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The Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
William Blake, born the son of a London hosier in 1757, was reared amid nightcaps and stockings, garters and gloves. He could almost have been some star child or changeling, suggests Peter Ackroyd, his most vivid biographer, for right from the beginning he found himself living in a world that was inhabited also by heavenly hosts. He saw seraphim roosting in the trees of Peckham and angels wandering amid the haymakers as they mowed the summer grass. As a boy, his mother had once beaten him for saying that he had just seen the prophet Ezekiel, but it would have taken far more than a mere thrashing to convince him that he was wrong. ‘When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea? . . . Oh no no I see an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ Blake declared.1 His soaring imagination slipped free from all earthly restraints, his childhood perceptions of alternative realities unfurling and elaborating over the course of his life into the vast, fantastically complicated and almost incomprehensible mythic system of his books.
‘Blake be an artist & nothing else. In this there is felicity.’2 A divine messenger had instructed the boy as to what path he should take and so, at the age of ten, having proved hopeless behind the shop counter, Blake was sent off to Henry Par’s Drawing School in the Strand, a respected institution which offered the sort of academic training which Palmer was always to wish that he had also had. Blake had long nurtured an interest in art. His indulgent father had got into the habit of buying him prints that, considered dull or unfashionable at that time, could be picked up for mere pennies. These laid the foundations of what was to grow into a valuable collection, the piecemeal sale of which would help to stave off penury in later life. But Blake was also a talented draughtsman and, at the age of fourteen, having completed his first training, he was indentured to the engraver James Basire.
Basire was his second choice. Blake had originally been destined to work with William Ryland but, on meeting him, had refused. ‘Father,’ he had said, on leaving the studio, ‘I do not like the man’s face: it looks as if he will live to be hanged.’3 His premonition had turned out to be true. Ten years later, charged with the forgery of notes, Ryland would swing from the gallows at Tyburn. Basire, however, was to prove a kind and thorough master. Old-fashioned and peaceable, he instilled in his often-impetuous pupil the virtues of precision and patience. He taught him a carefulness to temper his arrogance. He was embarking on a time-honoured profession, he told him, for the art of engraving went back to the Hebrews and their Chaldean forbears and beyond them, via Zoroaster, maybe even to God who had engraved the tablets of stone which Moses had brought down from the mountain.4 The hopeful young apprentice could hardly have guessed what a long, arduous, backbreaking, sight-blurring, spirit-battering future his craft held in store for him.
In 1779, Blake enrolled for six years as a student of engraving at the Royal Academy. He was an assiduous learner, though he loathed the life room. What good was the slavish copying from nature, he wondered. Life drawing smelt of mortality. Modern man stripped of his clothing was but a corpse. He was equally revolted by what he saw as the bland urbanity and faux humility of the, by then, grand old man of the Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds. He detested his ponderous lectures on the virtues of ‘general beauty’ and the pursuit of ‘general truth’. ‘General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess,’5 Blake raged, scoring the margins of Reynolds’s Discourses with furious annotations. ‘Damn the Fool’. ‘This Man was Hired to Depress Art’ he inked in black letters on the title page.
Blake refused to follow Reynolds’s classically influenced course, far preferring the art of what he saw as a profoundly spiritual age: the monuments of Gothic antiquity and the effigies of the medieval church. He was not alone in his tastes. A small community of fellow artists shared his predilection for the Middle Ages, among them Thomas Stothard who, when he had first met Blake, had been working on a set of illustrations to the Poems of Ossian. This Gaelic epic, purporting to record the songs of the blind bard Ossian about the battles of Fingal the warrior, had caused a literary sensation when it was published by James Macpherson in 1773, though subsequently it was condemned as fake. Stothard and Blake became artistic allies but, where the former went on to become an art world grandee, the latter never rose to be more than a jobbing engraver: a craftsman with undoubted skills but some decidedly unconventional views. Blake’s choice of a bride did not help. In the aftermath of a failed courtship, he had met a sympathetic but probably illiterate gardener’s daughter, Catherine. ‘Do you pity me?’ he asked her. ‘Yes indeed I do,’ she said. ‘Then I love you,’6 he replied and shortly afterwards they married. She signed the register with a cross. It was not a liaison that would bring access to society or membership of an Academy which valued social status. Nor did Blake show the sort of financial acumen that a rising artist needed. Detesting ‘the merchant’s thin/ Sinewy deception’,7 he refused to engage in a scrabble for wealth and, though Catherine learnt increasingly to help him, he was always to find it difficult to make ends meet.
The fundamental cause of his worldly problems, however, was the fact that he was considered quite mad. Blake was living in the ‘Age of Reason’. René Descartes had set the agenda in the seventeenth century with his mechanistic model of the universe and, ever since, mathematics had been taken as the template of knowledge and science had put nature to stern empirical test. Blake openly professed his loathing for this logical world. He detested Newton with all his ‘wheels and orbits . . . particles, points and lines’.8 These wheels were to him the cruel ‘cogs tyrannic’ which ground up human freedom, destroying ‘harmony and peace’.9 He hated the empiricism of Francis Bacon and John Locke. It blotted out the light of divinity, he thought. Instead, Blake believed in his visions. A chat in his Lambeth study with the Archangel Gabriel or an impromptu visit from the ghost of a flea – ‘his eager tongue whisking out of his mouth, a cup in his hands to hold the blood and covered with a scaly skin of gold and green’10 – were to him far more real than any scientific abstract. ‘I do not believe the world is round. I believe it quite flat,’ he declared. He had it on good authority: ‘I have conversed with the Spiritual Son,’ he explained: ‘I saw him on Primrose Hill.’11
When discreet inquiries were made as to Blake’s eligibility to become an Academician, such fixations were to prove far from helpful. Even Fuseli, a fellow eccentric and, as Blake described him: ‘The only man that e’er I knew/ Who did not almost make me spew’,12 thought that his friend had ‘something of madness about him’.13 Blake was never to be elected to the Academy. And yet there was clearly something compelling about this small man with his impassioned points of view. ‘Another eccentric little artist’, recorded Lady Charlotte Bury in her diary after meeting him at a dinner in 1818. But if on first encounter she had assumed him merely to be an amusing curiosity, she soon found her mind changing. ‘He looks care worn and subdued; but his countenance radiated as he spoke,’ she wrote and, though his views were peculiar, they were ‘exalted above the common level of received opinion’. He was ‘full of beautiful imaginations and genius. Every word he uttered spoke the perfect simplicity of his mind and his total ignorance of all worldly matters.’14
Blake’s closest friends certainly recognised his incorruptible talent. Flaxman and Fuseli believed that the time would come when his art would be as esteemed as highly as Michelangelo’s; furthermore, he was ‘damned good to steal from’,15 Fuseli said. He and Stothard both collaborated with Blake. Flaxman, too, remained a supporter and together with George Cumberland, an amateur artist and connoisseur of early Italian prints who, like Blake, believed in ‘the inestimable value of the chaste outline’,16 would introduce him to clients. But Blake was uncompromising. His fantasies were too powerful for the tastes of the period. Stothard blamed Fuseli. He had ‘misled’ Blake ‘to extravagance’17 he said, though, in fact, even this most melodramatic of artists had urged Blake to tone down his more unruly outpourings.
For some twenty years, the visionary genius relied almost entirely for his living upon the patronage of a government servant, Captain Thomas Butts, who, having accrued a modest fortune as the chief clerk in the office of the muster master general, became a steady buyer. Purchasing works at a rate of up to a drawing a week, he gradually transformed his Fitzroy Square house into a private gallery of miracles. For many years, Palmer was later to claim, Butts was the only man who stood ‘between the greatest designer in England and the workhouse’.18
‘He who has few Things to desire cannot have many to fear,’19 Blake declared. He did not crave luxuries. He could have made his life easier by being a little more malleable, but he treasured his freedom far more highly than any hoard of worldly goods. ‘I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of body & mind to exercise the Divine Arts of the Imagination,’20 he said. Sometimes his untameable enthusiasms could be alarming, as his wife knew only too well. Throughout their long marriage, Blake made frequent, sometimes bizarre and occasionally frightening, sexual demands on her. Such unbridled urges, he believed, were an essential life force. His forcible opinions could be whipped into a fury. Cumberland, ever eager to help, had once introduced him to a clergyman who had commissioned four watercolours, the initial pair of which was to represent malevolence and benevolence. As soon as the cleric saw the first of these images the commission was cancelled. It looked unreal, he thought: it was difficult to understand. Blake’s pride was violently roused. ‘What is Grand is necessarily obscure to Weak men,’ he declared. ‘That which can be made Explicit to the Idiot is not worth my care.’21 This was just one of a number of enraged quarrels which, over the course of Blake’s life, left friendships in ruins. As poverty, neglect and the utter failure of an 1809 exhibition held in his brother’s hosiery shop caused him mounting frustration, Blake picked bitter arguments with his erstwhile supporters. He turned on Flaxman with accusations of hypocrisy; he successfully alienated the peaceable Stothard and, by 1810, had even managed to fall out with the ‘Dear Friend of My Angels’, the benevolent Butts. There were no more commissions forthcoming. ‘I found them blind and taught them how to see/ and now they know neither themselves or me,’22 wrote the despairing poet.
‘The Maker, the Inventor, one of the few in any age’23 was how Palmer would describe him, yet Blake in his lifetime suffered a heartbreaking neglect. His first book of poems, the only one to be published, had been printed in 1783. His last piece of work, a set of illustrations to Dante, would still be incomplete at the time of his death. In between the visions of a rhapsodic imagination would pour forth like a torrent – anything from the simplest songs of childhood to the most elaborate apocalyptic scenes – and yet, by the time he was entering his sixties, Blake would be reduced to engraving pictures of crockery sets for the Wedgwood sample book. ‘The great author of Eternity was obliged to illustrate egg cups, tureens, candlesticks and coffee pots,’ wrote Ackroyd.24 Little wonder that over the course of his life he devoted more than seventy engravings to the story of that most embattled of biblical characters, Job. And yet, even as his spirits were flagging, his imagination would flare. ‘I laugh and sing,’ he would cry: ‘for if on earth neglected I am in heaven a Prince among Princes.’25 He lived all his life in the bright lands of the spirit. ‘I have very little of Mr Blake’s company,’ his wife once informed an inquirer: ‘He is always in Paradise.’26
Blake was at a low ebb when, in June 1818, John Linnell, having been introduced by George Cumberland, the son of the great collector and connoisseur, first visited his home. Linnell was twenty-six and his career was just beginning to gain momentum. He had met his first major patron, Lady Torrens, and within a year or two would be introduced (by the ever-generous Varley) to the even more influential Lady Stafford who, charmed by his portrait-miniatures, would offer him the run of her aristocratic connections which would mean that he could start putting his prices up. His prospects could hardly have been further from those of the sixty-one-year-old Blake. Nor were their artistic ideas alike. Varley had taught Linnell to ‘go to nature for everything’ but to Blake nature was merely a mass of mundane material. He far preferred the spirits of his visionary life. And yet the two men had much in common. They were both religious dissenters and political radicals; they shared a reverence for the scriptures and had both learned Hebrew and Greek; they admired the art of Michelangelo, Dürer and Van Eyck and, both the sons of tradesmen, they preferred simple manners to a smart social life. Their friendship was to span the last decade of Blake’s life. They would visit each other’s studios, go to plays together, dine with mutual acquaintances and gaze at pictures side by side, including quite possibly, in the 1821 Academy summer show, an early landscape by Palmer whom, at that time, Linnell did not yet know.
Linnell, the down-to-earth businessmen, was determined to advance the career of the other-worldly Blake who had by then sold his ‘pension’, his collection of prints. He introduced the old artist to a variety of possible patrons and, though none of the grand aristocrats wanted to commission him, the family doctor who had recently attended the birth of Linnell’s first child, Hannah, offered Blake an engraving job. Dr Robert John Thornton, besides practising medicine, was an amateur botanist, a classical scholar and an enthusiastic pedagogue who at that time was interested in discovering which Latin classics would best serve as school books. Thornton did not believe in assisting children with direct translation and was preparing an edition of Virgilian pastorals in which the original text would be accompanied only by a simplified imitation of the first eclogue by the eighteenth-century poet Ambrose Philips. Now, encouraged by Linnell, he commissioned Blake to elucidate Virgil’s work further with a series of small illustrative designs.
The engravers greeted Blake’s first attempts with derision; the publishers wanted to abandon the project; but Blake, thanks to Linnell’s behind-the-scenes persuasions, was allowed to continue. He worked on in the face of considerable difficulty for, to meet the needs of the printers, he had to remake his images as woodcuts and this was a technique which he had never before tried. The result was a series of small but daringly idiosyncratic pastorals that glitter with light.
Linnell also commissioned Blake: an act of benevolence and respect which was later to involve him in hurtful controversy with the artist’s widow who, befuddled and frightened after her husband’s death, would accuse him of taking advantage of Blake’s impoverished circumstances. In fact, Linnell had saved the proud visionary from penury (and the added indignity of a job doing pictures of poultry and pigs) by commissioning him first to engrave copies of his watercolour illustrations to the Book of Job and then, when the old man was in his mid-seventies, to illustrate Dante’s Divine Comedy (Blake set himself to learning Italian so that he could fulfil this commission) originally with a series of watercolours and then with engravings for which he would pay him on weekly account. This allowance was all that stood between the Blakes and starvation. ‘I do not know how I shall ever repay you,’ Linnell recalled Blake saying. ‘I do not want you to repay me,’ Linnell replied. ‘I am only too glad to be able to serve.’27