William Blake, the Visionary Who Invented His Own Mythology

Illuminated printing, Swedenborg, Urizen and the Ancient of Days: the visionary art of William Blake, from the angels of Peckham Rye to the Ghost of a Flea.

William Blake, born in London in 1757 and died in the same city in 1827, was at once poet, engraver and painter, and in all these roles he sought to give form to what he called vision. From childhood he spoke of seeing angels and prophetic figures: his first biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, reports that at about eight years old he saw a tree full of angels at Peckham Rye. To his contemporaries he was an eccentric; to posterity he has become one of the great visionaries of art.

Illuminated printing

Trained as a professional engraver, Blake developed in the late 1780s a process he called illuminated printing. Text and image were drawn together on copper plates with an acid-resistant substance, so that the drawn parts stood in relief; the prints were then coloured by hand, often with the help of his wife Catherine. According to Gilchrist the method was revealed to him in a dream by his brother Robert, who had died in 1787.

This technique produced the Songs of Innocence in 1789 and, five years later, the Songs of Experience, as well as a series of prophetic books in which Blake built a personal mythology inhabited by figures such as Urizen, law-giving reason, Los, the creative imagination, and Orc, the spirit of revolt. Every copy of his books differs from the others in colours and details.

A personal mythology

Blake read Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic of visions of heaven and hell, with passion, and discussed his ideas in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, composed around 1790, where he also names Paracelsus and Jakob Böhme. From these readings he drew the conviction that the material world was a veil and that the imagination was the true divine faculty of man. In one of his poems he declares: «I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Mans».

This vision is translated into memorable images. The Ancient of Days, frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy of 1794, shows Urizen leaning out of a luminous disc as he measures the void with a pair of compasses. The large colour print Newton, held at Tate, portrays the scientist naked, bent over a diagram, seated on a rock that seems to lie at the bottom of the sea: a genius, but a prisoner of measuring reason alone.

The visionary heads and the Red Dragon

In his final years Blake befriended the painter and astrologer John Varley, a keen student of physiognomy. During night-time sessions Varley asked him to draw the historical figures he said he could see: so were born the so-called visionary heads, including the famous Ghost of a Flea, a muscular, scaly figure holding a cup, now at Tate.

Between about 1805 and 1810 he had meanwhile produced a series of watercolours of the Great Red Dragon of the Apocalypse, of impressive power, and in his last years he worked, commissioned by the painter John Linnell, on illustrations to the Book of Job and the Divine Comedy, left unfinished at his death. The Dante sheets in particular show his freedom as an interpreter, correcting and arguing with the poet while illustrating him.

Dying almost in poverty, Blake was rediscovered in the nineteenth century by the Pre-Raphaelites, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who helped complete Gilchrist's biography. In the following century he became a point of reference for poets, musicians and artists. His work remains the most complete example of an art that does not illustrate an esoteric doctrine but creates its own, in words and images.