Seeing the world in a way that made his contemporaries think him mad, Blake was a minor figure in his own time. Today, as Danny Bird reveals, he’s regarded as one of Britain’s greatest-ever artists and poets
When William Blake was just four years old, he saw God appear in a window. A few years later, he came across a tree teeming with angels on Peckham Rye. Visions such as these were an everyday occurrence for Blake, a man whose work blurred the barrier between lived reality and the spiritual plane. Largely overlooked during his lifetime and even dismissed as insane, Blake has latterly come to be seen as one of the foremost figures of the Romantic Age. It’s a reputation that rests both on the extraordinary imagery of his art and on his resonant poetry.
Born on 28 November 1757 in a room above his father’s hosiery shop in Soho, London, Blake’s parents, James and Catherine, were religious dissenters (Protestants opposed to the Church of England). He grew up in modest circumstances, receiving a rudimentary education at his mother’s knee – commonplace at the time and something the older Blake regarded as crucial to developing an unfettered imagination. In 1772, he was apprenticed to the engraver James Basire and learned his craft by sketching the monuments inside Westminster Abbey.
INSPIRATION FROM ABOVE
Blake became an independent engraver and a student at the Royal Academy in 1779. But his experience there only served to fuel his opposition to the mainstream art establishment. In 1782, he married Catherine Boucher. Their union was a long and blissful one. He taught her to read, to write after a fashion and to paint. She even shared in his visions and later claimed that he visited her every day after his death.
The early 1780s saw Blake establish himself as a printer in partnership with a fellow former Basire apprentice, James Parker. However, tragedy struck in 1787 when Blake’s beloved younger brother, Robert, died of tuberculosis. Keeping vigil at his bedside, the visionary artist claimed to witness Robert’s spirit ascend to the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy”.
This moment was so profound that Blake credited his brother’s spiritual influence as the source of the ‘Illuminated Printing’ technique that would become his trademark. Claiming to have had the knowledge revealed to him via Robert’s spirit, Blake set out on his most productive phase as an artist. Painting his designs on copper u
