YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

Bought with the income
of the
OLIVER WOLCOTT FUND

THE DRAWINGS AND ENGRAVINGS
OF WILLIAM BLAKE

THE DRAWINGS
AND ENGRAVINGS OF
WILLIAM BLAKE
BY LAURENCE BINYON

"^ w^

EDITED BY GEOFFREY HOLME
PUBLISHED BY THE STUDIO, LIMITED, LONDON
MCMXXII

Printed in Great Britain,
by Herbert Reiach, Ltd.,
19-24, Floral Street,
Covent Garden, W.C.2.

CONTENTS page
Introduction by Laurence Binyon .... i
ILLUSTRATIONS IN COLOURS. Plate
The Blossom, from Songs of Innocence. (1789).
Coloured print  6
Title-page of Thel. (1789). Coloured print of the
design without the title*  10
Page 4 of Thel. (1789). Coloured print without text* 12
Youth carrying a Cherub. Frontispiece to Songs of
Experience. (1794). Coloured print ... 22
The Ancient of Days. Frontispiece to Europe. (1794).
Coloured print  30
Glad Day. Coloured print*  34
Satan exulting over Eve. (1795). Colour-printed
drawing  38
Elijah in the Chariot of Fire. (1795). Colour-printed
drawing  42
The Death of Saint Joseph. Water-colours. . . 49
The River of Life. Water-colours .... 66
The Infant Jesus praying. Water-colours ... 72
The Ascension. Water-colours  76
The Wise and Foolish Virgins. (1822). Water-colours 85
Satan smiting Job. Tempera  95
Lucia carrying Dante in his sleep. Dante, Purgatorio,
Canto IX. Water-colours  100
The Earthly Paradise : Beatrice in the Car. Dante,
Purgatorio, Canto XXIX. Water-colours . . 103
ILLUSTRATIONS IN MONOTONE. Plate
The Penance of Jane Shore. (About 1778). Tinted
drawing, varnished  1
The Breach in a City. (1784). Indian-ink, with slight
colour  2
* These are taken from the two Books of Designs in the Print Room of the British Museum, mostly
printed from separate pages of the Prophetic Books, but from the designs only, without the text. V

Youth learning from Age. Indian-ink and water-
colours 
Har and Heva bathing, Mnetha behind. Design for
Tiriel. Indian-ink 
Har and Tiriel, Heva and Mnetha. Design for Tiriel
Indian-ink 
The Divine Image, from Songs of Innocence. (1789)
Coloured print 
The Bard, from Gray. Tempera .
The Agony in the Garden. Tempera .
Page 4 of Thel. Lightly tinted ....
The Flight into Egypt. (1790). Tempera .
The Nativity. Tempera 
Bathsheba. Tempera 
Job's Complaint. (About 1792). Indian-ink
Two Engravings for The Gates of Paradise. (1793)
Two Engravings for The Gates of Paradise. (1793)
Visions of the Daughters of Albion. (1793). The
Argument. Coloured print ....
Page 7 of America. (1793). Uncoloured
Page n of America. (1793). Uncoloured .
Hear the Voice of the Bard ! Introduction to Songs of
Experience. (1794). Coloured print

Page 2 of Urizen. (1794). Coloured print (without text) 24
Page 7 of Urizen. Coloured print (without text) . . 25
Page 8 of Urizen. Coloured print .... 26
Page 19 of Urizen (Los, Enitharmon and Ore)
Coloured print  27
Page 20 of Urizen. Coloured print .... 28
Page 26 of Urizen (The Nets of Urizen). Coloured print 29
The House of Death; The Lazar-House of Milton
(1795). Colour-printed drawing .... 31
Hecate. Colour-printed drawing  32
Oberon and Titania resting on Lilies. Page 5 of The
Song of Los  33
Unknown Subject. Coloured print 35

7
89
11131415
16171819
20
21 23

VI

Pity, from Macbeth. Colour-printed drawing . . 36
The Elohim creating Adam. (1795). Colour-printed
drawing  37
Oberon and Titania. Water-colours .... 39
The Sacrifice of Isaac. Tempera  40
Christ interceding for the Magdalen. Tempera . . 41
Job confessing his Presumption to God. Water-colours 43

The Crucifixion. (1801). Water-colours
The Entombment. Water-colours
The Stoning of Achan. Water-colours
The Eagle and the Child. (1802). Indian-ink drawing
for illustration to Hayley's Ballad .
The Death of the Virgin. Water-colours .
The Rainbow over the Flood. Indian-ink .
The Three Maries at the Sepulchre. (1803). Water
colours 
Nelson guiding Leviathan. Tempera .
Mary Magdalen washing the Feet of Jesus. Water
colours 
Ruth and Naomi. Water-colours

David delivered out of Many Waters. Water-colours 55

Page 4 of Milton. (1804). Coloured print
Page 36 of Milton. (1804). Blake's Cottage at Felp
ham. Coloured print 
Page 38 of Milton. (1804). Coloured print .
Design on page 8 of Jerusalem. (Begun 1804). Un
coloured 
Design on page 28 of Jerusalem. Uncoloured .
Page 31 of Jerusalem. Uncoloured
Page 35 of Jerusalem. Uncoloured
Design on page 41 of Jerusalem. Uncoloured
Page 70 of Jerusalem. Uncoloured
Page 76 of Jerusalem. Uncoloured
Fire. Water-colours 
Famine. (1805). Water-colours ....

444546 47
48 505i 525354

565758 59
606162 63
64 656768

vn

Dedication to the Queen, for Blair's Grave. (1806)
Pencil and tint (not engraved)
Satan watching the Endearments of Adam and Eve
(Paradise Lost). (1806). Water-colours
The Finding of Moses. Water-colours
The Woman taken in Adultery. Water-colours .
The Burial of Moses. Water-colours .
The Temptation. Water-colours ....
Angels hovering over the Body of Jesus. (1808). Water
colours 
The Angel rolling away the Stone from the Sepulchre
(1808). Water-colours 
Jacob's Ladder. (1808). Water-colours
The Creation of Eve (Paradise Lost). Water-colours
Queen Catherine's Dream. Water-colours .
The Judgment of Paris. (1817). Water-colours .
Four Subjects from A. Phillips' Imitation of Virgil's
First Eclogue. (1821). Woodcuts, first state
Four Subjects from A. Phillips' Imitation of Virgil's
First Eclogue. (1821). Woodcuts, first state
Mirth. Design for Milton's L' Allegro. Stipple
engraving 
The Fire of God is fallen from Heaven. Job, pi. 3
Line-engraving 
Then a Spirit passed before my Face. Job, pi. 9. Line
engraving 
I am Young and Ye are Very Old. Job, pi. 12. Line
engraving 
The Lord answering Job out of the Whirlwind. Job
pi. 13. Line-engraving ....
The Morning Stars singing together. Job, pi. 14
Line-engraving 
Job and his Daughters. Job, pi. 20. Line-engraving
Study for Job and his Daughters. (A different design)
Pencil and Indian-ink 

69 70 7i
737475
777879
80
81 82
83
84
868788
8990
919293

Vlll

So the Lord blessed the Latter End of Job. Job, pi. 21.
Line-engraving  94
The Tempter (Paradise Regained), No. 7. Water-
colours  96
The Tempter Foiled (Paradise Regained), No. 10.
Water-colours  97
Paolo and Francesca. Dante, Inferno, Canto V. Line-
engraving, first state  98
The Falsifiers. Dante, Inferno, Canto XXIX. Line-
engraving, first state  99
The Angel in the Boat. Dante, Purgatorio, Canto II.
Pencil and slight colour-wash .... 101
The Ascent of the Mountain. Dante, Purgatorio,
Canto IV. Water-colours  102
Portrait of Mrs. Blake. Lead pencil .... 104

Portrait of William Blake at work, 1820. By John
Linnell. Lead pencil . . . Facing 'page 6
Portrait of William Blake on Hampstead Heath, 182 1.
By John Linnell. Lead pencil . Facing page 18

IX

OR the sale of the Linnell collection of draw
ings, prints and books by Blake, the great room
at Christie's was full to overflowing. It was
March of 1918. Copies of the Songs of Inno
cence, of the Marriage of Heaven and Hell ; the
set of water-colour designs for The Book of Job ;
the famous century of Dante illustrations; single drawings
and rare prints ; all were fetching or going to fetch hitherto
unparalleled prices. Competition ran high, the excitement of
the bidders was infectious. In the middle of the sale Lot 171
was announced ; and observers on the edge of the crowd could
see, lifted high in the hands of the baize-aproned, impassive
attendant, a human mask, conspicuous in its white plaster.
It was the life-mask of William Blake; and as those tense
features were carried duly along the knots of dealers and
bidders, who, pencil and catalogue in hand, threw up at it an
appraising glance, the Ironic Muse could surely not have for
borne a smile. The auctioneer invited bids, collecting from
various quarters those imperceptible nods which give to auc
tions an air of magic and conspiracy ; and still the white mask,
with the trenchant lip-line and the full, tight-closed eyes, was
held up and offered to every gaze, turned now this way and
now that. It seemed to be the most living thing in the room ;
as if the throng of curious watchers, murmuring among them
selves, and the auctioneer himself, were mere shadows
engaged in a shadowy chaffering. It seemed to me that, next
moment, those eyes would blaze open, seeing, not us, but
some vision of celestial radiance ; and that all who could not
share that vision must dissolve into their native insignificance.
Sentences floated through my brain : " I should be sorry if I
had any earthly fame, for whatever natural glory a man has is
so much detracted from his spiritual glory. I wish to do
nothing for profit; I want nothing; I am quite happy."
"Painting exists and exults in immortal thoughts. " "Art is a
means of conversing with Paradise." I remembered how
Blake died singing hymns of joy. And I thought of his ' ' mad-

ness" ; and suddenly it appeared as if the world, with its mania
for possessing things, and its commercial values for creations
of the spirit, were really insane, and the spirit inspiring Blake
the only sane thing in it.

A subtle fluid streams through Blake's work, which has in it
the germ of intoxication ; hence people find it hard to judge of
it without a certain extravagance, either of admiration or
repulsion. Possibly indeed a quite "sane" estimate o£J±
misses somethmg ot its essence.._JBut, after all, he is an artist
among the artists ol the woridTwith affinities among them, if
few of these are to be found among those of his own race, and
fewer still among those of his own time. There is no need to
judge him by a strange and special standard, as if he were a
wholly isolated phenomenon. He is one of the greatest imagi
native artists of England.
The first edition of "The Golden Treasury" contained none of
Blake's poems : now his songs are in every anthology. He has
come into his kingdom as a poet. As a seer and as a quicken
ing influence on the thought of later generations he is recog
nized. As an artist, also, he has of late years begun to receive
more general homage. But Blake's art, in its great qualities
as in its frequent blemishes and deficiencies, is still not under
stood and appreciated as it should be ; and chiefly because it is
little known. Yet it is as painter, draughtsman and engraver
that Blake is greatest. Nothing perhaps in his pictorial art
quite matches the aerial radiance and felicity of his best songs.
But nothing in his poetry has the sustained grandeur of the
Job engravings, or of a whole series of splendidly imagined
designs. We are here concerned with Blake solely as an artist. And
first let me lay stress on his range and inventiveness as a
technician. Were there no mystical ideas or original imagina
tion to attract us to his work, we could still admire the artist
who, in a time when the fashionable academicians hardly

seemed to know of the existence of any art but that
of painting in oils, engraved his own designs, painted
in water-colours and in distemper, invented two methods
of etching in relief, revived (doubtless without con
sciousness of any predecessor) the " monotype," en
graved original woodcuts, and made at least one
experiment in lithography. He was also the printer of his
own " illuminated " books. If Blake had had the means and
opportunity of being a sculptor, I feel sure that he would have
rejected with scorn the accepted modern way of modelling a
figure to be copied in marble by workmen, but would have
taken a chisel and a block of stone and gone to work like the
carvers of the Gothic cathedrals. But I am far from thinking
that, if Blake had had an empty mind and dull imagination,
these merits of the innovator and technician would have
sufficed of themselves to give him a hold on the world's
memory. Indeed he would not have been driven to find new
methods if he had been interested in technique merely for its
own sake. He had intense ideas and a peculiar imagination
which he wanted to express, and he found the methods in
fashion inadequate or uncongenial. The youth of that day
who burned with ambition to paint " history " — the term was
comprehensively used in the eighteenth century — would
naturally aspire above all things to use the medium of oils on
a large scale. But Blake hated the oil medium. He said
absurd things about the great masters of oil painting — Rubens
and Rembrandt and Reynolds — but he was instinctively right
in discarding it himself. He made many experiments with
one medium or another, though he never arrived at a quite
successful solution of his problem, except in water-colour;
and here, too, he made experiments, discovering, by a mixture
of painting and printing, a way of giving force to the medium
adequate to the power of his grandest designs. And he
employed similar means for enriching the books which he
engraved and printed himself, giving his work a peculiarly
original character. As an engraver, he only arrived after long
3

years and towards the end of his life in finding a congenial
method. In all this he was not interested in technique tor its
own sake; he was seeking the expressive counterpart ot his
imaginative ideas. But neither would these imaginative ideas
give him rank as an artist, were they not directly expressed
through pictorial design. II.
Blake was a boy of sixteen when on his first original
engraving, "Joseph of Arimathea among the rocks of
Albion," he inscribed these words: This is One of
the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what
we call the Dark Ages, Wandering about in sheep skins
and goat skins, of whom the World was not worthy.
Such were the Christians in all Ages. Already we can see
into Blake's mind and have a glimpse of the world of ideas in
which it was to dwell throughout his life. Long months of
solitary work and contemplation in the most impressionable
years of boyhood among the soaring pillars and supine effigies
of the Abbey had saturated his spirit with the forms of Gothic
art. There was no architecture for him but Gothic architec
ture thereafter. " Grecian is mathematic form," he said,
" Gothic is living form." Gothic is a pregnant word in this
inscription. Blake was fascinated by the legend of Saint
Joseph of Arimathea and his missionary voyage to
Britain. Some years later he was to make a small
colour-print, now excessively rare, of Saint Joseph
preaching to the Britons. The legend appealed to Blake's
profound attachment to his country, whose mythic
past, as he read it in Milton's History, he loved to idealize,
and whose genius he symbolized in his own mythology as the
Giant Albion, "the Patriarch of the Atlantic." In the De
scriptive Catalogue he writes of his "visionary contempla
tions relating to his own country and its ancient glory, when
it was, as it again shall be, the source of learning and inspira
tion." He conceived of the Druids and the Ancient Bards of

Britain as of the same company as the Prophets and Patriarchs
of Israel. Jerusalem, the ideal city of the Imagination, was to
be built in " England's green and pleasant land."
Finally we may underline in the inscription I have quoted the
words Artist and Christian. To Blake these were synony
mous. No one could be a Christian who was not an artist.
At sixteen, then, Blake seems already possessed of the master
conceptions of his mature thought and art. And the subject-
matter of his paintings is just what we should expect from a
mind preoccupied with such conceptions. Classic mythology,
one of the main sources of motives for ambitious efforts in
composition since the time of the Renaissance, is almost
excluded. The Hecate (Plate 32) seems imagined from
Shakespearean phrases and allusions, rather than intended to
figure forth a classic goddess. We reproduce, for its in
terest (Plate 82), one of Blake's few excursions into Greek
fable, his Judgment of Paris; and here also he is anything but
dependent on classic traditions of art, and produces a scene of
"Gothicized" atmosphere, with comic touches like the name
of Paris so carefully engraved on his dog's collar. Avoiding
the Greeks and Romans, Blake chose themes of national or
Biblical inspiration. A born myth-maker, he went on to in
vent a mythology of his own, in which mystic ideas predomi
nated, but in which such symbolic names as Albion and
Jerusalem tell of the two soils in which his imagination was
rooted. But his art was happier when it sought expression
through forms and legends which belong to the common
heritage of Europe rather than to his private mental world.
The early pictures and drawings are often inspired by
English history. Gray's studies in Norse poetry attracted
him, as did Ossian : an illustration to " The Bard " was one
of his earliest exhibited works. Later on he even took themes
from contemporary England, and made "mythological" pic
tures of Pitt and Nelson as heroes of his nation. He made
many sets of designs from Milton. His illustrations to
" L 'Allegro " and " II Penseroso " were in the Crewe collec- 5

tion, and are now in America. The Butts set of nine designs
from " Paradise Lost " is in the Boston Museum; other ver
sions are in various collections. Eight illustrations to
"Comus" are also at Boston. Twelve designs from Para
dise Regained " (once Linnell's) are in Mr. Riches' collection.
He illustrated Young's "Night Thoughts" and Grays
"Poems," both very fully; and Blair's "Grave, and the
" Pilgrim's Progress," and some of Shakespeare ; and made a
hundred drawings for Dante. But, apart from his own
mystical inventions, his most constant source is the Bible.
The book of Job attracted him early, and became his favourite
and his greatest theme. Many of his best and most original
paintings and drawings, however, are drawn from the New
Testament. To return for a moment to the engraving of Joseph of Ari
mathea. The figure of the Saint is taken straight from a
figure in Michelangelo's fresco of the Crucifixion of St. Peter,
though the drawing which served as a model was probably not
a design of the master's own hand, but one of the innumerable
highly-finished school copies made after the picture. It took
Blake's fancy ; he gave it a new name and he placed it in a
background of his own imagining, on a rocky cliff beside
the sea.
The translation of a massive Michelangelo type into a Gothic
atmosphere is characteristic of Blake's art. One of the
sources of dissatisfaction in Blake's drawings is the incon
gruity between heavily-muscled nudes, taken from Renais
sance models, though realized as a whole in almost rudimen
tary fashion, and the ethereal movement and long lines of his
draped figures, taken from memories of Gothic sculpture. In
his thought there is a similar dualism ; intense spirituality and
the assertion of the glory of the body and the holiness of its
passions. In the early engraving Glad Day, made in 1780,
the nude form is of a type which really seems to express the
spirit through the body : but later Blake took over forms from
prints he had seen of Michelangelo's latest work, like the
6

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PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM BLAKE AT WORK
1820. LEAD PENCIL DRAWING BY JOHN LINNELL
(In the possession of T H Riches, E'.q )
Last Judgment, and made a sort of convention of the elabo
rated play of developed muscles on his nude forms. We can
not doubt that he recognized the profoundly spiritual element
in the great Florentine ; but how much he would have profited
could he have seen with his own eyes, instead of through poor
translations, the Prophets and the Sibyls, and the Adam, and
the glorious athletes of the Sistine ceiling ! Having nothing
of the severe Florentine discipline in draughtsmanship behind
him, and being besides incapable by temperament of emulat
ing such mastery, he adopted from the outside a set of forms,
attitudes and gestures which we find repeated again and again
through his work ; the naked body being never drawn for its
own sake but as the symbol of definite desires, ideas, and
energies. Hence there is often a kind of cheapness or incom
pleteness in Blake's forms, which we forgive because of the
inspired energy with which he uses them. He copied his
visions, and maintained that these were " organized and
minutely articulated beyond all that mortal and perishing
nature can produce." His copies, we infer, were far from
perfect. I do not know whether others have the same experi
ence, but I find that Blake's works seem to dilate and gather
beauty in recollection, so that often the actuality, when seen
again, disappoints. They exert a greater power over the mind
than the eye.
Blake's conception of human form and manner of drawing,
taken by themselves, are often hardly different from what we
find in ambitious contemporaries like James Barry and others
now forgotten, whom he admired. But in most of Blake's
work, even when he is not at his best, we are conscious at once
of something in it which makes an immense difference ; some
thing which is alive, which excites and challenges our spirits.
It is a demonic power, flowing from a mysterious source. And
of a piece with this power is Blake's gift for spontaneous
design, which contrasts with the compositions of most artists
by its extraordinary directness of attack. He is a great,
because a passionate designer ; and considering his limited

repertory of forms his instinctive arrangements of them show
surprising resource of invention. If he uses a basis of sym
metry, as he often does, he does not learnedly disguise it, as
other artists have done, but employs it to its utmost value,
almost diagrammatically, as in The Sacrifice of Jephthah (in
the Graham Robertson collection), or as in some of the Job
engravings, or the Angels hovering over the Body of Jesus
(Plate 77). He uses the device of repetition with the same
bold and naked reliance on its force, as in the Stoning of
Achan (Plate 46) with its repetition of lifted arms. The Job
series alone suffices to show what a master of imaginative
design Blake was : and the reproductions in this book illus
trate many drawings which for creative power are hardly
rivalled in English art.
Blake is not among the great colourists, as we usually under
stand the term ; yet his colour has fascinations of its own. It
is sometimes powerful, rarely subtle. He does not select and
make a harmony of his selection. He will take all the tints of
the rainbow at once : but just as in his design, his impetuous
audacity and directness carry off what in one less impassioned
would be a mere revelry of varied colour. Sometimes his
colour is careless, or unpleasant, but sometimes quite lovely,
with a delicate, throbbing aerial flush.
III.
The poet sees the world not as a series of aspects but as related
energies and movements. Blake was a poet when he painted
as when he wrote. The energies and movements which under
lie and cause the phenomena of life were his pictorial themes ;
and these he personified, as the primitive imagination of man
kind has personified the forces that it saw or divined around it.
When Gray writes From Helicon's harmonious springs
A thousand rills their mazy progress take :
The laughing flowers, that round them blow,
Drink life and fragrance as they flow,
8

what picture is made in Blake's mind ? He sees the flowers,
in form such as never grew on earth, as the nest or cradle of
little fairy-shapes which bend down to scoop up the water
from the stream and drink it with ecstatic gestures. One
might multiply indefinitely similar instances in which what
for the reader is a metaphor taken for granted and almost lost
in the habits of language, bursts for Blake into the vivid
image of its original meaning. See what he has made of
Shakespeare's image of Pity in " Macbeth " (Plate 36).
This natural kinship with primitive imagination goes with an
extraordinary zest for the elemental. In " The Gates of Para
dise " Blake has depicted (Plates 17, 18) the Elements of
Earth, Air, Fire and Water. But all through his art it
is when he is free to deal with elemental energies that he is
happiest and most powerful. In the drawing called Fire
(Plate 67) how much more he seems to sympathize with the
released and triumphant flames than with the terrified efforts
of the burning city's inhabitants to save their treasures ! How
magnificent the swirl of the flames behind the winged Satan
and the recumbent Eve (Plate 38) and in the Elijah (Plate 42) !
I do not think that in the whole art of Europe there is anyone
who has painted fire and flame so splendidly as Blake. He
loves to give to his figures the rushing movement of wind, and
communicates the sense of movement so vividly that we seem
to share in it. Indeed it is one of the chief exhilarations of
his art that we seem in contemplating or remembering it to be
endowed with ideal faculties, transcending the body's limita
tions and such as we enjoy only in our dreams. Movement
controls his drawing. Wonderful again is Blake's apprehen
sion of the vast and starry spaces of night (Plate 23) . Torrents
and waterfalls he never saw ; but how fine is the movement of
heavy water in the small drawing of the sea (Plate 50), and of
gliding streams whenever he draws them !
With this zest for the elemental and his instincts of the
Primitive, Blake seems always to be seeking t© get back to
the beginning. He did not, indeed, as has been done in our

day, seek in art to get back to the savage ; but his mind was
full of a glorious mythic Britain in the past, and seeing the
mind of his own age overlaid and choked with the decayed
and dead traditions of the Renaissance, he sought behind all
that for gleams of inspiration in what remained ot ancient
English painting and sculpture. But, as he somewhere says,
he could not help being infected at times by his own age and
things he had seen, and we see the traces of infection m his
less happy efforts, more plainly doubtless than he was him
self aware of. IV.
At the opposite end of the world, in a country then hardly
known to English people except as a sort of legend, there was
living in Blake's time an artist with whom he has some
strange affinities. Soga Shohaku was a painter of Kyoto,
who died in 1782. The popular movement in Japanese paint
ing of the day was toward naturalism, and the successful
master of that movement was Okio, whose works were every
where admired, copied, and sought after. Shohaku hated
naturalism and derided Okio, as Blake derided Reynolds.
He longed to bring back the great days of the fifteenth cen
tury, when masters of his own Soga family had painted in
inspired, impulsive strokes of the ink-charged brush the
spiritual heroes dear to the votaries of the Doctrine of Con
templation. Shohaku was poor, arrogant, and thought in
sane. His mind dwelt in a world which, for all the obvious
differences, had a fundamental affinity with the mental world
of Blake ; the world impregnated with the bold paradoxes of
Lao-tzu and his followers, asserting the infinite liberty of the
spirit, contemning routine, ceremony, great possessions, and
all literal interpretations of sacred books, believing in forgive
ness and in a fluid mind. Shohaku, like Blake, was infected
by his own age, and the force of his style often touched the
extravagant and grotesque.
It is not for nothing that of all our artists Blake is probably
10

the one who makes the strongest appeal to the cultivated
Japanese. (A book on Blake by M. Yanagi was published in
Japan in 1915) . Lovers of art in the Further East would never
dream of condemning Blake's " incorrect drawing," they
would take his arbitrary proportions as part of his artistic
nature, just as in the case of the masters of their own classic art.
Not looking for complete representation in a picture, but for
"inventive and visionary conception," they would not find
Blake eccentric, at any rate in style.
Can it be true that Blake was, as he claimed, " taken in vision
into the ancient republics, monarchies and patriarchates of
Asia"?On the back of Mr. Morse's wonderful drawing of The Rain
bow over the Flood (Plate 50), there is a pencil drawing of a
human figure with an elephant's head, holding on his knee a
similar-headed child. I have heard that this was meant for a
spiritual portrait of someone. But one would say at once
" This is the Indian god Ganesha." And common-sense con
fidently concludes that Blake had seen some statue of Ganesha,
and remembered it. But then we recall that page in
" Jerusalem " (Plate 63) where the great man-headed, bearded
bulls seem to have stepped from the porches of the ruined
palace of Nineveh : and dates confront us with the fact that
it was not till over twenty years after Blake's death that
Rossetti saw these alabaster monsters being " hoisted in " at
the doors of the British Museum : in his lifetime they were
still buried under the Mesopotamian sands and unknown to
all the world. V.
Had Blake seen and studied medieval manuscripts when he
set about making the " Songs of Innocence " ? It is hardly
possible that he could have escaped seeing, and delighting in,
illuminated missals and breviaries. And had he not been a
trained engraver, I think that in default of a printer and pub
lisher he would have written out copies of the Songs and
11

decorated them with his brush. But having the resources of
his craft at his command he invented a way of multiplying
copies, though, as the colouring of each page was done by
hand, the labour involved was hardly less than if he had been
both scribe and illuminator.
The method invented for the needs of the occasion,
and used later for most of the Prophetic Books, was
that of etching both text and decoration m relief.
"Instead of etching the blacks, etch the whites," is
Blake's memorandum. It was a less laborious way of
producing the effect of a woodcut; an anticipation in fact
of the process-block. But the page as first printed was not
intended to be complete ; it was merely the foundation of a
page finished in colour by the brush. For the printing he
chose a tawny, a reddish, a green or a blue tint. In the tiny
plates of " There is No Natural Religion "—which was pos
sibly the earliest of the whole series — more than one colour
was dabbed on to the copper; so too in certain pages of
" Urizen "; and probably in more cases than has generally
been admitted ; though as a rule the printing was done in one
colour only. The hand-colouring of some copies was in trans
parent tints, of others in opaque colour, with a sort of granu
lated impasto, an effect chiefly due, perhaps, to the printing.
Plates n and 12 reproduce the same design from " Thel," and
illustrate the entirely different effect obtained by these dif
ferent methods. Copies of the Songs and of the Prophetic
Books vary greatly. A detailed account of the various copies
known is given in Mr. Keynes' invaluable Bibliography.
In decorative combination of text and design the Songs are
perhaps the most successful of the books, though not all the
pages are happy. But in the history of book-printing and
book-decoration these rare volumes are an interesting link
between the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages and
the revival of the " beautiful book " by William Morris.
The pages reproduced give some idea of the range of design to
be found in the books, which contain some of Blake's most
12

striking, some of his strangest, and some of his least attractive
work. The " Jerusalem," which is usually uncoloured, has
the most impressive pages of all. Begun in 1804, it was not
finished, as Mr. Keynes has shown, till 1818. With the
"Milton" it makes a second group, separated from the rest by
an interval of some years. It is remarkable that in the two
latest of the main group of Prophetic Books, " Ahania " and
the " Book of Los," each of which is known only by a single
copy, the ordinary method of etching is employed for the text,
and the colour for the design separately applied to the plates.
This unexpected experiment was not felicitous, and the relief-
process was resumed in " Milton " and " Jerusalem," though
in both of these we find a greatly increased use of the " white-
line " method of working from the lights to the darks, in
which the effects to be obtained later in the " Virgil " wood
cuts are anticipated. Some pages of " Jerusalem," e.g.,
page 28 and page 33, seem to be largely graver-work — what
Blake called " woodcutting on pewter " — though probably
combined with the use of acid.
The designs in the Prophetic Books suffer less than the text
of them from the difficulty of deciphering the code of Blake's
private symbolism. We can enjoy the pictorial energy in
them for its own sake. But the creatures of his Myth have
not the vitality of the figures which belong to the world's
imagination, as we see by comparison with the splendid draw
ings which were made by Blake at the same period of his life.
VI.
Charles Lamb said that his real opera were not the essays that
his leisure hours produced, but the great folios, filled by his
laborious pen, on the shelves of the India House. So might
Blake have pointed to the series of line-engravings, done after
other men's designs, which occupied so great a proportion of
his working days. Had he done nothing original, his name
would still be dimly preserved in books of reference among
those of serviceable, obscure engravers of the English school. 13

His original prints were produced at intervals, sometimes of
many years. As everyone knows, Blake was apprenticed to
James Basire, a good man at his craft, but not notable or dis
tinguished. Two years after his apprenticeship had begun,
in 1773, Blake produced his first original engraving, the
Joseph of Arimathea, which we have already described and
discussed. Blake was a boy of sixteen when he engraved this
plate. If there is incongruity in the matter of the design,
there is incongruity also in the technical means. We feel con
scious both of impulse and impediment; a desire to use the
graver on the copper as a free instrument of expression,
impeded not so much by want of skill as by the impositions of
habit and professional training.
Since the time of Diirer and the Little Masters, the art of line-
engraving had been made over to the business of reproducing
the work of painters and draughtsmen. It had become an art
of translation. The tones of the painter had to be translated
into the lines of the engraver. In the latter part of the eigh
teenth century the usual procedure was to etch the ground
work of the print and then go over the whole with the graver,
adding the finer and more delicate lines required. The use of
the acid as a preliminary saved much labour, but it meant the
loss of that brilliant purity and freshness which is so delightful
in the work of earlier men like Goltzius, or the fine group of
engravers who worked for Rubens, or the French masters of
the portrait. Mechanical devices for translation of tone like
the famous " lozenge and dot," had become a tradition.
All through his life we see Blake, in his original line-engrav
ings, striving to get free from the encumbrance of professional
routine, seeking for a really expressive method of using his
tools, and never quite satisfied, till towards the end of his life
he does really seem to find himself.
In 1780 Blake produced the print called Glad Day; the
figure of a young man alighting on a hill with outstretched
arms, a caterpillar at his feet and a gross moth flying from the
dawn. Here there is a complete recoil from professional
14

methods. There is no elaboration, no cross-hatching; it is
little more than outline. With a gain in spontaneous direct
ness, it remains tentative and meagre. The artist seems to
have felt its deficiencies, for he used the same design some ten
years later for a coloured relief -etching (Plate 34). This, like
the Joseph of Arimathea preaching, which I have already
mentioned, is known by but one or two copies. The flaming
richness of the colouring had darkened, but has now been
restored. To 1793 belong two contrasted works in original
engraving : the pair of large engravings Job's Complaint and
The Death of EzekieVs Wife; and the little book of eighteen
prints called " The Gates of Paradise."
Mr. Graham Robertson owns the finished Indian-ink draw
ings for the Job (Plate 16) and the Ezekiel. Miss Carthew
possesses a study for the Job, with a different arrangement of
the figures ; and slighter pencil studies are in the Print Room.
The engravings of these two subjects are ambitious, and Blake
employed all the skill he had learnt in his profession. He
never again engraved a design on so large a scale. The two
prints show a certain effort to escape from the routine of train
ing, especially the Ezekiel, where there is less of the heavy
cross-hatching and more reliance on parallel strokes of the
graver ; but they are, after all, translations from tone into line,
and as translations are not very felicitous. Blake had done
the utmost he could with the experience he had learnt in the
elaborate method. But he needed better models, and these as
yet he had not studied, though he had certainly seen prints by
Diirer and his school.
In an almost completely contrasted method are the little plates
of " The Gates of Paradise." The designs are sketched on
the copper, and though the graver-work betrays a certain
habit of formality, increased by the dry printing of the time,
the general impression is of a spontaneous lightness. Never
theless, we feel that etching or dry-point would have been a
happier medium.
In 1796 and 1797 Blake engraved the illustrations to Young's 15

" Night Thoughts." He had made altogether five hundred
and thirty-seven drawings in colour-wash and pen for this
poem, on folio sheets into which the printed pages were inlaid,
the margins being filled with the designs : but only forty-
three were engraved. The drawings now belong to Mr.
W. A. White, of Brooklyn : they are naturally unequal, but
some of them (not engraved) seemed to me very beautiful
when I saw them. A<W;
It is by these illustrations and those to Blair's " Grave (en
graved by Schiavonetti) that Blake was best known to the
public of his time, since both were published, unlike most of
his work, in the ordinary way, through a bookseller. But
though none could fail to be struck by their imaginative
power and invention, neither series ranks with Blake's finest
achievements. Nor in the " Night Thoughts " has he suc
ceeded in finding a satisfying manner of using the burin. In
the drawings the natural fire and sweep of the pen-line and
the light washes of bright colour stimulate the eye ; they have
the virtue of a spontaneous sketch; but translated into en
graved lines they are tamed, and the forms are apt to look
empty. 1810 is the date of the Canterbury Pilgrims, engraved by
Blake after his own picture. This he claimed to be in the
manner of Diirer and the old engravers ; but though there is a
sort of experimental archaism in it, the effect is laboured and
dry.Eight years after this he met the young Linnell, who turned
his attention to engravings of the school of Marcantonio ; and
now at last he was led to study the kind of model which he had
so long been wanting. The fruit of this new study is seen in
the " Illustrations to the Book of Job."
Here at last, at nearly seventy years of age, Blake has found
felicity. It is our good fortune that these, the noblest series
of designs which he ever made, are by far the finest of his
original prints. There is no comparison between these and
his earlier plates . They are the greatest work in original line-
16

engraving that modern Europe has produced since the six
teenth century ; and in the realm of imaginative design there
is very little in English art that we can place above or beside
them.
The Job series gained by the unusual patience that Blake, by
nature so impatient, devoted to their production. Not only
had the study of Job been for long years in his mind, but the
studies still existing for some of the compositions show how
he matured his conceptions and gradually improved on them.
By comparison such work as the designs for the " Night
Thoughts " and Gray's Poems seem hasty improvisations.
Moreover hemade two sets of elaborate coloured drawings ; in
1822, for Butts, and in 1823-5, f°r Linnell, before he set to
work on the engravings. I have seen both these sets of draw
ings (the former set was sold at the Crewe sale in 1903 ; both
are now in America) and though some judges have thought
differently, the engravings represent, to my mind, the finest
and completest forms of the designs. They seem to me
throughout to be superior to the drawings. There exists, in
deed, one painting which is a modification of the sixth plate
of the engravings and which is certainly superior to the print ;
but this painting, which is in tempera on panel, must surely
have been of later date than the engraving. It belonged to
Sir Charles Dilke and is now in the Tate Gallery (Plate 95).
Here the shape of the design is altered : Satan has wide, out
spread wings, and the sullen sunset splendour of the colouring
seems to be in its original condition.
A single plate, of excessive rarity, deserves a mention here.
This is the stipple-engraving Mirth (Plate 86). It reproduces
one of the illustrations to " L' Allegro," which I remember
being charmed by at the sale of the Crewe collection, and
which are now in America. Blake was a skilful stipple-
engraver after other artists, but after engraving the Mirth by
this method he seems to have disliked the effect and re-worked
the plate with impetuous strokes of the graver. I only know
this state of the print by the reproduction in Mr. Russell's 17

Catalogue. The stipple-print is in the Print Room of the
British Museum; it was acquired at the Linnell sale.
Blake's last engravings are the seven illustrations to Dante
These are inferior to the Job plates both as designs and as
prints ; he does not seem to have adapted himself to the larger
scale. The two reproduced (Plates 98 and 99) are from a set
of early states of the plates, in Mrs. Morse s collection.
These states have not hitherto been described, and may be
lithTjob is Blake's grandest work in engraving, showing his
powers of imagination at their fullest reach, the little set of
woodcuts to Virgil's " Eclogues " hold us equally, m their
idyllic vein, by the charm of complete felicity.
As originally published, they could hardly have had worse
chance of recognition and appreciation. They were ill
printed, huddled together, four on a page, with grotesquely
incongruous surroundings, and mutilated by other hands.
The book in which they appeared was the third edi^n of Dr.
R. J. Thornton's " Eclogues of Virgil," in two volumes, with
230 illustrations : it was designed to make the study of Latin
easy for beginners, and imitations of the Eclogues by English
poets were printed opposite the Latin text. It was published
in 1821. Blake made eighteen drawings in pencil and sepia
to illustrate Ambrose Phillips' imitation of the First Eclogue.
These were in the Linnell collection; they are now in
America. One subject was not engraved; and of the rest
three were engraved by other hands, the result being no
longer recognizable as Blake's work. The frontispiece is on
a rather larger scale. Dr. Thornton printed under it an
apology for the woodcuts, as showing "less art than genius."
It was only the persuasion of artists like Lawrence and James
Ward which induced him to admit Blake's work at all. At
this time the school of wood-engraving started by Bewick was
already infected with the ambition to rival the fine finish of
the steel-engravers. Manipulative skill was the quality
sought and esteemed. Blake's bold, swift way with the wood
18 ;

PORTRAIT OF WILLIAM BLAKE ON HAMPSTEAD HEATH,
1821. LEAD PENCIL DRAWING BY JOHN LINNELL.
(In the possesssion of T. H. Riches, Esq.)

produced work which seemed rude and childish to the trained
professionals of Bewick's school who were also employed on
the book, and they exclaimed against it. As Gilchrist records,
the blocks were cut down to fit the page. How much the blocks
suffered from this mutilation we can now judge; for Linnell
preserved two or three sets of proofs from eight of the blocks
in their original state. In 1920 one of these sets was presented
to the Print Room of the British Museum by Mr. Herbert
Linnell; and in the Burlington Magazine (Dec, 1920) I was
able to reproduce these eight prints side by side with the same
prints as they appeared in Thornton's book. Not only were
the blocks cut down, but they were worked on by other hands
in an effort to make them more presentable. Plates 83 and 84
give the eight woodcuts in their earlier state. We can only
sigh that proofs of the rest of the set were not preserved.
Blake had before this made a few "woodcuts on pewter,"
notably the head and tail-piece to a ballad of Hayley's, "Little
Tom the Sailor " (and some pages of " Jerusalem " may have
been produced by this process). Now at the age of sixty-
three he attacked the wood with the graver for the first time.
In spite of his denunciations of the "demons" of chiaroscuro,
he did not engrave in outline, like the men who worked after
Diirer, but used the "white-line," long ago employed by
Scolari and some other Italians, and made popular in his own
time by Bewick. He evoked his forms from the black back
ground with rich gleams and a shadowy suggestiveness.
Nowhere else has he treated landscape motives with such
interest and enjoyment. These little cuts were the starting-
point and inspiration for the pastorals of Calvert and Samuel
Palmer. VII.
Edward Calvert, who under Blake's inspiration was to make
some of the most exquisite small engravings ever done in
England, served in the Navy as a midshipman; then deter
mined to forsake the sea and follow art. He came up to
London from Devon and sought out a stockbroker, Mr. John
19

Giles, on business of property ; and the conversation having
diverged to " the grandeur of the ancients," Mr. Giles went
on to tell him of " the divine Blake, who has seen God, sir, and
talked with angels."
I always think that Mr. Butts, who for so many years was the
external support of Blake's imaginative life, commissioning
from him a long series of paintings and drawings, must have
been of a kindred nature with this delightful, improbable, but
quite real stock-broker, John Giles. With their homely
English names, and, as one conceives, their innate and inno
cent reverence for the man of genius, they remind one of those
sympathetic natures, all delicacy and sensitiveness within,
which Mr. Conrad has discerned and revealed sometimes
under the plain, ruddy exterior of an English sea-captain.
And I think it an honour to our race that it produces such
natures, little versed in terms of art, perhaps, but in such a
man as Thomas Butts appearing as a patron how precious to
discover, when we remember the pomp and vanity of the great
patrons of art, the Popes and potentates, who thwarted and
wasted even while they encouraged the genius of men like
Michelangelo.
The Butts collection contained much of Blake's finest work,
both in tempera and in water-colour.
Of Blake's pictures it is difficult to speak, since few of them
probably retain their original appearance, and some are
darkened wrecks. We learn from the Descriptive Catalogue
that he painted at one time in oils ; then made a number of
what he called " experiment pictures," of which he says that
they were " bruised and knocked about without mercy to trv
all experiments. " '
In the end he satisfied himself with a kind of tempera paint
ing, using glue instead of the egg medium, on gesso over
canvas, panel copper, or steel. This he absurdly called
fresco, and asserted that the pictures done in this medium
are known to be unchangeable."
I knew the Nelson guiding Leviathan (Plate 52) when it was

in the possession of the late Mr. T. W. Jackson, of Oxford.
It was so dim and darkened that the forms were hardly dis
tinguishable : but before he left it to the nation Mr. Jackson
had it restored (in no way repainted) by Mr. Littlejohn, the
chief mounter at the Print Room, who had a genius for such
work, and whose untimely death in action in the war was a
national loss. As it appears now at the Tate Gallery, it makes
Blake's assertion that " clearness and precision have been the
chief objects in painting these pictures " seem less prepos
terous than it does when contemplating the Pitt or The Bard.
Mr. Sturge Moore thinks these two Blake's finest " frescoes. "
The Bard makes one think that the kind of use of tempera
which we see in Tintoretto's big pictures in the School of San
Rocco was what Blake was groping after.
One of the most important of the " frescoes," The Ancient
Britons, described as having figures near life-size, seems to
have entirely disappeared. I confess I cannot share Blake's
own great admiration for his Canterbury Pilgrims : it does
not seem to me the type of work in which his real genius was
engaged.Nine of the tempera pictures are reproduced in this volume,
among them the Nativity (Plate 14), strange and exquisite
invention, in which the essence of Blake's spiritual imagina
tion is disclosed. Very beautiful also is the Flight into Egypt
(Plate 13). In quite another vein the Satan smiting Job (Plate
95), with its splendour of symbolic colour, is unusually well
preserved and must rank high among Blake's works.
But most of Blake's work as a painter is in water-colour. The
early English school of water-colour is usually thought of as
a school of landscape only. But in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century the medium was pretty frequently used
for figure-design. Besides Blake, there was Rowlandson, who
with reed-pen and wash composed with such inexhaustible
fertility scenes from the life around him, which, even when
the matter is gross or brutal, are touched with so lively a grace
and composed with so abounding a power and ease that we
21

are enchanted. Rowlandson and Mortimer, both gay and
liberal livers, were the rival champions of the Academy
schools in their youth, and the idols of the students ; the tradi
tion of their exuberant promise and facility still lingered when
Blake, at twenty-one, entered the schools in 1778.
Mortimer, now almost forgotten, was immensely admired in
his day. Blake's early essays in " history " were modelled on
his style. One of these, The Penance of Jane Shore (Plate 1),
was included by Blake in the exhibition of his works in 1809.
He covered it with varnish, as a substitute for glass, as Gains
borough did some of his drawings : and the mellow tone it has
acquired is very pleasing. The usual practice of painters in
water-colour till about the beginning of the nineteenth cen
tury was, of course, to wash in the design with Indian-ink,
and put the colours on over this grey foundation. This was
parallel to the practice of oil-painters who laid in their design
in white and brown or grey before they proceeded to colour.
The intention was to secure coherence and due subordination
of the parts to the whole.
Some of Blake's finest drawings have very little colour. And
he used the Indian-ink alone with beautiful effect ; in no draw
ing with more felicity than in the Har and Heva in Mr.
Marsh's collection (Plate 4), which has a strange marmoreal
quality. This drawing is one of a set of designs for " Tiriel, "
probably the earliest of the Prophetic Books. The whole set
of twelve are described by W. M. Rossetti in Gilchrist's
" Life. " But they are now dispersed, and the whereabouts of
most of them is unknown. One, however, reproduced in this
volume (Plate 5) came into the British Museum in 1913 : it
was in an extra-illustrated set of Academy Catalogues, with
many other interesting drawings by English artists. The
figured dress on one of the women is unlike Blake's mature
manner, which disdains pattern : but at this time he was fond
of such enlivening ornament. The little drawing Youth
learning from Age (Plate 3), which is brightly tinted, must
belong to this period ; as also, I think, an early version of
22

Elijah in the Chariot of Fire, which belongs to Mrs. Morse.
The most impressive drawing of this early period is The
Breach in a City (Plate 2), of 1784, the first work in which
Blake's powers of grim imagination are displayed in a per
sonal style. This is very slightly coloured.
Blake's difficulty with water-colour on a large scale was the
difficulty of preventing his broad washes from appearing weak
and empty in a strong design. To add pattern to dresses was,
after his youthful period, uncongenial to him ; the accidents of
light on varying textures had no interest for him. Arrange
ments of drapery again were obstacles to that unimpeded
movement in which he inveterately delighted. How then was
he to give richness and body to his surfaces ? He invented a
method, half-painting and half-printing, which yielded, in
some sort, the effect he desired. I imagine the method was
prompted by the effects of colour-printing obtained from the
relief -etchings of the " Songs of Innocence " and the other
illuminated books. A similar method had been employed by
G. B. Castiglione (1616-1670), and other artists, but doubtless
their "monotypes" were unknown to Blake, who achieved
besides a much more elaborate effect. The method was to
make the design roughly and swiftly on mill-board in dis
temper (not oil-colours) and while it was wet take an im
pression from it on paper. The blotted ground-work of this
impression was coloured up by hand. The design could be
revived on the mill-board when another impression was
wanted. Some of Blake's finest works were produced by this
means ; for instance, the Elijah and the Pity.
Most of these works were produced in or about the year 1795,
a time of splendid productiveness in Blake's life. Later, he
reverted to transparent water-colour : and in this medium he
made hundreds of drawings, the best of which he repeated
more than once, with more or less variation in technique as
well as design : sometimes using a light tint over the founda
tion of Indian-ink, and then repeating the design in fuller,
richer tones. Thus the set of designs for " Paradise Lost," 23

reproduced in colour in the Liverpool edition of the poem
(1906) are in pale subdued tints, like the Satan watching the
endearments of Adam and Eve (Plate 70), which is a version
of one of the subjects of the series. But another version of the
whole set is in the Boston Museum, much stronger in colour ;
I remember particularly the Creation of Eve (Plate 80) with
its deep blue sky. Yet other modified versions exist of these
Milton illustrations : some were in the Linnell collection.
Among the mass of Blake's water-colours, whether colour-
printed or not, preferences will be various : but a certain
number stand out among the rest. The Elohim creating Adam
(Plate 37), tremendous in imaginative energy; the Elijah
(Plate 42), grand in colour as in design; the Pity (Plate 36),
magnificent in movement and supremely original; the Wise
and Foolish Virgins (Plate 85), one of Blake's most perfect
creations, with its fine pictorial contrast between the calm,
ranked movement of the Wise and the tossed and troubled
forms of the Foolish, and, above all, the superb dawn land
scape and angel blowing his trumpet in the sky ; the Entomb
ment (Plate 45), with its profound and veiled emotion; the
Angel rolling away the stone from the Sepulchre (Plate 78),
unusually complete and superbly conceived; the River of
Life (Plate 66), most lovely of Blake's drawings in its aerial
colour ; the Job confessing his Presumption (Plate 43) ; the
Crucifixion (Plate 44), a grand pictorial invention, though the
dicing soldiers in the foreground are not quite worthy of the
rest ; each of these (to name no more) is in its different way a
passionate design, throbbing with interior life. These alone
would suffice for a noble fame.
Blake deplored that his best drawings could not have been
painted on a large scale as altar-pieces for churches, " to make
England, like Italy, respected by respectable men of other
countries on account of Art. " Certain it is that the compara
tive smaUness of the scale, and the character of the medium,
have impeded recognition of the rare and great qualities of
these works.
24

VIII.
Only in the present year were Blake's illustrations to Gray's
poems given to the world, in a magnificent volume of full-
sized reproductions. They are presumed to have been in
Beckford 's collection, which passed into that of the Duke of
Hamilton, but were lost or mislaid till 1919, and were only
known to Gilchrist by hearsay. In style the drawings remind
us of the " Night Thoughts " series, and one would be
inclined to place them rather earlier than 1800, the date pre
sumed by Professor Grierson, their editor, on the strength of
a poem written in the original volume and dedicating them to
Mrs. Flaxman. The poem seems to refer to Flaxman's good
offices in transplanting Blake from London to Felpham. But
there is no reason why the drawings should not have been
made earlier ; indeed it seems likelier that Blake offered them,
as work he had by him, than that they should have been made
for the purpose of presentation. However, this is a small
matter. The drawings are not of Blake's best work, being
hasty in execution, but some of them show him in a vein of
humorous fancy, not betrayed elsewhere ; others contain the
germ of grand designs, and they are of extreme interest as
showing the contact of two minds so different as Gray's and
Blake's. Mr. Grierson, in the admirable essay prefixed to
the reproductions, illuminates the subject by reminding us of
Johnson's attitude to Gray : just what Johnson condemned as
obsolete mythology is just what sets Blake on fire. We can
not doubt that Gray appeared to Blake as a great Romantic,
and hard as it is for us to think ourselves back to the time
when Coleridge and Keats and all the Romantic Movement
were yet to come, we see how natural it was for Gray's
genius, especially in poems like " The Bard," to appeal to
Blake, who read into the older poet's verse an imaginative
passion that was latent or half -suppressed in the lines he illus
trated. Blake's last work was the designs for Dante. Would that he
had known him earlier ! The drawings, a hundred in number, 25

are very unequal. A few are elaborately coloured and com
pleted ; many are mere sketches. They also differ greatly in
quality. The set were sold in one lot at the Linnell sale.
American competition was keen; and during the war the
national museums were deprived of their annual purchase
grants. Still, by concerted action, sufficient money was
raised, and the drawings were saved for the country, or at
least for the Empire, since the largest proportion went to the
Melbourne Gallery, which contributed the most to the pur
chase. Dante ought to have been congenial to Blake, who
said " you have only to work up imagination to the state of
vision, and the thing is done " ; for of all poets Dante is the
one whose imagination is always at the pitch of vision. Blake
also, deriding Reynolds' doctrine of generalized form, insisted
much on particularity; and no poet sees with such intense
particularity as Dante. But when we look at Blake's own
work, we see forms determinate indeed in outline but gener
alized in conception; there is no intensity of detail. The
" Commedia " is full of minute and scrupulous observation :
Blake never seems to have observed anything for its own sake.
Herbert Horne in his book on Botticelli, that fine monument
of English scholarship, points out that one reason why Dante's
poem is called a Comedy is that it was written in a style that
eschewed the exalted tone of Tragedy, disdaining neither the
phrase of common speech nor the most familiar images of
daily life. Instead of seeking to create an atmosphere of
remoteness and grandeur, Dante wants to make his reader
see every detail of his visionary journey, and no comparison
is thought too homely or undignified if it makes these near
and vivid. It is so that Botticelli in the famous series of pen-
drawings, now at Berlin, conceives his illustrations ; at least
he does not conceive them in the manner which we associate
with Michelangelo and the tradition derived from his example,
a manner disdainful of detail and relieving heroic or grandiose
forms against a spectral or murky void. Blake, before he
came to read Dante, was steeped in Milton and the Old Testa-
26

ment, in a world of imagination to which Michelangelesque
forms and a vast, vague background were congenial. Even the
figures of Dante and Virgil were seen by him in the gener
alized aspect which he gave to figures from the Bible story.
And yet in spite of what appear to be so serious disqualifica
tions, Blake goes to the core of Dante's matter ; for he is akin
to the great Italian, if not at all in his mode of vision, in the
spiritual intensity of his nature. He is not so human as Dante
in the passionate feeling of the heart ; but spiritual anguish,
spiritual ecstasy, he expresses with a power that could hardly
be surpassed. Botticelli is his only rival. Both these artists
possessed a faculty, unrivalled, I think, by any other
European artist, of creating forms that float or rush upon the
air, so that we seem to share the lightness of their buoyancy
and the motion of their flight. Botticelli has all the advantage
of a Florentine, versed in Dante's poetry from his youth, and
living in one of the greatest times of art : yet there are
moments in which Blake, by his intense passion, excels him.
Botticelli gives us little of the terribleness of the poet : his
pen-work, with its fluent outline, can render nothing of the
atmosphere, the changing glooms and irradiations which
mean so much in Dante ; he hardly begins to persuade us that
he is really living in his imagination till we come to the
"Purgatory" and the "Paradise," where he moves as in
native air and creates pages of enchanting beauty. Blake,
with all his frequent failures — for rarely is a single design
quite satisfying as a whole — contrives, with his strange
elemental power, to give life to the strangest of the creatures
he imagines.
Perhaps, of all the series, the scene in the "Earthly Paradise,"
with the mystical procession, and the stream dividing Dante
from Matilda as it winds through the flowery meadow, and
the flames of the seven candles reflected in the water (Plate
103) is the most felicitous. Here Blake's peculiar rain
bow tints give just the sensation of unearthly radiance that
we require. And the unfinished character of the drawing 27

seems, paradoxically, to make it more complete to our imagi
nations. It is the same with another lovely sketch, washed
with colour, of the Angel departing in his boat " without sail
or oar," which is also in the British Museum (Plate 101). Of
the elaborated and fully-coloured designs none surpasses the
Paolo and Francesca, with its great swirl of anguished lovers
borne upon the wind, which is now at Birmingham : it is one
of those which Blake engraved (Plate 98). A very beautiful
design for the " Purgatory " is at Oxford. And Blake seems
to have been especially fortunate in those scenes where the
poets climb the mount of Purgatory, with the sea, dark and
glittering, below them : two or three of these are in the Tate
Gallery, with some impressive pages from the "Inferno."
One of the finest of the full-coloured designs is the Lucia
carrying Dante in his sleep (Plate 100), with its wonderful
sky of stars. IX.
" The painters of England are unemployed in public works."
Blake's lament and desire show how he conceived of the func
tion and need of art in national life. Isolated in his own age,
he was ever conscious of the lost medieval tradition and striv
ing to take up again its broken threads. His own art may be
charged with eccentricity, partly due to an abnormal nature,
partly to want of education and the warping circumstances of
his time; but he aspired to belong to the central tradition.
And we may with more justice perhaps charge with "' eccen
tricity " the trend of nineteenth-century art, embogged in a
naturalism which may well appear to future times as little
significant as the " naturalist " movement in seventeenth-
century Italy.
Blake's immediate influence on his little group of young dis-
ciples was mainly through the pastoral vein of his woodcuts
and did not succeed in stimulating them to arduous creation!
Ihe torpor of prosperous commercialism came on England
and was heavy to contend against. When Rossetti sought for
28

a tradition to sustain the effort of the Pre-Raphaelites to re
connect the arts and the imaginative life, he too looked back
to the Middle Ages ; and on the path behind there was no one
but Blake to help him. Sterile dogmas have done their best
to drain the arts of imagination : but no fulness of power will
be theirs till the imaginative life pours into them again. Of
that time Blake is the herald and the prophet. Laurence Binyon.

Cordial acknowledgments are due to the Trustees of the
National Gallery of British Art ; to the Trustees of the British
Museum, and of the Boston Museum; and to the private
owners — Mr. William Bateson, Miss Carthew, Mr. Edward
Marsh, Mr. and Mrs. Sydney Morse, Mr. T. H. Riches,
Messrs. Ricketts & Shannon, Mr. Edgar Tindall and Mr. W.
Graham Robertson — whose courtesy has made it possible to
represent Blake's art in these pages more fully than in any
previous publication ; in especial to Mr. Graham Robertson,
who has allowed his unrivalled collection to be drawn on to
the extent of one quarter of the whole number of illustrations.
I wish also to thank Mr. A. G. B. Russell, whose forthcoming
authoritative catalogue of Blake's drawings has been so long
awaited, for friendly advice and information, and Mr.
Geoffrey Keynes for valued help and for reading the proofs
of the text. Mr. Keynes's " Bibliography of Blake," pub
lished this year for the Grolier Club, with its scholarly and
minute account of Blake's printed books and MSS., is a work
to which every student of Blake must be deeply indebted.

29

PLATE 1. "THE PENANCE OF JANE SHORE." (ABOUT 1778.) TINTED
DRAWING, VARNISHED. 9J X 11* IN.
(In the -possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 2. " THE BREACH IN A CITY." (1784.) INDIAN-INK, WITH SLIGHT COLOUR. 13 x 18| IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 3. "YOUTH LEARNING FROM AGE." INDIAN-INK AND WATER-
COLOURS. 4J X 3J IN. (In the possession of Miss Carthew)

PLATE 4. " HAR AND HEVA BATHING. MNETHA BEHIND.' DESIGN FOR TIRIEL. INDIAN-INK. 7* x 10| IN.
(In the possession of Edward Marsh, Esq.)

PLATE 5. " HAR AND TIRIEL, HEVA AND MNETHA." DESIGN FOR TIRIEL. INDIAN-INK. 7± X 9£ IN.
(In the British Museum)

%f

• - jsv

o^

lerry Merry Sparrow
JndeT leave)* so green
| Ahappy Blotsom
¦ .\y»« Sw^ft as ajTow
See.k yoar cradle tui'fow
Near my Bottom .
Pretty Pretty RoW
Uniifer leaves sogreeft
it A Vi appy B3ow om
1 HeajAyou .solving* sottun
I PrettyTrettj
Hcar'wy Bosom. •

i

PLATE 7. " THE DIVINE IMAGE." FROM SONGS OF INNOCENCE. (1789.)
COLOURED PRINT. 4| x 2J IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 8. " THE BARD.

FROM GRAY. TEMPERA. 23*. x 17J IN.
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

PLATE 9. " THE AGONY IN THE GARDEN. ' TEMPERA. 10 x 14J IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 10.
TITLE-PAGE OF THEL. (1789.)
COLOURED PRINT OF THE DESIGN WITHOUT THE TITLE. 3J x 4J IN.
(In the British Museum)

PLATE 11. PAGF. 4 OF THEL. LIGHTLY TINTED. 6 x H IN.
(In the British Museum)

PLATE 12.
PAGE 4 OF THEL. (1789.) COLOURED PRINT WITHOUT THE TEXT.
3J x 4J IN. _
(In the British Museum)

PLATE 13.

THE FLIGHT INTO EGYPT." (1790.) TEMPERA. 10£ x 15 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 14. "THE NATIVITY." TEMPERA. 11 X 15 IN.
(In the possession of Sydney Morse, Esq.)

PLATE 15. " BATHSHEBA." TEMPERA. 10J x 14| IN.
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

PLATE 16. " JOB'S COMPLAINT." (ABOUT 1792.) INDIAN-INK. 13| x 19J IN.
(In the possession of IT. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

i Wiii.J, ¦/,if,lvtl9J

PLATE 17. TWO ENGRAVINGS FOR THE GATES OF PARADISE. (1793.)
EACH 3} x 2J IN. Un the British Museum)

Fire
%li ' l„>*l!lj,la. / /flny //'f>3

PLATE 18. TWO ENGRAVINGS FOR THE GATES OF PARADISE. (1793)
34. X 2| IN. AND 21 X 2{j IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 19 " VISIONS OF THE DAUGHTERS OF ALBION." (1793.) THE
ARGUMENT. COLOURED PRINT. 3| x 4| IN.
(In the British Museum)

''eery

yfi'd"^* ™*: &<& tLy rase dap tj^^ „,ltt
fTn ~ %**' "*^~^ <W# *# dkfe of Ore
g^g^fe^^W «W asrS^Jl^ t/uv'tL dark
lught.

' ' f!44£ Z2 'W "l>*n k™'Z3&' and LcAe tt murderer.
A^' A /^A5' / -e3™£ -^aydssiirt iff htm to die stem
^/mat trad u/Ae, y^rdp^LSev ^ ASTv ~~7~J l- ' ' . «5

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w> no muuv JJolLm>, no Jnare ol^Znce

*£? m-apsfjuniself

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^^ ' '

PLATE 20. PAGE 7 OF AMERICA. (1793.) UNCOLOURED. 8 X 6* IN.
(In the British Museum)

.,;«#'

^v_A thunder^ end^ fJir t-U 'ce. d/um. /ilbums 'Arihel Wrtzdinil bnrni~ ?
J J, ¦•xdr me .b'tvrij' <>I^A'<J>ht; and, Uke tJvp *. ternal Lwn.'i hon'l
lit iiunr/w _&, war. n'pLii] . Art thnu not (Jrc.M'lw .-tir/jen/: inrmd
**3tnhas at the bate of fcjtudiarrnoti in devour Iter rAtJ'Jre/i ;
Ijlasphemous JJem/rn .dlnttrArist '. Jra/sr &/• Ijdxutzcs '.'
L.in'er iii u'i'd reoellton , and tram&felser err (*odv Iuh»>;
Way didt uwu cvmi tz>junt>els ryes en this txrrdic iurm ?
r

PLATE 21. PAGE 11 OF AMERICA. (1793.) UNCOLOURED. 9J x 6| IN.
(In the British Museum)

.. *¦»&

A A J

*

PLATE 23. " HEAR THE VOICE OF THE BARD ! " INTRODUCTION TO
SONGS OF EXPERIENCE. (1794.) COLOURED PRINT.

41 x 2J IN.

(In the British Museum)

PLATE 24. PAGE 2 OF URIZEN. (1794.) COLOURED PRINT (WITHOUT TEXT).
4| X 4 IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 27. PAGE 19 OF URIZEN (LOS, ENITHARMON AND ORC)
COLOURED PRINT. 6J X 4 IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 30.
THE ANCIENT OF DAYS." FRONTISPIECE TO EUROPE. (1794.)
COLOURED PRINT. 94. x 6$ IN.
(In the possession of T. H. Riches. Esq.)

PLATE 31. "THE HOUSE OF DEATH; THE LAZAR-HOUSE OF MILTON." (1795.) COLOUR-PRINTED
DRAWING. 181 X 23J IN. [in the British Museum)

PLATE 32. " HECATE.

COLOUR-PRINTED DRAWING. 17 x 23 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 33 " OBERON AND TITANIA RESTING ON LILIES." PAGE 5 OF
THE SONG OF LOS. 94. x 6| IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 34.
GLAD DAY." COLOURED PRINT. 10| x 7f IN.
(In the British Museum)

PLATE 35. UNKNOWN SUBJECT. COLOURED PRINT. 4f x 6| IN.
(In the British Museum)

PLATE i\6. " PITY." FROM MACBETH.

COLOUR-PRINTED DRAWING. 17 x 21 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 37. "THE ELOHIM CREATING ADAM." (1795.) COLOUR-PRINTED
DRAWING. 17| x 21 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 38
SATAN EXULTING OVER EVE." (1795.)' COLOUR-PRINTED DRAWING
16| x 21 IN.
(In the possession of W. Bateson, Esq., F.R.S.)

PLATE 39. " OBERON AND TITANIA." WATER-COLOURS. 184. x 264, IN.
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

5 5
at -=
0* 'O
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PLATE 41. " CHRIST INTERCEDING FOR THE MAGDALEN." TEMPERA. 10 x 15 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 43. "JOB CONFESSING HIS PRESUMPTION TO GOD."
WATER-COLOURS. 154. X 13 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 44. "THE CRUCIFIXION." (1801.) WATER-COLOURS. 164. x 12J IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 45. "THE ENTOMBMENT." WATER-COLOURS. 15 x 12 IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 46. "THE STONING OF ACHAN." WATER-COLOURS. 15 x 13$ IN.
(In the possession of Miss Carthew)

PLATE 47,

"THE EAGLE AND THE CHILD." (1802.) INDIAN-INK
DRAWING FOR ILLUSTRATION TO HAYLEY'S BALLAD.
Cf x i\ IN. (In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 48. "THE DEATH OF THE VIRGIN." WATER-COLOURS. 14fxl4JIN.
[In the possession of W . Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 49

"THE DEATH OF SAINT JOSEPH." WATER-COLOURS. 14* x 131 IN
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 50. " THE RAINBOW OVER THE FLOOD." INDIAN-INK. 54. x 44 IN.
(In the possession of Sydney Morse, Esq.)

PLATE 51. " THE THREE MARIES AT THE SEPULCHRE " nam ¦
WATER-COLOURS. 144. x 16 IN. ( '
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 52. " NELSON GUIDING LEVIATHAN." TEMPERA. 29| x 24J IN.
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

PLATE 53. " MARY MAGDALEN WASHING THE FEET OF JESUS "
WATER-COLOURS. 134. x 13 IN.
(In the possession of Edgar Tindall, Esq.)

PLATE 54. " RUTH AND NAOMI." WATER-COLOURS. 14 x 124. IN,
(In the possession of IV. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 55. " DAVID DELIVERED OUT OF MANY WATERS."
WATER-COLOURS. 164, x 134. IN.
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

-<*-

Z-'rro ^{i&uuz£ Jx „
am.£,onaattStxacje. Co BiackhccXA -za^c; Co ribtufstavi) iv<
on

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iJS 2ZnJ^t&j3rJ7ts>n!,' f.ooat. \uiay Ud/ar£i cadences
-J?rosn Ckafuvt/sr est t&e. nariA. . j!p ZrcscuyipotKt&MoVer to. OieSOU
/-.audj-oitrtilW t/i& 'SfajnmercfZos: ySc(hudJusSe£&>nts ts '^f^,
£pvgfereC <fc oj3 X}o»>7r&:_ across *£J7ze Crarde/tir.o^Ji
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PLATE 56. PAGE 4 OF MILTON.

(1804.] COLOURED PRINT. 54. x 4 IN.
(In the British Museum)

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fLATE 57 PAGE 36 OF MILTON. (1804.) BLAKE'S COTTAGE AT FELPHAM.
COLOURED PRINT. 54. x 4 IN. Un the British Museum)

PLATE 58. PAGE 38 OF MILTON. (1804.)

COLOURED PRINT. 5| x 44. IN.
(In the British Museum)

VVtir Jx/ictir iAiOte jaVttr

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u. rnzjt.yim.str Ae pctieeA &. SaVcF: &ri£ notv J curt Itx-isfJ*: un/ess"
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PLATE 59 DESIGN ON PAGE 8 OF JERUSALEM. (BEGUN 1804.)
UNCOLOURED. 4 X 6| IN. (In the British Museum)

Every ornament of perfection . nntl every Labour at
n J/( all tJie Qarden.vrRcCe.n-. <Sl en g/l (Ae gclden. nusunpcrznf
it ^ Was- became tin. envied horror, and a remembrance, ot jedUutsy
\f>.Slncl every Act. a. Crun.e . ar,d ULoion. tAie punt-vA er <S^ judge? ^
| (°- A[r,d LA/bl

"Sftf

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. ^.^-^y »-«»»  «-

/rem A.V secret •scat a.

PLATE 60. DESIGN ON PAGE 28 OF JERUSALEM. UNCOLOURED
5 x 6| jN (In the British Museum)

PLATE 61. PAGE 31 OP JERUSALEM. UNCOLOURED. 8f X 6| IN.
(In the British Museum)

^

Ufr,'<A, -fiend*

tl,c

By S.dans
Cf vurd. ^n Alorr*. every r
It c's the. 'Jolt: oA' Los . U/t
. liidAf-iAci. with, cruel (tn tt.

a

s earch

rr.h namberiJtp' tuery Araxn
iJa> i.- neVer AtruA this' Cr'ate. . -•*>

etSide is the A'litl , intrtcaTe . drcodJuL
bpt no jnartxd man. crtn find trie. A^IcLL
¦ >< ' r'i irita.de oj^ -seventy vrars-

r can P^tercy find it . Hut\

^J-nr j-f^nurr. beauty A-Xawv" it no$ . nor can. j~tcrcy /<nd it
In the paurth reptein. of rluunasz./.py .Urtharux. s^trnd ~——^m
Wareatoly ae^'ins to ri>U. the btAlareiS of JEtemaA Deectbi. ^
*';"'';''¦/ che.. Gate erf. A^cs. lArthexnxx. Aere is nan*cd LoS .
•Stjfi "*re bepcna the' ^Ty-Vtam of Moral Vtrttte r.fimecC Ra^iab
rSUO'ca fleet thro ' o'ie 'C'^ie of Los and he stood un the Gate
, , _ - .h.-~;~jj r" ''""¦ ¦ ¦ '"¦ -
is I lit. fricncJ. of -AfUiton who na-sr lai/d hem. In Can: bridges Acre.
rrtaJ, '-faciei . he is che- twenty - eipjilh . &c is hour -fclsJ.
diLbton host teurnxA his 610 A 'ira^nvt tbi' Ot-Viru? Vision.
<-/ to dhibiad. WAither Afeest than J -Albian reply d . ^
/ xfo ft- Kterrud. Dead: ' the shades- of deaj A
me S. heneoJh . and syjre.a.iitjigl thernr^A'tft owCscde

Va rA lAt i

A As.

PCoariiy mjo/urmestc t>/ woe
death '' or he et Atansorn. far me

nt r-ded.

round try clone . and. ort ny

feet dfov

YvdJ. ri'.n.
In that
Pj.-'ini tdiese hlnu A ^.Arers cf death . & on ny hand:;. deaths trcn gloves
try.) 'Jtath Ajrs-rjAne ate. <&_ rny Artcn/is are became a barcLea (
.{ ;-, run ness to nie .& the humew Acctstep cs a terror to trie .
L,OS a/tsyjereA troubled: exrud. /us -TouA was rent ltv twajn .'
''•?•. vr tAie Wise die Aar an ^Arcnen'fnt'' does Merer endure .Sitoncmrnt
/Ac ' Ir cs AJorcd. ^Severity, A. destroys jyfercy m Us Vu.-tini
¦So speubrj-id not vet- tnAectecl *'<AA tJie -Errar A. Al/^jstrm

PLATE 62 PAGE 35 OF JERUSALEM. UNCOLOURED. 8| X 64. IN.
(In the British Museum)

sztrnm

re ri rife wire corn <?. WliMn. a. mans worst ¦ cne/nas'

Sbaib be t/ic'i; a A" Atts csv/i hcuse asuA Aamily : in a. AHe/t i.'icn
¦~jr s~~~  ._*._.- .«_ _y  -i  . L.. o*' — . a is,. re. t _ _ .V r

Of CAenercuUori . to destroy by iSuv
"JJtn Air id*! und. WiAe or* the jOantb .

arid j^tiinetmetnt , hr:p)Sy derusaAem.
O Clod tbto/i art AFot an y'Ucnpej- / .

PLATE 63. DESIGN ON PAGE 41 OF JERUSALEM. UNCOLOURED.
If X 64. IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 65. PAGE 76 OF JERUSALEM.

UNCOLOURED. 8f x 64, IN.
(In the British Museum)

PLATE 66.
THE RIVER OF LIFE." WATER-COLOURS. 16 x 14J IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

^**

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M^

-4.

41

A

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...

V

PLATE 67. " FIRE." WATER-COLOURS. 124, x 16f IN.
(In the possession of IV. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

2: <A

wo,

eA As3^
^£
Pi §
<A

wz s<

w

. . A % i ' ¦
ft *i i i
/< I A
¦ f fr f
/I ¦ ¦ m
¦ \ - !

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A

PLAtE 69. DEDICAtlON to THE QUEiEN, FOR BLAIR'S GRAVE. (\W&.)
PENCIL AND TINT. (NOT ENGRAVED.) 11J x 9| IN.
(In the British Museum)

a Jx

cf

A^; *;*AA.
? ft -A A fc

^ /

A.

-<'#*7> ~ > '?'

* WfJ Av'

•• •'#- AD -
jfc ~ ' • •#"

¦im>

i ''. ft I

I 3

PLATE 70 " SATAN WATCHING THE ENDEARMENTS OF ADAM AND
EVE." (PARADISE LOST.) (1806.) WATER-COLOURS
10f A 7j IN. (In the possession of Mrs. Sydney Morse.)

PLATE 71. " THE FINDING OF MOSES." WATER-COLOURS. 12f x 12£ IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 72.

" THE INFANT JESUS PRAYING." WATER-COLOURS. 12* x 13* IN
(In the possession of Mrs. Sydney Morse)

PLATE 73.

"THE WOMAN TAKEN IN ADULTERY." WATER-COLOURS
14 X 13f IN. (.!" the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass.)

PLATE 74. " THE BURIAL OF MOSES." WATER-COLOURS. 13| X 124. IN
(In the possession of Sydney Morse, Esq.)

1

// ' ' ' -
l// ' ,' '/ f
y/ a

'A

¦if,.

PLATE 75. "THE TEMPTATION." WATER-COLOURS. 16f x 12J IN.
(In the possession of W . Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 76.
' THE ASCENSION." WATER-COLOURS. 16f x 12*. IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 77. " ANGELS HOVERING OVER THE BODY OF JESUS." (1808.)
WATER-COLOURS. 164 x llf IN.
(In the possession of Sydney Morse. Esq.)

PLATE 78. " THE ANGEL ROLLING AWAY THE STONE FROM THE
SEPULCHRE " (1808.) WATER-COLOURS. 16 x llf IN.
(In the possession of Mrs. Sydney Morse.)

PLATE 79. "JACOB'S LADDER." (1808.) WATER-COLOURS. l4g x 114. iN.
(/« the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 80. " THE CREATION OF EVE." (PARADISE LOST.)
WATER-COLOURS. 19| x 15f IN.
(In the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Mass.)

PLATE 81. "QUEEN CATHARINE'S DREAM." WATER-COLOURS. 16 X 13 IN.
(In the possession of Mrs. Sydney Morse.)

PLATE 82. "THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS." (1817.) WATER-COLOURS. 154. X 184. IN.
(In the possession of W. Graham Robertson, Esq.)

PLATE 83. FOUR SUBJECTS FROM A. PHILLIPS' IMITATION OF VIRGIL'S
FIRST ECLOGUE. (1821.) WOODCUTS ; FIRST STATE.
(In the British Museum)

.1 . , -

-- -^U^s^^^gi-r^i;^ izhr —¦-'"•-

j-rr.-- — 

"^^

™ -• — .. "¦'»¦> ... ¦- ¦ ;\i. ;¦ .C...:

Iii3fi
^?jfly
llllllllll
"^^vaS^^S .ViS
PLATE 84. FOUR SUBJECTS FROM A. PHILLIPS' IMITATION OF VIRGIL'S
FIRST ECLOGUE. (1821.) WOODCUTS ; FIRST STATE.
(/« the British Museum)
PLATE 85.
" THE WISE AND FOOLISH VIRGINS." (1822.) WATER-COLOURS
15J X 13 IN.
(In the possession of Miss Carthew)

PLATE 86. " MIRTH." DESIGN FOR MILTON'S L'ALLEGRO. STIPPLE-
ENGRAVING. 6f x 4f IN.
(In the British Museum)

J JjiyOons ic_ (.ky Daughters were eating (fedrinkingWin* mtkeir
eldest Brothers House & bekdd tkere came a great wind front tWWildera

&.Smote upon tke four faces of the house &!t|eJI upon theyoungMen & tkey are

Dea4

°=*sc-

Lcn.hn .PMUItntas t/m/frt ' riirrrts March 8 IMS by I* " SW. 1 /..•/.'

PLATE 87. " THE FIRE OF GOD IS FALLEN FROM HEAVEN." JOB, PL. 3
LINE-ENGRAVING. 84. X 6| IN. (In the British Museum)

be more Pure than. ,, hisfy.

I. .-.,„lr,n. AWA'vW «!l/t, A.l,/,rr,r, "f,„- / ." l&U hi I

plate 88. " Then a spirit passed before My face." job, pL. §,
LINE-ENGRAVING. 84. x 6f IN.
(In the British Museum)

' I / VAA AAv*I^ for his eyes are upon ^A.AVA'^NA \ 9
AAA ¦ * 'T"' J/v

A '"¦ mayvvitWr»"'v !¦<> Af A7~"A'~

PLATE

" I AM YOUNG AND YE ARE VERY OLD." JOB, PL. 12.
LINE-ENGRAVING. 84. x 6| IN.
(/n (he British Museum)

t~.,nr'x,.. yuJ,rsiyax,^yt -int-Uy r7i,.J,.i l«Zjk, WllL.wB'nktA'.l f',,.,,,,,,,,. Quint Su.,,,,1

freed:

PLATE 90. "THE LORD ANSWERING JOB OUT OF THE WHIRLWIND."
JOB, PL. 13. LINE-ENGRAVING. 84. X 6f IN.
(In the British Museum)

PLATE 91 " THE MORNING STARS SINGING TOGETHER." JOB, PL. 14.
LINE-ENGRAVING. 8^ X 6| IN.
(fn (he British Museum)

AH/ZiJ \ ^A r^v ¦ -^

¦rJr/P^ ,

A? T-/A

w-t- j

Vvj'

How precious are niy wiouohts
unto mo O (Jr.ci

V CAAr^AA\\
•JW, AAA i

fefe were mot found Women fair as tlie Daughters of Jot^
iii tke Land fJC tkeir rather gave tkem inker tt
-'"Aa- 1 r> ,L rAL»=^
A6AAC among; tke ir brethren AfO
ttVg" J f [ ascend up mtoHeaven ikm art there A/J\*
JftmatcmyWamHellbehiJJ.TIwii

'%^_

art Uvtre

PLATE 92. " JOB AND HIS DAUGHTERS." /OB, PL. 20. LINE-ENGRAVING.
84. X 6f IN. ^n fhe British Museum)

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A~

I

PLATE 93. STUDY FOR "JOB AND HIS DAUGHTERS." (A DIFFERENT
DESIGN.) PENCIL AND INDIAN-INK. 11 x 84. IN.
(In the British Museum)

After tk'isj ok Wed V
an. hundred. &.iortyveax? ( "^A
<Sc.sb.whis Sons ,-Sc h , s-
„ *^~\ San s -So n 3
yd

tl..„, h.ist harf«o Pleasure

even tour Generations
So Job died . a
1 bemp old /A :A

— L.

& full of days r>;

"Lf,,Um J •uh!,rl.,H ..i l/tr ,4ct etrrax. y.„. .-/,,; /.>;_/>. I K,. .",,„¦ .6 /-..',- /

/} .«¦/

PLATE 94. " SO THE LORD BLESSED THE LATTER END OF JOB."
PL. 21. LINE-ENGRAVING. 84, X 6f IN
jvn. ru *x. ^ tJjg British Museum)

PLATE 95

SATAN SMITING JOB." TEMPERA. 12| x 161 IN
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

PLATE 96. "THE TEMPTER." (PARADISE REGAINED.) NO. 7. WATER-
COLOURS. 64. X 54, IN. (In the possession of T. H. Riches. Esq.)

PLATE 97. "THE TEMPTER FOILED." (PARADISE REGAINED.) NO. 10.
WATER-COLOURS. 6*. X 5* IN.
(Jn the possession of T. H. Riches, Esq.)

PLATE

" F^STaVTx^i'n DAN™- ™«™- CANTO. V. LINE-ENGRAVING,
»i x u8 m. (/„ the possession of Mrs_ Sydngy Morse^

r.

h-S
z-~.< o
OS '3
O 2
it 3
w „

XI
oH
Z <
ud
a; a*
(*«
•-<wH
Z<Q

wi/i z
< mm
H -*«

H<
a,

PLATE 100.
" LUCIA CARRYING DANTE IN HIS SLEEP." DANTE. PURGATORIO
CANTO IX. WATER-COLOURS. 144. x 20*. IN.
(In the possession of Charles Ricketts, Esq., A.R.A., and Charles Shannon, Esq., R.A.)

*A A*

i \

."•?¦-:»»¦

.«»,',«.¦¦ -'"A1', ,-s '¦«*;;?«-

*f!%mgz

PLATE 101 " THE ANGEL IN THE BOAT." DANTE, PURGATORIO.
PLATE 101. ^ANTO II. PENCIL AND SLIGHT COLOUR-WASH.
201 x 141 IN. (In the British Museum)

PLATE 102. "THE ASCENT OF THE MOUNTAIN." DANTE, PURGATORIO.
CANTO IV. WATER-COLOURS. 20| x 144 IN.
(In the National Gallery of British Art)

PLATE 103.
THE EARTHLY PARADISE: BEATRICE IN THE CAR." DANTE
PURGATORIO. CANTO XXIX. WATER-COLOURS. 14| x 20*. IN.
(In the British Museum)

U,V/

%{A^<,. mm Ar f*
7,1 , C
. «&*;

JlJa

s*

m

A^AAA

v

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i

m. i • n

-< j ¦
1 1 '

.AA ; a

A^j^fA

PLATE 104. PORTRAIT OF MRS. BLAKE. LEAD PENCIL 10 X 8 IN-
(In the possession of Miss Cartnew)