Seeing Angels

Blake depicts Cain fleeing his murdered brother under a stormy sky shot-through with light as his parents, Adam and Eve, gaze in horror. Blake's vision is both naturalistic and symbolic. He had the courage to tackle the unspeakable.
Painting,1809

WILLIAM BLAKE

Childhood

Born on 28 November 1757, William Blake was eight or ten in Peckham, Rye, London, when he had his first vision, and reported seeing a tree filled with angels "bespangling every bough like stars." Depicting angels, Biblical figures, and mythic creatures would become part of Blake's life work, but his father thought his headstrong son, who had been educated by his mother, was imagining things.

Fortunately he sent him to a drawing school on the Strand. With the help of his father, Blake scoured dealers and auction houses for old prints and engravings by Raphael, Michelangelo and Dürer. He already had an eye for the beautiful “bounding line”, and he learned to draw by copying drawings.

Apprenticeship, a riot, marriage

A few years later, Blake was apprenticed to an engraver, and spent long afternoons sketching in Westminster Abbey. Swept up in a mob, he helped to storm Newgate Prison and free its prisoners. Rejected by the woman he loved when he was 25, he quickly married Catherine Boucher. Marriage might not seem to suit a prophetic visionary, but Blake taught Catherine, who was 20, how to read and write and engrave, and she became his steadfast supporter and, perhaps, his inspiration for Eve.

Adam and Eve, engraving for Paradise Lost, 1799-1800
Blake believed in the equality of men and women and in the equality of the races. As Adam and Eve caress each other, the rather jejune Satan caresses his snake.

Blake’s first collection of poems, Poetical Sketches, was published sometime around 1783. In 1784 he and his brother Robert opened a print shop, and began working with Joseph Johnson, a radical publisher. Johnson’s house was a meeting place for scientists Joseph Priestley and Richard Price and writers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose stories Blake illustrated.

Glad Day

He who binds to himself a Joy
Doth the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

Inventing relief etching

Blake loved his brother, and when Robert fell seriously ill with TB he nursed him until Robert died. Working alone, thinking of Robert, he felt inspired and invented the novel method of engraving now known as relief etching. “He wrote on the copper plate (in reverse) in acid-resistant liquid, so that when this was then covered in acid, the acid etched away the uncovered areas of the plate. This left the text and design in relief, ready to be inked and then placed on his rolling press. In practical terms, this process removed the need to send his work out to costly printers. More significantly, the method allowed Blake to compose text and images at the same time from the same plate, a symbolic union of his twin creative forces” (British Library). The first of his illuminated books appeared in 1788.

His ideas were deepening. Disillusioned by the excesses of the French Revolution, which he had originally supported, and by the established church, Blake found inspiration in the Bible, his experiences, and his mythic imagination.

Imagining a new-born world

Blake’s work contains vivid images of the natural world. He was empathetically aware of the ‘misused’ horse, the ‘hunted hare’, the ‘wounded skylark’, and the ‘wild deer’, and he was especially concerned for the impoverished country people who had been driven to the big cities for work. Blake understood that their degrading poverty was not the result of Britain’s industrialization, which was the product of scientific genius, but the result of greed and exploitation and the deliberate abandonment of Christian teaching. In 1804 (it was first published in 1818) he wrote,

JERUSALEM
And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my arrows of desire:
Bring me my spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire.

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

Friendship

That Blake was able to survive and to work as an artist was largely due to his wife Catherine, who always believed in him, and to his friends who bought his engravings though they doubted the value of his work. George Cumberland, one of the founders of the National Gallery, was almost alone in recognising Blake’s genius. This despite the fact that today we can see that Blake's art moved from fairly charming to glorious.

"Now I may say to you, what perhaps I should not dare to say to anyone else," he wrote to his friend and patron Thomas Butts. "That I can alone carry on my visionary studies in London unannoy'd, & that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, See Visions, Dream Dreams & prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of other Mortals; perhaps Doubts proceeding from Kindness, but Doubts are always pernicious, Especially when we Doubt our Friends" (25 April 1803).

It is impossible not to think that Blake experienced those "pernicious" doubts from his friends. Despite it all he persevered, and was creating illustrations for Dante's DIVINE COMEDY when he knew he was dying - and on the day he died.

Auguries of Innocence

In his incandescently wise Auguries he wrote,

It is right it should be so;
Man was made for joy and woe;
And when this we rightly know,
Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.

Close-up of Angels from
Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by Angels

Blake died, seeing visions of heaven, in 1827. For years after his death, he was regarded as a lunatic and the beauty and depth of his art went unrecognised.

THE TYGER
Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies
Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire?
What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And, when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did He smile His work to see?
Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

The Creator God

Seeing Blake today

In 1947 Northrop Frye, MA (Oxon), DD, D.Litt, FRSC, a Canadian, published the first distinctive study of Blake's art, TERRIBLE SYMMETRY, and brilliantly described his philosophy. In 2001, not quite two hundred and fifty years after he was born, the Tate and the Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted exhibitions of his work. In 1949 the Blake Prize for Religious Art was established in his honour in Australia. In 1957 a memorial was erected in Westminster Abbey, where he had worked so many years before, in memory of Blake and his wife.

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