Charles Lamb called his contemporary William Blake "the most extraordinary person of the age," while a reviewer of an exhibit of Blake's art in 1809 called these works "fresh proof of the alarming increase of the effects of insanity." These opposing views represent the two poles toward which most contemporary opinion of Blake gravitated. To many, he was an exceptional genius; to others he was a renegade madman. From the perspective of the twenty-first century, Blake is, if not the greatest Romantic poet, almost certainly the most intriguing. He is the only major figure to have achieved a reputation as both a poet and a painter, and he has remained an important but controversial creator in both arenas.

William Blake was born on November 28, 1757, the third child of seven children of a London merchant, James Blake. Showing an artistic impulse from an early age, Blake abandoned formal schooling around the age of ten and enrolled in a drawing school.

At fourteen he was apprenticed to the London master engraver James Bashire, under whose tutelage for seven years he learned the intricate techniques of engraving, etching, and printing.

Although Blake left school early, he had an inquisitive mind and was a voracious reader, especially of the Milton, Shakespeare, and other major poets. By the age of twelve he had begun to write his own poetry and he also tried his hand at drama and composed essays on many subjects. In 1783, when Blake was twenty-five, a group of friends published a collection of his juvenile verse, his first appearance in print. By this time, however, Blake was firmly committed to his art, having produced his first independent print when he was sixteen. He would not publish his first work until 1788, when he was thirty-one.

In 1782 Blake married Catherine Boucher, the uneducated daughter of a gardener in Battersea, who, despite her illiteracy would prove an ideal wife and assistant to Blake in his art. Faced with providing for a wife, Blake in 1784 opened a London printshop in partnership with another engraver, taking in his younger brother Robert as an apprentice. Robert's untimely death in 1787 at the age of nineteen devastated Blake, who claimed after his brother's demise to be in constant communication with his spirit concerning the techniques of engraving, a fact that was perhaps not entirely shocking to family and friends who remembered Blake as a young boy claiming to have seen angels sitting in the branches of a tree near his home. Such assertions would fuel accusations both during and after his lifetime that Blake's mind hinged on madness.

In 1788 Blake published All Religions Are One and There Is No Natural Religion, introducing to the world what he called "illuminated printing," a process of combining art and text that he claimed to have learned from his dead brother Robert. The following year he produced his first masterpiece of both literature and art, Songs of Innocence, a collection of nineteen illustrated poems. Four years later in 1793 he produced a companion volume, Songs of Experience, publishing the two collections the following year as Songs of Innocence and of Experience, his most famous work. In between, he produced several important examples of his illuminated printing, including The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790), his best-known work after the two Songs.

In later works, such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion, The Book of Thel, The Book of Los, The Book of Urizen, and Jerusalem, Blake unveiled his complex mythology to explain man's history and his relationship to God. In other "prophetic books" such as America and Europe, Blake intermixed history and his personal mythology in a critique of modern society.

Religion and mystical vision lie at the heart of William Blake's art and poetry. Even works that do not contain Blake's own writing, such as Illustrations of the Book of Job, his last completed book, reveal his interpretation of the Bible. Blake's work was his life, and his work incorporated his message to mankind. As he proclaimed in a letter to another artist, "Now I may say to you . . . that I can alone carry on my visionary studies . . . and that I may converse with my friends in Eternity, see Visions, Dream Dreams, and prophecy & speak Parables unobserv'd & at liberty from the Doubts of Other Mortals."

William Blake: Dreamer of Dreams

September 15 - October 31, 2001

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