William Blake - Classic Literature William Blake
William Blake was born on 28 November 1757 in London. His father ran a hosiery business. Blake received his initial education at home, from his mother. Blake’s family was influenced by the teachings of Emmanuel Swedenborg.
His artistic creativity was encouraged at home and by the age of ten, he was engraving copies of drawings by the Italian masters. He was apprenticed to the engraver Henry Basire, with whom he spent seven years. At the age of sixteen, Blake was assigned the task of studying the Gothic churches in London. Blake started working as a professional engraver in 1778.
Blake enrolled in the Royal Academy in 1779. He leaned more toward the style of the Italian masters such as Raphael rather than painters such as Rubens. Subsequent to his studies at the Royal Academy, Blake worked as an engraver for magazines and also painted in watercolors. One of his first patrons was Mr. John Flaxman, whom Blake met in the year 1782.
Blake married in the year 1783, his wife Catherine Boucher was five years younger than him. She was illiterate. Blake taught her to read, write, paint and even to engrave. At around that time, Blake ventured into business with the help of his brother Robert and opened a print shop. The shop was located at Broad Street. After the death of Robert in 1787, the business failed.
Even though Blake had started writing poetry by the age of twelve years, his early involvement with engraving did not leave him with much time for poetry. Poetical Sketches, Songs of Innocence, and Songs of Experience were published in 1783, 1789, and 1794, respectively. Auguries of Innocence, which was published after his death contains one of his most quoted stanzas.
To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.
His social contacts included John Flaxman, who was one of his first patrons, Henry Fuseli, and George Cumberland, who was one of the founders of the National Gallery. "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell" was engraved by Blake in the year 1790, it is regarded as his major work in prose. Blake was opposed to the materialistic behavior of the society of his times and was a critic of the effects of the Industrial revolution. He even considered Newtonian science to be nothing more than superstitions. He has expressed his views in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," by using a language of paradoxical aphorisms.
Blake was a member of the Swedenborgian church, which he joined in 1789, and wanted to establish a New Jerusalem in England. However, he later moved away from the Swedenborgian church. Blake believed that it was essential that an individual rose above the restrictions imposed by organized religion.
Blake found it difficult to get support for his views, even from his faithful wife.
Blake settled in Lambeth in 1790. During this period, his principal works include The Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Book of Urizen, and The Song of Los. Blake found a patron in William Hayley who supported him. Blake illustrated the works of William Hayley. From 1803 to 1808, Blake worked on Milton: A Poem In Two Books, To Justify The Ways Of God To Men. He also started to work on engravings for his poem Jerusalem. He continued until 1818, and executed a hundred engravings.
Blake’s ideology comes across strongly in his works The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Last Judgment. He was influenced a great deal by Milton and like Milton, he tried to create his own version of Heaven and Hell, he created a mythological god, whom he called Urizen and a messiah whom he named Orc. The Last Judgment is a summation of Blake’s works, which also carries illustrations of his mythological creations.
Blake claimed to have visions of angels since childhood and it was these visions that strengthened his faith in his own doctrine. He was a votary of free love and he believed that enlightenment could be achieved by the individual by listening to one’s inner voice and not by following the strictures of organized religion. Blake drew inspiration from the Christian Gnostics and their concepts of spirituality.
Blake is credited with having invented a method of printing, which he referred to as illuminated printing. The pages of the books produced by this method were painted by hand. The process was slow and Blake could never reach the wide audience he had sought for his works. However, as each book was individually produced it led to each book becoming a unique work of art.
Blake had a happy married life, although there were some compatibility issues in the beginning due to Catherine being unable to read and write and also because the couple had no offspring. In London, around the year 1803, Blake associated himself with a group of artists who were known as the "Shoreham Ancients." This group was supportive of Blake’s ideas and also taught him about the techniques of watercolor painting.
Thomas Butts, who was a friend of Blake, collected several of the illustrations that Blake had done for the Bible. Blake commenced working on the illustrations for The Book of Job, when he was sixty-five years old and he had completed twenty-one illustrations by the age of seventy. He also executed engravings and close to a hundred watercolor paintings for "Divine Comedy," written by Dante.
Blake’s works and teachings did not quite get a receptive audience in his lifetime. This was partly due to his expensive invention, which he used for printing his books as well as his philosophy, which could not find many takers. People saw him as an eccentric. However, he is revered by many modern artists, such as T.S Eliot and W.B Yeats, who was highly impressed with Blake’s spirituality.
Blake was never very successful financially. However, when he died he did not have any debts. He died on August 12, 1827 of complications resulting from a persistent problem with his gall bladder. He was buried in a public cemetery at Bunhill Fields.
