A blockbuster show at Tate Britain gives William Blake his due

By K.S.C.

IN THE GRAND new survey at Tate Britain of the prints, engravings, paintings and poetry of William Blake (1757-1827) is an enigmatic depiction of Isaac Newton (pictured). It is enigmatic because the nude, muscular Newton appears to be sitting on an encrusted rock on the ocean floor. Pink, anemone-like fronds waft gently by his feet and a confounding inky darkness extends behind him; but he is oblivious to all this. He has eyes only for the paper scroll at his feet, on which he is marking out a series of precise lines with a compass. Although this image has since been used as the model for a bronze sculpture of the 17th-century scientist and mathematician, now on display outside the British Library, Blake was not much of a fan. He disparaged “Newton’s particles of light” and his lack of spirituality, and was probably more than a little jealous of the acclaim Newton enjoyed. In a letter to a friend, Blake wrote: “Pray God us keep / From Single vision & Newton’s sleep!”

The show is chronological and delights in such detail. Blake grew up in Soho, in London, just a few streets away from where Newton had used a prism to split a beam of sunlight almost a century before. Blake’s family were comfortable, rather than wealthy, as the owners of a hosiery shop and haberdashery. They encouraged his interest in art, and, when he was 14, he was apprenticed to James Basire, a successful engraver. Later he studied at the Royal Academy, where he was expected to minutely copy classical paintings and statues and adopt a formal, mannered style which he loathed.

He was, reading between the lines of this exhibition, a difficult man who delighted in many antipathies. His poetry—which is arguably more celebrated today than his art—railed against class, religion and industrialisation. His first biographer, Benjamin Heath Malkin, wrote that Blake claimed “drawing from life always to have been hateful to him; and speaks of it looking more like death, or smelling or mortality.” This ruled out portraiture, which might otherwise have been a good source of income. Instead he funded his art through patrons, with whom he often had fraught relationships, and commercial engraving (ditto).

Nor was even his art an unalloyed pleasure: his public frustrated him. Contemporaries did recognise his talent, and his innovative methods and style. By the turn of the 19th century he was even beginning to receive some modest acclaim; but he was unable to fit within the mould the contemporary critics proscribed. The more allegorical and spiritual his work became, the more it confused and even disgusted the general public. This, in turn, made Blake bitter and withdrawn.

The nadir of his career was a disastrous exhibition in 1809. The advertisement for it, written by the artist himself, was naked in its desire for fulsome recognition. The Royal Academy, he complained, had “effectually excluded him” that year. “[I]f Art is the glory of a Nation, if Genius, and Inspiration are the great Origin and Bond of Society, the distinction my Works have obtained from those who best understand such things, calls for my Exhibition as the greatest of Duties to my Country.” The works were shown in the rooms above his family’s haberdashery shop in London. Few attended; a lone reviewer speculated that he might be a lunatic.

Perhaps the best and most constant relationship Blake enjoyed was with his wife, Catherine. A talented engraver and colourist in her own right, she had a hand in many of his creations. It was only from the stability of their marriage that he was able to give a full expression to his talent, expressiveness and unique vision.

These qualities are evident in the work on show at Tate Britain; each rewards time spent in contemplation. Fingers stab; lightening jags across the sky; hands are raised in despair and supplication; people dance with arms outstretched and interwoven. Locks of hair catch the light in rough sketches done only in shades of grey; figures just a few millimetres high scamper among the brambles of decorative borders. The intensity he achieved is astonishing, particularly in the most sinister pieces where the heavens are rent, monsters snap and drool and subtle washes of light shine in the darkness. Be warned, however: many of his pieces are so minute in scale and so ornate that you have to queue for minutes on end or jostle your fellow museum-goers to get a closer look. Something that Blake would, no doubt, have considered no more than his due.

“William Blake” continues at Tate Britain until February 2nd