How William Blake s Gothic World Challenged Classic Art Great Artists

In the late 18th century, Britain was in the grip of Romanticism as it swept away all the rules established by Classicism. The spirit of Romanticism called for artists to identify and follow their own creative vision, regardless of circumstances. One of the first English artists to live according to these beliefs, experiencing visions which would inspire his greatest work and suffering terrible poverty in the process, is today considered to be one of the most original of all the English masters, William Blake. Those who choose to engage with the work of Blake find that his extraordinary explorations into ways of using his medium in different ways, very rewarding. They also find his extraordinary visionary qualities equally fascinating. There is Blake the poet, who is probably the best-known person, there is Blake the thinker, the person of original new ideas, and then there's Blake the painter. Now, in a way, of course, it does a great injustice to Blake to separate these characters out because he is a unity and I think it's understanding him as a unity that makes one understand why he is so special, why he has a particular contribution. Progressively, actually, Blake's ideas have become more and more accepted. Blake was very much of a non-conformist. He's never been an artist at the absolute forefront of British art, but he's always been somebody who's been well recognised. Blake was born in the Soho district on 28th November 1757. His parents chose not to send him to school and from an early age he began to experience visions. As a boy, he saw angels in a tree on London's Peckham Rye. Blake's father dismissed his visions, but he did not fail to recognise his son's unusual intelligence and talent for drawing. So when Blake was ten years old, he was sent to drawing school. Blake worked hard at drawing school and by the age of 15 he began his adult training. His parents could not afford to pay for him to attend a fine arts school, so he was apprenticed to James Bazire, a successful London engraver. The technique of copper engraving involves an elongated approach to line. This kind of continuous line had characterised Gothic art during the Middle Ages. Blake was required by the printmaker Bazire to make some drawings to be used as a basis for engravings from the tomb sculpture in Westminster Abbey and I think it was the elongated line, the elongation of form and the sinuous flowing curves of drapery which particularly attracted Blake. This is thought to be his oldest surviving work, a Gothic-inspired drawing of an ancient English king copied from a wall inside the abbey. These great cathedrals were built by craftsmen who dedicated their entire lives to slowly and painstakingly producing these things and those ideas I think were very important to Blake, this idea of a craftsmanship notion where one was dedicated to a religious idea. He once said, Grecian art is mathematic form, Gothic art is living form. Gothic represented everything that was about life and flow and vitality. He saw it as a spiritual art, he thought of it in terms of the religious beliefs of the Middle Ages and he also saw its form as expressing that spirituality. First of all the tallness of the Gothic buildings, the idea that they're soaring to heaven. And then the sinuous lines that you find in Gothic architecture and sculptures, the wonderful moving flowing lines and the flowing line in Blake is I think always one of his most beautiful characteristics. The flowing line can be seen very well in a later watercolour where the angels are guarding Christ in the sepulchre and the two framing angels, their wings curve upwards forming very much that kind of flowing and yet also pointed Gothic arch. At the time, Gothic art was far from fashionable and the art establishment considered classical art to be the most superior of all art forms. The president of the Royal Academy, Joshua Reynolds, argued that careful study of classical and Renaissance masterpieces was the only way an artist could hope to succeed. Visionary genius had no place in Reynolds' scheme of things. Nonetheless, in 1779, William Blake began to study at the Academy after completing his engraver's apprenticeship. It was a tortuous experience. Blake and Reynolds did share a mutual passion for Michelangelo. Blake was an avid collector of Renaissance prints but despite this, he felt that Reynolds' strictly academic approach took respect for the old masters too far. He found endless copying to be a stultifying experience. For Blake the maverick, great art grew out of the artist's personal vision. As he once said, talent thinks, genius sees. The Royal Academy was a place of rules and regulations, of conformity, of long training by copying from old masters, copying drawings, copying from casts of sculpture. And I think that for anyone as original, shall we say, as Blake, this must have been quite a suffocating atmosphere. He certainly disliked very much the way in which Joshua Reynolds handed down wisdom from on high and his rather rude notes in the margins of the printed discourses of Joshua Reynolds reveal a lot about just how angry Reynolds made him feel. Blake essentially was a mystic and he was an anti-rationalist. He was a bit of a revolutionary in a certain sense. One can see from the notes of certain people that the diary of Lady Charlotte Berry, in fact, records a dinner that she was at. It was this strange, eccentric little artist by the name of Blake who was there. He seemed to be a funny little figure but he had wonderful ideas. He had this wonderful sense of spirituality and a beautiful sense of the imagination and a genius for things, which was completely unique. He was happy within his own spirit and was really not interested in becoming a part of the art community as such. Blake attempted classical history painting during his years at the Royal Academy, as in this watercolour, showing Joseph and his brethren. But the composition of his figures was criticised and the painting was not well received. Blake was influenced by classical art. Certainly he copied Grecian forms and one can see those classic forms in his work but it's as though he transforms them and this, I think, is very characteristic of Blake. He borrows from all over but he transforms them in a special way and he tried to, so to speak, infuse them with a kind of linearity of his own that, from his point of view, expressed the spirituality he wanted to convey. As the 1780s passed, Blake realised that he was unlikely to receive any of the rare commissions for history paintings. This was not his only problem. He failed to set up as an engraver in his own right and his work in this medium would always be as a hired hand. But Blake's talents extended beyond visual art. He was also a poet and, in 1783, his first volume of lyrical verse was warmly received, in literary circles, where he became something of a fringe figure. His poetry is far better known, perhaps, than his paintings. Poems like Jerusalem and Tiger, Tiger are very much a part of Britain's poetical literary traditions but it's only now that his paintings and his prints and all of his other work is beginning to get a wider audience. His personal life took a positive turn when he married Catherine Boucher and they moved into a new London home with William's brother, Robert. His happiness turned to grief in 1787 when Robert died, aged 20. After years of obscurity, Blake's art took a revolutionary turn. He decided to combine painting, engraving and verse in books, which he and his wife would produce and distribute himself. These illuminated books were a radical idea and they presented Blake with technical difficulties. Then a remarkable thing happened. His dead brother, Robert, appeared to Blake in a dream, revealing the method he should use to create his first masterpieces, the technique of relief etching. Blake invented a technique of his own in order to produce his illuminated books and this was partly from necessity. He didn't have large printing equipment and all the kind of expensive material that professional printers would have at that time, so he had to have a system where he could print it in his own small press. He created the plate in the ordinary fashion by covering it with an acid-resistant ground and then drawing into it. But then once he'd bitten the plate, he treated the remainder of the process as a relief printing process so that instead of inking the areas of the grooves and wiping the ink off the top surface of the plate, he inked the top surface and left the grooves uninked blank. In the relief etching process, any colour could be used for the print, but Blake and his wife, Catherine, then laboriously would watercolour various areas and would also use pen and ink to strengthen lines. In 1789, Blake used the relief etching technique to produce the first of his illuminated books. The Songs of Innocence is a collection of lyric verse combined with printed images. This was not illustrated poetry, but neither was it visual art with a textual accompaniment. It was art like nothing ever seen before. He probably was first inspired to the idea of having illustrations surrounding his text by medieval manuscripts, which he would have seen in the sale rooms and other places, though it has been pointed out there were many other places where you get image and text brought together, such as in the frontispieces of 17th-century Baroque books, for example. But once he'd started doing this, one feels that he can see that by putting an image round a poem, he actually turns the poem into a visual form itself, and so he then, in a sense, uses the design to reinforce rhythms and ideas and thoughts in the poem. The Songs of Innocence opens with a shepherd experiencing a vision of an angel, as we see on the title page. In his joy, he praises the works of God on earth in a succession of poems. Infant Joy is an example of the optimism of Blake's verse and of the unique illuminated technique that he adopted. He makes the form of his writing suit his subject and he makes the form of his image suit the subject, so both are interrelated. You can't really separate them out. In Sick Rose, the framing device is of a thorny stem of the rose, but the rose itself droops down at the bottom of the plate and there you see the so-called sick love of the worm which has caused its disease. Blake's radicalism did not stop there. In 1793, he released Songs of Experience, a similarly produced volume intended to accompany the Songs of Innocence. Blake's intention was to convey the concept of coexisting opposites as part of a complex philosophical belief system. Therefore, the infant joy of innocence is balanced with the infant sorrow of experience and the lamb is now abandoned in favour of the tiger, resulting in one of the most famous stanzas in the whole of Blake's poetic career. Tiger, tiger, burning bright In the forest of the night What immortal hand or eye Could frame thy fearful symmetry? Experience in one way has triumphed over innocence so that the parallels that there are, like the lamb and the tiger, essentially the tiger is always going to be victorious. I feel he almost has more admiration for the fearful symmetry of the tiger, tiger, burning bright than he has for the little lamb gambling around in its pastures. When he put the Songs of Innocence and Experience together, he was wanting to demonstrate what he calls the contrary states. Blake begins the early part of his career with a relatively optimistic view of mankind, and the Songs of Innocence reflect that. It's the idea that we are all divine creations and you can see the divine in the universe. The Songs of Experience ask a rather different question. Why, if the world has been created by God, is there so much cruelty? On the one hand, there's elation, on the other hand, there's despair. This fits in with his philosophy, the history of the fall of the world. When God created the universe, so to speak, it wasn't, in his eyes, an ecstatic idea, such as one finds in the Bible. It is more that God is this severe creature who has separated the spiritual and material into two contrary states. The verses contained in the two books of Songs include some of Blake's best-known lines, and the poetry is more accessible compared to some of his later work. America is one of a number of publications that Blake referred to as his prophetic books. On one level, its subject matter was the American Revolution, an event which triggered revolutionary action in France. Blake initially supported the French Revolution, but he became disillusioned when it degenerated into the Reign of Terror. Blake, politically, was a radical. He had associations with a number of groups of fairly radical, not to say revolutionary, views about, for instance, the state of politics in France in the late 1780s and 1790s, a time of the Revolution and the Terror. But certainly he did not go out of his way to make himself conspicuous. This was not his way. The use of his private mythology allowed him to clothe his radical political views so that they were perhaps not recognised for what they truly were. Blake himself was actually very critical of the established order. He had this view where he was very much opposed to this modern mechanised world. This notion of industrialisation was an area that he was very much opposed to. And in fact that's part of the reason why very gradually, towards the latter half of the 20th century, his ideas are beginning to be taken up much more and his work is much more appreciated. Blake was fascinated by the power of myth and he tried to convey his ideas in mythological terms. The freedom of man was one such concept. Early in America, Blake's verse urges the slave to cast off his chains and proclaim his liberty. This was a popular theme of the time in the tradition of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the academy schools, Blake received conventional training of studying from antique sculpture, very often sculptures of the figures of the gods and goddesses of classical literature. But I think he resented in some way this hold which the classical past had on the minds of England, of the minds of the elite, of patrons and of the hierarchy of artists in particular. And I think that he wanted to find a different way of expressing his own imagination rather than summoning up Mars and Venus and so on. We have to remember that when Blake was developing his world of mythological figures, it was a period of the French Revolution and following the French Revolution in England, there was a tremendous political reaction. The country went very conservative. There was a lot of suspicion of any individuality, eccentricity, criticism of the government and so on and so forth. By clothing all his criticism in these mythological figures, it meant that people couldn't really work out what he was talking about, so he was safe from prosecution, where a lot of people were prosecuted for sedition at that time. A more profound reason is his fascination with the whole concept of myth, the belief that the ancient myths, shall we say, combined a form of experience that rational thought can't grasp. And it's almost as though when you act these things out as mythological forms, you're getting to a deeper level of truth. He was able to use his own personal mythology to engage with some of the moral issues of his own time, like the very different perceptions of what was acceptable in the behaviour of men and the behaviour of women. And he explores that through the figure of Ulthuan, who was one of his imagined characters. If one was to characterise him as a philosopher, then you might perhaps call him a mystical realist, in that he believed that the reality of the world was not actually on the upper surface, the surface that we see, but it was this underlying visionary world that underlayed surface appearance, and that an artist's job was actually to break through this upper surface, this upper reality, to the real world that lay underneath. Blake's prophetic books are filled with mythological characters of his own creation. A recurring example is Loss, symbol of the imagination. So is Jerusalem, the conceptual embodiment of liberty. This is The Ancient of Days, the front piece to Blake's prophetic book Europe. It is widely known as one of the most striking depictions of God in art history. Except that it is not God at all. It is Urizen, the negative aspect of God, who stifles the individual by imposing rules and measurement, as the pair of dividers show. The figure of Urizen leans out from a bowl of heaven which has allowed him for a moment to come out with his dividers. Urizen, in Blake's mythology, was not a benign god, but what we might call a control freak. And those sharp angles very much reveal the way in which he is measuring and dividing the dark earth below. The lines and angles are, in a sense, complemented by the extraordinary way in which Blake suggests a kind of wind of heaven which blows his beard and his hair out to the side, almost as though they were being tugged by a divine force. By the time Europe appeared in 1794, William Blake and his wife were living happily in the South London district of Lambeth. But they were not wealthy, and the prophetic books did little to improve their financial situation. Perhaps Blake realized that their message was too obscure for the market, for in 1795 he stopped producing them. Instead, that year, he produced a series of biblical and historical scenes without any textual accompaniment. Blake's production technique for these Lambeth prints was also very different. He adopted the simplest method of printmaking, which is a method known as monotype or monoprint. What Blake did was he took a smooth surface, he in fact used millboard, and he would then ink up the surface in the designs and patterns that he wanted. And he would then just literally put a sheet of paper on top of it and rub it so that he literally, it was just a surface print. And as you can see from that, if the ink was still sticky, you could take two or three. Because Blake was so meticulous, he then used his ink technique and he used other forms of painting to make those prints a kind of combination of a reproductive process, that is the print, and the individual artistic production, the hand of the artist himself. Blake's Lambeth prints are amongst the most accessible of all his works. But his agenda is still evident. This is a print entitled Newton, after the man who symbolized the rationality of the Enlightenment. But Blake was as concerned with existence being rationalized by a scientist as he was with its being rationalized by the deity Urizen. Newton is immersed in his geometry, but this is to the exclusion of all other facets of existence. His rationality is ultimately irrational, and therefore a form of madness. Insanity can also be seen in this Lambeth print, depicting the biblical king Nebuchadnezzar. Some of Blake's contemporaries thought that he was mad, and an image like this did little to sway their opinion. Blake captures the torment of the diseased mind, a subject that few artists had tackled before. Nebuchadnezzar is the king of Babylon, destroyed by his own greed, love of luxury, and baser instincts. He is shown in the posture of a beast on all fours, and this pose was probably taken by Blake from a print by Durer, the great German Renaissance artist and printmaker. And its linear qualities also would have appealed to Blake. He was probably first of all influenced by a fellow artist, somebody who died a few years before, but who in some senses was a precursor for him in the depiction of spiritual and sublime subjects. This was John Hamilton Mortimer, who had done an etching of Nebuchadnezzar when Blake was a young man. And probably what he was looking at in terms of forms was first of all his hero Michelangelo. Although it doesn't come exactly from a Michelangelo figure, it is a little bit like the large muscular figures on the Sistine Ceiling. And then perhaps again he might have been looking at some other sources, in particular Assyrian reliefs, which he quoted from directly in one of the other lamp of prints. In the decades that followed, madness became subject matter for artists of the calibre of Goya and Géricault. These are now regarded as giants of the Romantic age. For many critics, the work and the life of William Blake qualify him for the same artistic status. Romanticism as a movement, one has to understand, was not a movement with particular forms in the way that Classicism has. There's only really a Romanticist attitude to things. Blake completely exemplifies this Romanticist attitude to the world. It puts a primus in creation of things, into one's own feelings and one's own responses to the world and to nature and to religion and so on. Probably the most important point from this point of view is his interest in inspiration. The idea that the artist is to be valued most of all for the artist's creativity, for their inspiration. This is contrary to what we might call the pre-Romantic view of an artist where technical expertise, we say, is valued most highly. As the 19th century loomed, Blake was poor and little known in London. He had some patrons, including the civil servant Thomas Batts and John Flaxman, a sculptor who commissioned Blake to produce a large series of watercolours illustrating the popular poems of Thomas Gray. Amongst them is The Long Story, one of Blake's more endearing images. But more typical is this title illustration for the eighth of nine poems entitled Night Thoughts, written by Edward Young. The commission came from the publisher Richard Edwards and this image depicts the Whore of Babylon and the Seven-Headed Beast as described in the Book of Revelation. This is just one of 517 images produced for the Night Thoughts commission. But it did not earn Blake much money. Blake was virtually invisible as far as contemporary critics were concerned or contemporary artists were concerned. I don't think Blake was particularly concerned about that. Certainly with regard to the Royal Academy, I think virtually none of the members of the Academy really knew him very well and it was only towards the latter end of his life that artists like Linnell and Varley and Fuseli, who was a member of the Academy, become a circle that began to appreciate his work. By 1800, William Blake was struggling on half a guinea a week. So when the poet William Haley offered him some commissions, he took it, even though it meant moving to his patron's country residence. Blake left London for the only time in his life. Blake loved the rural environment and he continued to have his visions. On one occasion, he baffled a local woman by describing the funeral of a fairy which he had experienced. I think that Blake's visions were very real to him and I think that even in childhood, those visions linked him in some way to the life of the spirit and this spiritual side of Blake is extremely important. Modern psychologists and psychiatrists would see childhood visions as being not wholly uncommon, but they tend to disappear later in life. It's possible that Blake somehow found a way of hanging on to that ability, that strange ability to visualise things outside real, tangible experience. There is a particular quality which is known by psychologists as eidetic vision, which some people do possess, where they do somehow manage to externalise their inner vision. It happens quite a lot with children, less in adulthood, and it may be that Blake did actually possess this particular power, but whether he did or didn't, he believed in the reality of the imagination and in a sense, what you had created in your imagination had a reality of some sort, even if it couldn't be seen to exist in the material world. Blake's visions occurred throughout his life and on occasions, they directly influenced his working techniques. He began to use a painting technique in which his pigment was mixed with carpenter's glue. According to Blake, this was also revealed to him by Jesus' father, Joseph. Blake used the carpenter's glue medium for some of his finest images, as in this late work, The Body of Abel Found by Adam and Eve. Blake used carpenter's glue as a binding medium for his pigment and in doing this, he felt that he was following not only the visionary inspiration of St Joseph, but also the precedent of Renaissance artists in the way that they also mixed their paints. Though not often with glue, much more often the pigment in the Renaissance time was bound in egg yolk to produce tempera, and in fact, it's tempera, this is the name which Blake himself gave to this particular very difficult and sticky medium. Blake began to run into difficulties. Haley was unable to provide him with sufficiently stimulating work and an incident with a drunken soldier led to Blake being accused of assault. When the soldier also accused Blake of slandering the king, sedition was added to the charge sheet, leaving Blake facing the death penalty. Thanks to Haley's intervention, Blake was acquitted of all charges. But the whole affair was a terrible trauma both for Blake and his wife. He was fed up with life in Sussex. So in 1803, he returned to London, moving to South Moulton Street off present-day Oxford Street. Back in London, Blake worked on his final illuminated epic, Jerusalem or The Emendation of the Giant Albion. As with much of Blake's illuminated work, we must make great efforts to understand his visionary mythology. Blake seems to create these two camps of the absolute enthusiast on the one hand and the people who just say, well, he's complete rubbish. He was an extraordinary character, he was a fantasist, he made extraordinary claims, and we can't really believe them all literally. And yet, on the other hand, his basic idea, which was the importance of the imagination, I think there's a message for all of us in that. And I think if one can see Blake from that point of view, somebody who's stressing the power of the imagination, the significance of it in our lives, the need for us to, so to speak, invent ourselves all the time, to go beyond the simple material, then I think he's got a message for everyone. In Blake's lifetime, his work divided opinion amongst those who experienced it. Negative reaction was widespread. When Blake exhibited his work in 1809, a reviewer described it as a farrago of nonsense. Even contemporary works, such as the spiritual form of Nelson guiding Leviathan, proved unpopular. Only Blake's loyal patron, Thomas Batts, was prepared to buy the temporary image of Chaucer's Canterbury Pilgrims, though the price paid was a mere £10. Being a junior civil servant, £10 was all Batts could afford. Yet his support for Blake was remarkable. Over the 17 years that Blake spent at South Moulton Street, there were times when Batts was virtually the artist's only patron. Batts was keen to buy Blake's work when he decided to work in another different artistic medium. An image such as Jacob's Dream is a fine example, with its deeply spiritual lighting and remarkable swirling ladder disappearing into the heart of the sun itself. Similar effects are combined in another Biblical image of the time, God blessing the seventh day. Here, the unity of God and angels suggests a schism between the realms of the divine and the human. Yet the astonishing sense of light makes this an image of hope and salvation for all. This is one of Blake's finest images, executed in what was then the still little-used medium of watercolour. Watercolour was a medium that he could bring alive ideas very quickly onto the page, and he could experiment with it, and he could work out ideas and bring them to fruition very quickly. For Blake, turning to watercolour gave him a kind of access to a brighter and richer palette, particularly in his later work like Jacob's Dream or in some of the Divine Comedy, where there is a new sort of richness and intensity to his colour. Blake is a marvellous watercolourist himself, a very innovative one. For example, in the late works, the Dante illustrations, he develops a very particular technique of using short brushstrokes that give a wonderful kind of shimmer. It's almost prefiguring Impressionism in some ways. He himself would have liked to have been ultimately a fresco painter. He would have liked to paint, like Michelangelo, huge murals, and he said, for example, in the catalogue of his one-man show, which he had in 1809, he said that these are designs which I would like to have as great big murals. So probably he was seeing watercolour still as a designing technique, one might say, in a way, which ideally he would like to lead on to something larger. During the early 1800s, watercolours comprised the bulk of Blake's work, most of which was bought by Thomas Batts. It was a frustrating decade for Blake, but in 1819 he was introduced to fellow artist John Linnell. It was a fortuitous encounter. Linnell was fascinated by Blake's work and his unusual spiritual nature. In 1821, Blake and his wife made their final move to Fountain Row, and his final years would be the best of his life. He was surrounded by younger admirers, and his response was to produce some of the finest visual art of his career. This 1819 panel was commissioned by one of his new friends, John Varley. The inspiration for this panel was real. Blake claimed the creature visited him twice, and this is just one of a whole series of visionary images created for Varley. Blake's painting The Ghost of a Flea is a work that I always think is very much on the edge between the sublime and the humorous. The image itself, of course, has curtains, almost as though he's on a stage. It's almost like Mr Magician or something like that. And the idea of the flea having a human body, now in a way you can say that fits in with Blake's mythology because he's constantly seeing human form as being a way of expressing the spirit of animals, of plants, and all sorts of things. Blake's painting The Ghost of a Flea is a very tiny little painting. This strange creature seems to inhabit this very dark, rather rich, humid, dense atmosphere, presumably where fleas do inhabit. And it's surrounded by tiny little gold stars, and I think that that's part of what Blake's art was really about. It was creating completely new ideas and new images of things, or new ways of seeing things, very often on a very tiny scale, so that one has to look very closely to see all the nuances of what's going on in the image. Linnell was behind Blake's final two great projects, the first of which was a set of engravings from watercolour designs illustrating the Book of Job. This was probably quite an attractive subject to Blake himself, because although Job is a figure from the Old Testament, it seemed to have some of the characteristics of his own private mythologies. In a sense, it perhaps also had a kind of analogy with the trials and tribulations of his own life, although he wasn't smitten with sore boils. He maybe suffered from mental boils in the form of neglect and frustration, and really doggedly hard work in order to stay alive. This is the most striking of the 22 designs made by Blake for his 1820s Job engravings. It is the work of an artist well into his 60s, but at the peak of his powers. This is the moment when Satan plagues Job with boils. Blake intended his audience to see this image as one stage of a spiritual journey, just as the artist's own spiritual journey was nearing its end. Blake wasn't simply illustrating the Book of Job, he was adding a dimension of his own and suggesting that although he wasn't contradicting the main story, which is about the man who persists in his faith and is then rewarded, he's also showing that the story of Job has, in his eyes, a kind of learning experience behind it. Blake is suggesting there that you shouldn't just obey the letter of the law in religious matters, you have to enter into the spiritual meaning behind it, and this involves your whole body, your whole thought, your whole experience, your whole feeling, which is what is happening when he and his family are celebrating with their musical instruments in the last print. There was one final collection of masterpieces to come. Through the efforts of Linnell, Blake received a commission to illustrate what may be the greatest achievement of medieval literature, Dante's Divine Comedy. It was an ambitious project, and Blake was to die long before he could complete the commission. But what he did achieve was remarkable. Blake was able to take his technique of painting, and he produced a series of seven watercolours, that allowed him to completely expand his own painting technique and his way of producing images that showed him really at the height of his powers at the end of his life. He had some reservations about Dante's own personal theology, but it specifically created a much brighter, almost pellucid sort of images, and all of this came to fruition in images like the Divine Comedy. This is a depiction of the Divine Comedy passage, where Beatrice addresses Dante. The eyes may signify the seven eyes of God, or Blake may have intended to convey his own visionary mythology. Whatever the interpretation, he was happy to alter Dante's message to suit his own spiritual concerns. I think that this way of playing around with Dante, whom many would have regarded as being absolutely invincible, he was so great, his greatness was really unassailable, shows that Blake was willing to pursue originality. Even in the later years of his life, he was willing to go on a spiritual journey of his own and arrive at a very different conclusion from Dante, who he felt, in some ways, was too controlling, too rigid in his ideas. Another good example of this is in The Circle of the Lustful, a more swirling composition depicting two adulterous lovers described in the Divine Comedy. Whereas Dante had described them as being eternally trapped in a fiendish wheel as punishment for their sin, Blake retains the wheel motif, but transforms it into a liberating spiral, leading the two lovers upwards to their freedom. Images like this have prompted Blake's sense of lighting to be compared with that of Rembrandt. He has developed visually as an artist when he's producing these works. You find some of the most wonderful rhythmic designs in his representation of Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers who, although they committed adultery under what you might call extenuating circumstances, nevertheless have to be punished in eternity because that's what the rulebook says. As Dante himself says, like Starling's in Autumn, a very evocative image of the idea of unbridled passion being buffeted to and fro by the winds. But for Blake, this passion that they have expressed is actually a force. So his design makes this into a dynamic spiral leading upwards as though it is something positive rather than negative. This watercolour is amongst the strongest of the Divine Comedy images. Anateus setting down Dante and Virgil in the circle of hell. A late work in watercolour that brings together many aspects of Blake's artistic identity. The musculature and long Gothic line are once again in evidence. The colouring is subtle and effective. The great curve of the giant Anateus is offset by the upward sweep of the cloud, similar in style to the illuminated books. And there is the overall sense of this being the work of a visionary, an image intended to communicate its creator's own spiritual agenda. Perhaps this is the ultimate achievement of William Blake. He was very much an eccentric, one of those English outsiders. One could say that he was very much the most original artist that England has ever produced. The neglect that Blake suffered in his own lifetime has largely been redressed by the attention which his works receive today. But I think that his achievement was in holding on to his visions, his visions in the general sense of what art should all be about, his own personal and artistic integrity. One might say that his contribution to English art, as opposed to culture in general or to literature or to thought, is in fact to bring this imaginative dimension into art and show it to be something that was important. In a way we can say that he has many successors who have followed on that concept of the imaginative being important in art. On the 12th of August, 1827, William Blake died at his home in London at 69 years of age. It is said that he died singing, surrounded by visions of angels, an entirely fitting end for the life of a true visionary. Few, if any, artists have matched Blake's individuality and artistic integrity. More than any other artist, William Blake had to find his own way to secure his deserved status as an English master.