most celebrated of them, "The Ghost of a Flea" (P1. 59d), has a close family likeness to certain monsters which appear in Italian Mannerist painting. There is, for instance, in a Florentine painting of about 1550 a figure of Satan (P1. 59e) which is strangely close to Blake's head, particularly to the extra sketch made by him of the vision when it disturbed his work by opening its mouth, Blake having begun to draw it with its jaws closed. The Italian picture in question, now in the Museum of Aix-en-Provence, in Blake's day was probably in a private collection in that town, and it appears never-to have been engraved. Blake may of course have known a similar monster in an engraving of the same period, but it is also possible that this is yet another case of similarity based on common sources.1

Gilchrist says of Blake that his "ideal home was with Fra Angelico,"2 and in his more placid compositions there is much to remind us of this master. We have already noticed one similarity between their paintings in a point of detail, but beyond that no direct contact is traceable.

There is, however, reason to believe that Blake may have been influenced by the artists of the early Italian Renaissance. He could have known them indirectly through the sketches made by Flaxman in Italy, which included copies after Ghiberti, Donatello and other artists of the Quattro- cento. They were also beginning to be accessible to the public through the engravings in Ottley's Italian School of Design,3 Metz' Imitations of Ancient and Modern Drawings (1798), and the Etruria Pittrice (1791 ). Here again, however, evidence of direct influence is hard to find. Gilchrist compares plate 2 of the Job series with Orcagna, and plate 21 with Luca della Robbia.4 The similarity with Orcagna is only general, but the group on the left in plate 21 is close in general formation and in individual types to della Robbia's choir of angels in the Opera del Duomo in Florence.

Two other cases occur in which Blake comes very close to the Quattrocento. The early water- colour of "Har and Heva" (P1. 54d) is strikingly similar in character to Botticelli, particularly to the "Mars and Venus" now in the National Gallery. This painting, however, had not, yet come to England, and Blake cannot have known it though he may have known work similar in character. In the "Burial of Moses" the angels at the top of the composition remind us of Quattrocento figures such as those on Ghiberti's relief on the Reliquary in the Museo Nazionale in Florence.

Blake did not, however, confine his admiration to Italian artists. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Darer and of the German and Flemish engravers of the same time. We know moreover that he saw original paintings of this type in the collections of Truchsess and Aders in London. It is not therefore surprising to find similarities to their work in his designs. The closest parallel is to be found in his coloured print of "Nebuchadnezzar" (P1. 6oa) which goes back to certain figures in German engravings5 (P1. 6ob). Gilchrist tells us that Samuel Palmer also noticed this similarity but he told Gilchrist that Blake only saw the prints in question many years after he made his own design.6 The similarity is so close, however, that it is difficult to believe Palmer's statement. When

1 Figgis has pointed out that a monster of the same type occurs in two earlier water-colours by Blake, the "Pestilence," and "David and Goliath" (The Paintings of William Blake, P. 47 and pls. 66, 67). 2 Gilchrist, op. cit., p. 303.

3 Published 1823 and I826, but from drawings made many years earlier.

4 Op. cit., p. 292 f. 5 Cf. this Journal, I, P1. 25. 6 Op. cit., p. 77. Damon (op. cit., p. 328) on the other hand

states that the Nebuchadnezzar is derived from an engraving in Richard Blome's Bible Commentary, of 1703. I have been unable to trace a copy of this work.

204 ANTHONY BLUNT Blake was impressed by a figure in any work of art he seems to have absorbed it completely into his stock of visual images, and it became as much a part of the store as elements which he had drawn from nature or from any other source. It is, therefore, quite likely that when Palmer showed him the German prints containing a figure like his Nebuchadnezzar, Blake had entirely forgotten that he had ever seen a print of this kind, and he probably had no idea that he had been inspired by such a model.1

We have further evidence of his study of German engravings in the water-colour illustrating the "Whore of Babylon" (P1. 6oc) from the Apocalypse. His composition shows a woman in oriental dress seated on a seven-headed monster. In general type this group goes back to Durer's woodcut of the same subject which was no doubt known to Blake and which had been popularized in Alciati's Emblemata where it is used to symbolize False Religion. In some ways, however, Blake's water-colour is closer to a drawing by an anonymous German artist of the I6th century formerly in the Oppenheimer collection (P1 6od). The monster here is very different, but the woman herself wears oriental costume like Blake's figure. As always, however, there is nothing in Blake's composi- tion which looks second-hand. He has transformed his model by giving the monster human heads, and he has filled the design with a crowd of minute figures entirely of his own invention. It seems nevertheless likely that Blake had some such model in mind in this case since on other occasions when he treats the same subject he uses a completely different formula.2

It must also be from Durer or from contemporary Flemish engravings that Blake derived the grotesque heads which he introduces so forcibly in some of his compositions of the Crucifixion. In general character they remind us of Jerome Bosch. Another possible connection with Flemish art is to be found in Plate 99 ofJerusalem. For the "Union of the soul with God" (P1. 6oe) Blake seems to have turned to the familiar pattern used in representations of the Prodigal Son embraced by his father. The example which comes closest to Blake's design is an engraving by Martin de Vos (P1. 6of) in which the father wears a broad-brimmed hat which could almost be the original which Blake transformed into the halo round the head of God.3

Finally mention must be made of a very curious sheet of sketches by Blake which seem to betray a German origin. This sheet is preserved in the Whitworth Institute, Manchester, and bears on the recto sketches for plates in Europe and The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. On the verso is another very faint sketch for the same subjects, but over it are drawn groups of small figures in curious attitudes. Figgis4 interprets these as experiments in figure composition, in which Blake was trying out various patterns for future compositions. It is in itself improbable that Blake would use such an abstract approach: his method was to find a pattern to express a vision or idea, rather than to play with patterns for their own sake. It has been suggested,5 with greater plausibility, that Blake was experimenting with the idea of an alphabet in which each letter is composed of human figures. Moreover the alphabet is Hebrew, not Latin.6 Alphabets composed of human figures were known in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance,7 and in one of them, by Peter F16tner, dating from about 1535-40, the letters O and N are very close to Blake's groups. Fl6tner's engraving is excessively rare, but imitations of it by Jost Amman (1567) and by an anonymous wood-cutter working for Martin Weygel8 were made and may well have been familiar to Blake. We know that Blake knew a little Hebrew, for he wrote to his brother in 1803 that he was learning the Hebrew alphabetS and his engraving of the Laocoon bears a few words in Hebrew script.10 It is therefore quite probable that Blake was here adapting the scheme of Flotner's Latin alphabet to the Hebrew letters.1

1 In another context, Illustrations to Young, Night Thoughts, night vii, he gives a totally different rendering of it.

2 Cf. Illustrations to Young, Night Thoughts, night viii. 3 A possible connection with Holbein should also be men-

tioned. In Blake's "Procession from Calvary," the dead Christ is of a very unusual type, naked except for a loin cloth, and laid out stiffly on the bier. Holbein's celebrated "Dead Christ" at Basel shows a similar type, which Blake may have known through a copy or a derivative.

4Op. cit., p. 82. 5 B.F.A.C., Blake Centenary Exhibition, I927, catalogue,

p. 51- 6 Two of the letters are ambiguous. They might be the

Latin O and N, or the Hebrew Samech and Aleph badly formed.

7 Cf. the article Alphabet in Otto Schmidt's Reallexikon zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 1937.

8 Cf. E. F. Bange, Peter Flitner, 1926, p. 2 1. 9 Works, p. o1072. o Ibid., p. 764. 11 The dates do not entirely agree, since the sketches on the

recto suggest 1792-93, ten years before Blake was learning the

60

a-Blake, Nebuchadnezzar, Colour Print. Tate Gallery (p. 203)

b-Lucas Cranach, The Were-Wolf, Detail. Woodcut (p. 203)

c-Blake, The Whore of Babylon, Water-Colour, Brit. Mus. (p. 204)

d-German, I6th Cent., The Whore of Babylon. Drawing. Formerly Oppenheimer Coll. (p. 204)

e-Blake. Jerusalem, p. 99 (p. 204) f-Martin de Vos. The Prodigal Son. Engraving (p. 204)

61

a-Blake, The Chariot of Inspiration, Jerusalem, p. 46 (p. 205) f-Blake, Beulah Throned on a Sunflower, Jerusalem, p. 53 (p. 206)

b, c, d-Sculptures from Persepolis. After Ouseley's Travels, 1821 (p. 205)

e-Blake, Lost Drawing. Lithograph by W. B. Scott (p. 205)

g-Devi. After E. Moor's Hindu Pantheon (p. 206)

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION 205 So far the models which we have found Blake using were, though not perhaps among the most

widely copied at his time, at any rate in the general tradition of artistic sources. But there is one more class of works of art on which he unquestionably drew which is more peculiar. Blake's lifetime covered one of the most active periods in the development of archaeology in the fields of non-classical art. It was the moment when the study of ancient Asiatic and Egyptian civilizations was becoming for the first time a science. And there is strong evidence to show that Blake was interested in the work of his contemporaries in this field.

The most remarkable example of this influence occurs in a plate from Jerusalem (P1. 6Ia), in which is depicted a peculiarly splendid design of a chariot drawn by human-headed bulls. The wheels and shafts of the chariot are composed of serpents, and from the foreheads of the monsters drawing it there grow snake-like forms which end in hands. On the backs of the monsters ride bird-headed, winged figures. This is generally admitted to be one of Blake's most magnificent pages, and the resemblance of the monsters drawing the chariot to the great figures from Nineveh has often been noticed. One critic goes so far as to speak of the prophetic insight which inspired Blake to create in advance the monsters which Layard was to uncover thirty years later. This view is, of course, nonsense, and it only requires a glance at the engravings published by earlier travellers to the East, de Bruin, Kaempfer, Niebuhr, or, in Blake's own day, Ouseley, to see where he found the model for his design. The winged, human-headed bulls of Persepolis had been described since the i6th century, drawn in the 17th and accurately engraved in the 18th. As parallels for Blake's designs I illustrate (P1. 6 Ib, c, d) plates from Ouseley's Travels in Various Countries of the East, of which the second volume dealing with Persia was published in 1821, when Blake was still at work on Jerusalem, because the various elements of his composition are most conveniently shown there. In P1. 6Ic we see the winged human-headed bull, of which Blake has reproduced not only the actual features but to an extraordinary extent the monumental character. There is reason to suppose, however, that Blake as usual was not merely copying a single model, but combining various features of dif- ferent works of the same kind. For the bird-headed creatures riding on the backs of the monsters are very close to those depicted in another plate in Ouseley (P1. 6 Ib), and it is perhaps not fanciful to suppose that the single-horned bulls of the capital shown in P1. 6 Id suggested the strained attitude of the human heads and, in elementary form, the serpent-like horns which sprout from their fore- heads. Should any doubt remain as to the probability of Blake having actually used these originals, it is worth adding that he must have known these or closely similar models, since among the engrav- ings executed by him for the Cyclopedia of Abraham Rees are three plates illustrating sculpture from Persepolis, copied from the work of one or other of the travellers mentioned above.1

A further example of the influence of Persian sculpture occurs in one of the Dante drawings, number 6I1, representing Nimrod. The figure has the same long, tight curls which we see, for instance, in the head from Persepolis engraved in Ouseley, plate xliv.

This is by no means the only example of Blake's study of non-classical antiquity. Plate 78 of Jerusalem shows a bird-headed figure, which, though not Egyptian in character, is probably derived from the Egyptian gods of the same type which had been well-known since the 17th century. Other examples point to the influence of the Far East. We have already noticed the oriental dress in the "Whore of Babylon," and the Chinese character of certain trees in Blake's printed books, notably in page 7 of America (P1. 55a); but other examples show a closer resemblance. A lost drawing reproduced by William Bell Scott (P1. 6 e) shows two elephant-headed figures which can only be derived from Indian representations of Janesa. Indian sculpture was beginning to be known in England in Blake's time and specimens of it were to be seen in the British Museum, from which Hebrew alphabet. But we know from the Rossetti manuscript that he often used his old note-books again after an interval of some years. Blake evidently devoted considerable attention to the study of lettering. His printed books show the most elaborate experiments in every sort of script-Roman, Gothic, cursive. In some cases, e.g. in the title-pages to the Songs of Innocence and Experience, he seems to foreshadow the picturesque and grotesque alphabets which were to flourish in the middle of the i9th century in the designs of artists such

as Cruikshank, and which survive to-day in the cover of Punch.

1 The symbolism of this plate is not altogether clear, but the most likely explanation is the following. The monsters are the bulls of Luvah, or Passion. The snakes are reason or the material world, which restrain them. The two members ending in hands which grow from the heads of the bulls probably represent inspiration. They spring from their fore- heads (the mind) which are crowned with laurel, the symbol

14

206 ANTHONY BLUNT

perhaps Flaxman drew the plates illustrating such work in his Lectures on Sculpture.1 Further evidence is to be seen in Blake's allegorical painting of "Pitt guiding Behemoth" (P1. 59c), in which the big halo decorated with figures and ending in a point at the top is purely Buddhist in type. In this case Blake himself gives a clue to his source, since he writes of the picture and its companion "Nelson guiding Leviathan" (P1. 59a): "The two pictures of Nelson and Pitt are compositions of a mytho- logical cast, similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo and Egyptian Antiquity, which are still preserved on ruide monuments."2 Yet another instance is the plate of Beulah enthroned on a sunflower in Jerusalem (P1. 6 If), which recalls engravings in Edward Moor's Hindu Pantheon, a work known to Flaxman and therefore probably to Blake.3 Of these engravings the closest to the artist's design is one of Devi (P1. 61g).4

Blake did not, however, confine his study of early art to the East, and he was acquainted with the prehistoric art of this country. He often refers to this in his writings, and there are at least two representations in his designs of the druid temple at Stonehenge,5 with which he was no doubt familiar through the works of English antiquaries.6

Blake's interest in the early art of the Near and Far East and of Europe is explained by the theory to which we referred in connection with his attitude towards classical art. Blake coupled the productions of Egyptian and Asiatic civilizations with those of antiquity as among the best surviving copies of the lost originals which he supposed the Jewish patriarchs to have created. He seems even to have felt that the more 'primitive' works of the Near East were perhaps truer to these imaginary models.7

He believed, moreover, that he had one means by which he could actually recover the originals of which all these works were but the debased copies. By inspiration, by visions, he could see the originals. The passage about the Pitt and Nelson paintings, quoted in part above, explains this point. Blake describes them as:

. . .

similar to those Apotheoses of Persian, Hindoo, and Egyptian Antiquity, which are still preserved on rude monuments, being copies from some stupendous originals now lost or perhaps buried till some happier age. The artist having been taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies and patriarchates of Asia, has seen these wonderful originals, called in the Sacred Scriptures the Cherubim, which were sculptured and painted on walls of Temples, Towers, Cities, Palaces, and erected in the highly cultivated states of Egypt, Moab, Edom, Aram, among the Rivers of Paradise, being originals from which the Greeks and Hetrurians copied Hercules Farnese, Venus of Medicis, Apollo Belvidere, and all the grand works of ancient art. They were executed in a very superior style to those justly admired copies, being with their accompaniments terrific and grand in the highest degree. The Artist has endeavoured to emulate the grandeur of those seen in his vision, and to apply it to modern Heroes, on a smaller scale.8 The examples quoted above of Blake's borrowing from the work of earlier artists may have

given the impression that he was indiscriminate in what he took. But this is the reverse of the truth. It has already been said that Blake's intentions in painting or writing were singularly clear, and in of poetry. One points forward, and the other has apparently just handed a pen, the vehicle of poetry, to one of the winged genii riding on the bulls. The seated figures probably repre- sent Los, inspiration, and Enitharmon his emanation, the man with the bowed head and the woman with her eyes closed, indicating the state of poetry in the material world before it attains the state of pure vision. The difficulty in interpreting this plate lies in the fact that it seems to have no connection with the text of the poem at the point where it occurs, unless we associate it with the line on the next page: "Shudder not, but Write, and the hand of God will assist you.")

1 Blake had read Wilkins' translation of the Baghavat- Gheeta, and even executed a drawing called "the Brahmins," of which the subject, according to his own statement, was Mr. Wilkins making his translation (Works, p. 804).

2 Works, p. 780. 3 Cf. Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture, p. 52. 4 Edward Moor, Hindu Pantheon, edit. I861, pl. 33. 5 Jerusalem, pl. 7o and Milton, pl. 4. e In his Descriptive Catalogue he writes: "The British Anti-

quities are now in the Artist's hands." (Works, p. 796.) 7 Blake is not entirely consistent on this point, since in his

notes on the Laocoon he speaks of Egypt and Babylon, "Whose Gods are the Powers Of This World, Goddess Nature, Who first spoil and then destroy Imaginative Art." (Works, p. 766.) But in this case he is thinking of Egyptian and Babylonian art in relation to his imaginary Jewish originals, whereas in other cases he is thinking of them in relation to existing works.

8 Works, p. 786.

BLAKE'S PICTORIAL IMAGINATION o207

both fields he only used those models which fitted his general conceptions. We know that he read with enthusiasm the works of the great mystics and that he studied ancient religion not only in its classical but in its pre-classical forms. From these sources he built up to a large extent his own mystical beliefs. In the same way in his painting he made use only of those types of art which were sympathetic to him. All the styles mentioned in the above analysis as objects of Blake's admiration can be grouped broadly under the term Religious Art. Whether it was from early Persian sculpture, 12th century manuscripts, or Italian Mannerism that he borrowed, it was always from an artist who regarded the function of art as subservient in one way or another to the needs of the super- natural. To complete the picture it is worth while noticing the forms of art of which Blake dis- approved and which he never used as models. We can find no trace