At the age of 52 William Blake was already acquainted with despair. He once
said, “I devoted myself to engraving in my earliest youth” and, indeed, from
the age of 12 he had worked as an artist and an engraver. In 1809, the year
of the exhibition now being memorialised at Tate Britain, he had also
claimed that “during a period of 40 years he never suspended his labours on
copper for a single day”. But this remarkable and assiduous labour had met
with neither success nor even recognition.
Yet he had already completed some of his greatest work. Sixteen years before
he had engraved Songs of Innocence. The little volume was considered “wild”
and “mystical”; it did not sell. He produced Songs of Experience. There were
few purchasers. Then in 1792 he engraved The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; as
a result he became further isolated from his contemporaries. “I say I shan't
live five years,” he scribbled in a notebook. “And if I live one it will be
a Wonder.” But he still knew his own worth. In a catalogue of his works,
issued at this time, he declared himself to be a “Man of Genius”. None of
his contemporaries would have agreed with him.
That sense of neglect was compounded by a series of misfortunes in the years
immediately preceding the exhibition. He conceived a number of projects, for
painting and engraving, but all of them ended in defeat and disappointment.
He believed, for example, that he had been commissioned to paint a large
study of Chaucer's pilgrims, but then discovered that the commission had
been given to an artist named Thomas Stothard. So, secretly, Blake raged.
In the face of public neglect, then, he decided to hold a one-man exhibition
in which he would display among other things “my various inventions in Art”.
At the centre of the exhibition would be his own painting of the Canterbury
pilgrims, as proof that his art was infinitely superior to that of Stothard.
He also placed much hope on what he called his “Exhibition of Paintings in
Fresco, Poetical and Historical Inventions, by Wm Blake”. He wrote out his
prospectus as a leaflet and gave it to a printer in South Molton Street.
This was the street in which Blake and his wife then lived; the house that
they occupied can still be seen in much the same condition as it was in the
early 19th century.
In this prospectus Blake declared that “the ignorant insults of individuals
will not hinder me from doing my duty to my Art ... those who have been told
that my works are but an unscientific and irregular eccentricity, a madman's
scrawls, I demand of them to do me the justice to examine before they
decide”. He went on to compare himself to Michelangelo and Raphael before
declaring that “if 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”.
He charged one shilling for each ticket, and a “Descriptive Catalogue” was
also available for half a crown. This catalogue, now being republished by
Tate Britain, was bound in blue-grey wrappers. It is unlikely that more than
a hundred were printed and only 21 copies survive. It was not very carefully
proofread and, in any case, one significant detail was omitted. Blake added
on the title page, in pen, the address of the exhibition: “At No28 Corner of
Broad Street - Golden Square.” Broad Street has now been changed to
Broadwick Street but Golden Square still bears the same name. Strenuous
field-walking, however, does not persuade me that the corner of Broad Street
could ever have touched the Square. It may be a case, to paraphrase Blake
himself, of a corner of London that Satan himself could never find.
No28 Broad Street was, in fact, a haberdasher's shop owned by his brother.
There could be no more unlikely venue for a collection of extraordinary
paintings. There are descriptions of James Blake, in the sober dress of an
old-fashioned shopkeeper complete with knee breeches and worsted stockings,
with a courteous welcome for any visitors. It was he who would have showed
them some 16 works of art, nine temperas (ground pigment with a glue base)
and seven watercolours, of which nine are on view in the current exhibition.
The most sensational of the works, The Ancient Britons, is now lost. But it is
known to be the largest painting that Blake completed, about 10ft x 14ft. It
represented the last battle of Arthur against the Romans, in the 5th
century, and was conceived in the spirit of Arthurian lore, druidic allegory
and comparative mythology that Blake espoused. It was immense, with images
of stone trilithons inflamed with the light of a setting sun.
And then, of course, there was the painting of Chaucer's pilgrims, finished in
direct competition with that of Thomas Stothard. Its dimensions are larger
than those of Stothard's work, and Chaucer's pilgrims are travelling in the
opposite direction from that chosen by Stothard. It is composed as a frieze,
and it bears all the marks of an historical re-creation. Blake himself said
that he wished to return to the style of “the old original engravers”, and
the painting does resemble a piece of antiquity restored. He painted himself
as the ploughman, testifying to his patient work over the years and, as he
wrote, “thin with excessive labour, and not with old age, as some have
supposed”.
Of the paintings on exhibition at the Tate Britain, two of the strangest and
most elaborate are undoubtedly The Spiritual Form of Pitt Guiding Behemoth
and The Spiritual Form of Nelson Guiding Leviathan. They are not conceived
on the same huge scale as The Ancient Britons but they are part of a giant
conception. In his catalogue Blake describes how, before creating these
works, he “was taken in vision into the ancient republics, monarchies and
patriarchates of Asia”, where he saw great works of art, “some of them one
hundred feet in height ... all containing mythological and recondite
meaning, where more is meant than meets the eye”.
So he dreamt or imagined these vast works of art, and wished to reproduce
them. Pitt and Nelson were only recently dead, and he had decided to include
these contemporary heroes within his own sacred mythology. Of Pitt he wrote
that “he is that Angel who, placed to perform the Almighty's orders, rides
on the whirlwind, directing the storms of war”. Blake still believed himself
to be a public artist, with a duty to convey his vision of English history.
They are remarkable pictures, infused with a barbaric splendour, with the
central figures of Nelson and Pitt posed like sacred objects of some lost
cult while around them are depicted various images of primeval savagery,
worship and destruction.
Blake believed in magic and there are times when he cast spells upon his
imagined enemies. His work was part of a strange swirl of strange beliefs
that were part of the interest in political radicalism and revolutionary
politics at the beginning of the 19th century. This was a period of
alchemists, astrologers, faith healers, conjurors, mystics, mesmerists,
magnetisers and prophets. This is the context of Blake's representation of
“spiritual form”.
Another work on display, The Bard, from Gray, has the same numinous and
disturbing qualities; Blake's line is confident and exuberant, as if he were
tracing the outlines of his imaginative energy. It is a work filled with
power and exaltation. Here is the figure of an inspired artist from a
sublime past, who has the power of revelation; he, like Blake, stands alone
against a world that threatens to engulf him. Edward I had condemned all the
bards of Wales to death, but one had survived. The bard is never understood.
“You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas,” he wrote to a
correspondent in this period. “But you ought to know that what is grand is
necessarily obscure to weak men. That which can be made explicit to the
idiot is not worth my care.”
He also demonstrated the essential continuity of his art by exhibiting a
watercolour that he had completed 30 years earlier. The Penance of Jane
Shore was one of the historical works that he undertook when he was still a
student at the Royal Academy. It testifies, if nothing else, to the strength
and permanence of Blake's artistic preoccupations. He wrote in the catalogue
that “the productions of our youth and of our maturer age are equal in
all essential points”. The exhibition at the corner of Broad Street was a
reaffirmation of his art and genius through the years of hostility and
neglect.
On exhibition here are also some of Blake's spiritual visions. One of the most
famous, and one of the most beautiful, Christ in the Sepulchre, Guarded by
Angels, takes its inspiration from some of his very earliest artistic
memories; as a young man he was asked to draw certain of the tombs and
memorials in Westminster Abbey. In this watercolour there is a sense of
spiritual revelation as the two angels hover in prayer above the recumbent
form of Christ, and the image of art and holiness is fully restored in some
lines he wrote at this time:
Two winged immortal shapes one standing at his feet
Towards the east one standing at his head towards the west ...
Another watercolour in this exhibition, Jacob's Ladder, is also touched by a
sense of the numinous as the angels climb on the spiral stairway towards
Heaven's gate. “To the eyes of the man of imagination,” Blake once wrote,
“nature is imagination itself ... to me this world is all one continued
vision of fancy or imagination.”
Yet the world refused to understand or countenance him. Hardly anyone came to
the exhibition. None of the temperas or watercolours was sold. The Ancient
Britons had been commissioned in advance. It was, according to one
contemporary, “a dead failure”. There was only one review, in The Examiner,
and that was hostile. He was described as “an unfortunate lunatic, whose
personal inoffensiveness secures him from confinement”; the critic also
declared that his catalogue exhibited “the wild ebullitions of a distempered
brain”.
This was the last public exhibition tBlake would undertake. He retreated from
the world of art, and in future years his work was largely confined to book
illustration. “I am hid,” he wrote. And, indeed, he did disappear from the
view of erstwhile friends and patrons. Yet his genius could not be hidden
for ever. His paintings and watercolours still hang in the galleries of
Britain and the United States when the work of his admired contemporaries
such as Stothard has been all but forgotten. This exhibition provides
another reaffirmation of his art.
William Blake's solo show, Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888) April
20 to October 4
